Page 7 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

With another impulse, she lifts her hand to the shaved side of her head, where the leads once hung. The body had cried when she saw them in the mirror, with her beautiful long hair chopped so severely, but it…made sense. At least.

The handlers had spoken so many times of monitoring her brain patterns, at seeing how a demon soul in a human body would react, and, especially at first, Ambra had been so excited.

And now she’s sitting on the floor, slowly stitching her skin back, as Gurlien audibly goes through the closet.

“Any shirt will do, it doesn’t matter,” she calls out, and her throat turns the words into something tight, something choked out.

He immediately comes back out, holding a perfectly functional pull over sweater, the type that the body would always reach for with the first hint of a chill.

Still working on the skin, she chucks the bloody shirt off, using it to scrub some of the dried viscera off her stomach, and Gurlien blinks away, visibly startled.

“Do you need bandages?” he asks, his voice a bit strangled.

“No, I’m almost done,” she responds, taking the moment to squint at him, at his clear discomfort, before she clings to the side of the sink, hauling herself up.

Her legs shake at the action.

Firmly ignoring that, she runs the ruined shirt under the water, then dabs off the rest of the dried blood, until the only reminder of the wound is a thin pinkish scar, slightly raised.

She frowns at it, but the skin resists any of her effort to smooth that away, too.

The body has several other scars, raised in the same way, thin strips of skin poorly healed. Ones on her fingers, almost blended in with callouses. Some on her knees, like she fell. One on the side of her hip that aches a bit in bad weather, one curved against her breastbone, neatly hidden by the undergarments the body still wore.

It’s somehow wrong for Ambra to be adding to them.

Besides the surgery scars, of course. Besides the places where they hacked the body open in their mad rush to fit Ambra’s soul inside as well, then sealed them back up in the trap.

The rest of the blood dabbed away, she shrugs into the sweater, and it’s soft, like the blankets on the bed.

“Thank you,” she says to Gurlien, because that at least seemed appropriate, if she wants to keep him from handing her over.

He still watches her, sharp.

“You can go sleep, the leash will wake you if they pull me,” she says.

“Is there food here?” he asks instead. “If you were hurt so badly, you need to replenish.”

“Why?” she asks, but gestures to the small pantry where the body had requested sweets be stored. “Go ahead.”

His forehead furrows, fascinatingly so, and if her legs were shaking less, she would’ve reached out and pressed her thumb into the wrinkle between his brows.

But even with his visible confusion, he opens the pantry, to the brightly colored snacks within. The candy, the preserved pastries, the thin bags of something called popcorn that the body had promised they would try together, and then never did.

Thankfully, his hand passes over that, pulling out a box of foil wrapped bars and popping them open.

“How often did they take you out of stasis?” he asks, and his casual tone sends the small hairs on Ambra’s arms to raising.

“Not often,” she replies, cautious.

“How long were you out each time?” He pulls out two of the bars, then, to her horror, hands her one and leans against the other side of the counter, tearing open the one in his hands. At her blank look, he continues, “Hours? Days? Minutes?”

“Never days,” she answers, and he nods, like he expected that answer.

“And did they give you food?”

“You saw me with the necromancer,” Ambra points out, and he wrinkles his nose. “That was only about…two and a half hours ago out of stasis.”

Again, his eyes slate over to her, like he’s evaluating something she can’t see, but thankfully remains quiet.

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