Page 83 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

He doesn’t quite flinch from her words, but takes a long drink from his glass, the wine so dark no light can shine through it.

“I tried to apologize a few months ago, before Delina showed up,” Gurlien says, voice even quieter than before. “But they didn’t believe it was sincere, and I don’t blame them, and I got frustrated and made it worse.”

Ambra can easily imagine that happening, with how prickly and pointed Axel was to Gurlien.

“And?” Ambra asks, and he squints at her. “I’m not great at human morality, we know that, but you tried to make it better, and now you’re trying to live differently.” She takes a sip of the wine—it’s just as light as she remembers, and she’s briefly grateful that it’s the same. “Isn’t that the core of trying to be better?”

“I guess,” he mutters, before his face twists. “You’re a lot more forgiving than people are.”

“They don’t, I don’t know, need to forgive you for you to be better, right?” she asks, curious, and he slates his eyes towards her, like he’s expecting her to be sarcastic. “Humanshave done so many wrongs in the world, nothing would ever be accomplished if they all stood in one place feeling bad after they tried to make it better.”

“Would you forgive Nalissa? Or Boltiex?” he asks, and she scowls at him. “If they would swear to never control you, swear to never contact you again, would you let them go?”

“Are you asking that to just the attention off of you?”

That surprises a smile out of him, brief.

Ambra sets the glass down so her hands don’t shake. “If they released the leash, I might let them go,” she says, but it still reeks of a lie, after the torture and the control. “I wouldn’t believe them if they just swore. They swore to the body that she’d be safe.”

“Fair enough,” Gurlien says, before they lapse into equally moody silences.

The breeze through the patio ruffles in the shaved side of Ambra’s scalp, ruffling the short hair there, almost to the point of distraction.

Before Gurlien sighs, like the quiet gets to him too, even though they’ve had entire days where they’ve barely spoken.

“The last drink I had was the night at the bar that you interrupted,” he says. “This is a far better drink.”

Ambra has vague memories of a neon green cocktail splashing against the wall when Maison flipped the table, but she hadn’t paid it too much attention, all her focus on the orders flowing through the leash and the compulsion locking her limbs into movement.

“I would hope so, that place had sticky floors,” Ambra responds. “I would know, your Half Demon tackled me to them.”

“He would absolutely get insulted if you call him my Half Demon,” Gurlien says, grasping onto the distraction,before she sees his analytical mind finally kick in, sees the hunger for knowledge light up behind his eyes.

She settles back on the couch. This Gurlien, this want for information, this she can handle. This she can speak to.

She’d say anything to him to keep him in this place.

“How much of your actions and words were controlled?” he asks, gripping the stem of his wine glass like a pencil he could take notes with. “I know there were orders, how much individual parts were controlled?”

Ambra opens her mouth to respond, but he pushes onwards.

“For example,” he continues, and she grins at him, “before the bubble, you did a motion like this,” he gestures with his hand, and it must’ve been her shattering a piece of furniture. “Did he control that or did you? Why the motion if it’s just power?”

“It was compulsion, not strict control,” Ambra replies, and he nods, encouraging her on. “With the compulsion, like following an order, it makes me do whatever the command is, but it doesn’t always—strictly—determine how. My orders were to capture the Half Demon, maybe the necromancer, and to kill you and the alchemist.” The horror of what almost happened that day, that she was so close to never be able to have this conversation with Gurlien, if they had been just a little less competent. “I was focusing on the nec…Delina…because…obviously,” she says. “With a Necromancer in the room, it was hard to even glance anywhere else.”

“So the strict control, you wouldn’t have focused on her, instead been more methodical?”

“Depends on the handler,” she says. “Korhonen was good at crafting the compulsion to leave as much room for combat as possible while not letting me do my own thing.His philosophy,” she pauses for a brief second, to comprehend how easy it is to talk about all of the sudden, “was that I would always be better at combat than he could think to control, so he would let me determine the order of actions.”

“See, this would all be interesting in the theoretical,” Gurlien says, and the waiter drops off a slate slab full of meats and cheeses and strange jellies. “All interesting ramifications, all absolutely horrific in the real world.”

One of Boltiex’s assistants had once said something to that account. But had still done the experiments nonetheless.

So instead of answering, Ambra just swishes the wine in her glass, in the idle motion that the body would always do. “Korhonen honestly thought the bar fight would be done within seconds,” she says, as if speaking around her existence, speaking around her presence then, would make it easier. “He thought that faced with me, the Half Demon would immediately fold.”

“Yeah, that was a stupid thought. He literally died for her. Literally. Necromancer’s bringing anyone back is terrifying.”

Ambra nods, staring out at the small patio, something small and disquieted inside of her. Like they should be talking about something else, doing something else, besides just talking about their violent pasts. Like some sort of small talk, some sort of normal conversation, something where they could both forget the relative nightmare they’re in.

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