Page 109 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

There. Tied.

Chloe’s eyes blur together, and she sits back on her heels, letting her head lean against Killian’s new shoulder.

She should eat, consume some more of the food in her bag, get the energy back. They did something monumental, with too much power spent by her, too much energy, and now…

Now her friend was next held in the west.

The base would maybe never be functional again, with the protections ripped apart, with the prison cells so broken. With a demon they were actively working with in a Terese project killed.

There’s a shift from the metal bed, a creak of polished hinges, and both their heads snap up over to it.

The body, the person slash maybe demon, sits up, his arms visibly shaking at the effort, and he stares at them, his shoulders hunched in on himself, like he expects to be struck.

Next to her, Killian tenses, the hand against her back clenching into a fist.

The body opens his mouth to talk, despite the blood trailing from each side of his lips, then closes it. Tilts his head.

Then vanishes.

Killian exhales, explosive, before gentling the hand on Chloe’s back.

“That’ll be a problem,” he says, a growl deep beneath his voice.

“But not for right now,” Chloe says, and even she can hear the lethargy in her voice as she rolls up the scrolls. Rolls up their evidence, fits it back in her backpack—there’s demon blood on the backpack again, she’ll have to clean it—and zips it closed in only two tries.

Killian’s lips thin as he watches her actions, before he settles his arm around her, halfway between a hug and gathering her up.

Keeping her tightly against him, he lifts his head. Stares out at the room with the metal grating and the dented table and the dead body of the demon.

Before he swings his glance back to her. “Hold on to me,” he warns, like she could do anything else, but she loops her arm around her backpack, then grips his shirt.

It’s the basic uniform shirt of the college, rough and basic and Cotton.

He hauls her up, and she wobbles. “You did too much today,” he murmurs, before he stiffens, craning his neck.

A whisper of power to Chloe’s dulled senses drifts around them, and deeper within the building, someone screams.

“Someone else is here,” he murmurs, and gently, ever so gently, rests his cheek against the top of her head, a demon bubble almost kindly popping up around them, before…

The room around them shatters.

Chloe flinches, even with such little energy she has left, but nothing reaches her as the very building creaks, foundation crackling, metal warping, and then—

And before Chloe can even blink, they’re back in the small house in the snow.

26

Chloe staggers away from him, all but collapsing onto the same bed she woke up from only a few days earlier.

Just a few days earlier.

Too many things had happened.

She’s grimy, she’s covered in blood and dust—not a small bit her own—and too much sweat for the winter.

And she had killed another demon.

Chloe has just a moment of despair, while still staring up at Killian’s new face, before the door to the room slams open and a small form all but throws herself into Killian for a hug.

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