Page 111 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

Chloe’s not entirely sure which one is worse.

Her scrolls are spread out on the bed, the fabric of the nylon bag carefully cleaned, like he studied them while she was just in the other room.

“I couldn’t make them work,” he says, almost gentle, “don’t worry.”

“Right,” Chloe says, still unsteady, then grabs the plate from the meager kitchen.

The kid stands in the doorway of her room, watching her cautiously, her mouth hard, before sliding back and closing the door with a click.

“Is she okay?” Chloe asks, and thankfully there are already a few pieces of pizza missing, so the kid already got to eat.

“She gets upset when I’m injured,” he says casually, like it’s the most obvious and normal thing. “Worries she’ll be left here with just her mother.”

Makes sense.

“I made sure she’ll never want for money, she has a bank account that’ll get five thousand dollars deposited every month, and the protections here will stay when I’m dead,” he says, like it’s almost an accusation. “But she gets scared.”

“She’s twelve, of course she would,” Chloe says, plopping the pizza—pineapple and pepperoni, by the look of it—onto her plate and then sitting cross legged on the bed, staring blankly at the scrolls.

The lines blur with each blink.

“Your hands are still hurting,” Killian says, softer still. “And I missed a bruise to your ribs, I don’t know when.”

Chloe touches her hand to her side. It’s tender, of course, and it could’ve happened at any point in the last day.

There’s something awful across Killian’s face, something she can’t quite read, something beyond her.

And now she has to process the last day, over the slice of pizza with the demon staring at her, something between dread and anger in his eyes.

Numb, she pulls her cell phone out of its protected pouch on the backpack.

“I should probably…”

“Warn your friends?” he finishes for her. “Let them know you’re still alive? Tell them not to worry about the base falling? Tell them another abomination is out there, and we don’t know his mental stability?”

“Yeah,” Chloe says, then rubs her eyes, forcing herself to take a bite of the pizza. “All of that.”

He sighs, and that’s a different sound in the new body.

“Are you okay?” she asks, instead, setting her phone next to the scrolls, and his brow twitches. “You had way more—”

“I’m fine,” he interrupts, and that’s almost certainly a lie, she can instantly tell, with a sudden drop of knowledge in her gut.

“Okay, no,” Chloe says, and she barely has energy to eat, but she points at him anyway. “If I can’t hide my injuries from you, you don’t get to lie that everything’s peachy.”

His eyebrow twitches, which she can’t remember his previous body doing at all, and there must be a new quirk in the new one. “Why?”

Which is rude.

“Because there has to be some sort of balance in this,” Chloe says, pointing in between them. “You don’t get to be all knowing and leave me in the dark, I hate that.”

There’s a long moment of him staring at her, the pizza going cool in her hand.

“She tried to compress my chest, to force me into injury from this body,” he says finally. “It’s a rude tactic, like she thought I was stupid to fall from it.”

“She knew you?” Chloe says, already knowing the answer. “She knew about…” She points towards the other room, and Killin’s scowl deepens. “And knew you wouldn’t want to go back there.”

“And now she’s dead,” he says, almost a snarl behind his voice. “She was kept there the same as me, in the same row of prison cells, and she stayed there and helped.”

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