Page 78 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

Chloe scowls at him, then pulls her hands back, folding them in her lap to hide the shaking.

The clerk casts her another forlorn look. “Are you in town for a long time?”

“Lie,” Killian whispers.

“Oh yeah,” Chloe immediately responds, she doesn’t need a demon to know to do that. “Meeting some friends in a few days, gonna drive around and see all the sights, find a bunch of snow and throw it at each other, find a lake to skate in.” She throws him a smile, and he startles. “I got here early.”

“We’re in Minnesota,” he blurts out. “Why would you intentionally come here in winter?”

“Halfway point from my friends and I,” Chloe lies, as the clerk checks the lamp next to the bed, then the other. “We didn’t want the big city this time, we do this every other year.”

“Do you need to reserve more rooms for your friends?” the clerk asks, hopeful, casting a glance to the single bed that’s in the room. “I can reserve them.”

Chloe can’t quite pick up on that subtext, whatever it may be, but she’s acutely aware that she’s missing it. “They’ll do it when they drive in?”

As if sensing her disquiet, Killian shifts, until his knee presses against hers, a strange parallel to her sitting in the booth with the burger.

Right before he killed two people.

The clerk gives her a rather pathetic smile, then pockets the sensor, standing awkwardly. “If you need anything, I stay in room 104 during the weekends,” he says, and his voice breaks. “Knock on the door if I’m not at the desk, I’ll be able to help.”

Chloe gives him a thumbs up, and he waits for an agonizing moment, before shuffling out the door, letting it close behind him with a click.

The moment he’s out, Killian gently grabs her wrist again. “What happened?”

Chloe strongly considers shaking him off. “Can’t I be a bit weary after seeing some people die?” She snips back. “I’m not really a battle mage or anything like that.”

“They were attacking you,” Killian replies gently. “They were attacking you and some of those were kill shots.”

“Yeah, well…” Chloe trails off, as he turns her hand in his, still inspecting her, like he can tell something from that touch. “Still weird to see someone die.”

He’s still silent for a long moment, before he swipes his fingers across the thin skin at her wrist.

“Nothing hit me, I would have said something,” Chloe says, mullish.

“I can tell that now,” Killian replies, almost disgruntled. “What do you usually do when you’ve seen someone die?”

Like she has a routine. Like it’s so common that she would have a go-to thing to do.

“Run,” Chloe says, and it’s almost a bit too honest. “I’m good at getting out of things.”

He quirks a brow at her, then settles back against the bed, like she’s given him something to think about.

And Chloe really wishes Gurlien and Ambra were there. Someone more knowledgeable, someone able to decipher all of the body language and odd intentions of the demon in front of her.

Someone able to decipher all of the awkwardness inside of her.

Not speaking, he just regards her, his eyes flickering over her face like he can read her like a book and is finding something compelling.

She’s not used to that attention from a demon.

But instead of saying something further, she just picks up the phones still on the bed, running a quick scan on them.

One of them, the one that tingles with spell weaving, is almost completely normal, the only enhancements to elongate battery life and prevent damage from dropping. Chloe’s able to pop open the back with a snap of alchemy and crush the SIM card without any real issue.

The other one…

“This’ll be a problem,” Chloe mutters, poking it through a bedsheet as Killian watches her with lidded eyes. “It’s going to notify someone—I can’t tell who—if it doesn’t have a passcode entered at a certain time.”

---