Page 123 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

Chloe ducks her head back down against the sheets, against the pillow that’s creased from her weight.

He’s waiting for an answer from her, to a question he hasn’t quite asked.

“Can we make sure she’s happy?” Chloe asks, her voice a bit trembly. “I don’t want her…I don’t want her to be enslaved, I don’t want her drained, I don’t want her captive, I don’t…”

He hmms in the back of his throat, not cutting her off, but she lets her voice trail into silence anyways. He’s calculating, something in his gaze is far away, like he’s running equations and working the probability of something.

She’s seen the same expression across Ambra’s face, when she thinks Gurlien might be doing something dangerous. She’s seen it on Maison’s face, when Delina attempts something, and he thinks nobody can see him. She’s seen it flicker across Terese’s eyes before she agrees to anything.

“I hadn’t…considered…the happiness of the spirit fox,” he says, his voice as gentle as his hands. “It would…” His eyes flicker up to hers, reflecting the meager light back at her, and it’s immediately almost soothing. “Can you help me with it? The happiness?”

Chloe exhales as slow as she can, hope prickling in her chest. “Yes,” she breathes, and there are tears trembling in the corners of her eyes, completely unbidden. “Yes, absolutely.”

He rubs his thumb across her wrist, watching the thin skin there, where it moves over her bones. “Then yes,” he whispers, like he too can’t believe what he’s saying. “I will do whatever I can for happiness.”

They doze together,entwined, until the sun almost begins to set, the sun turning the snow outside a pastel pink and bruised purple, and Chloe almost feels peace.

30

The next base is, for a lack of a better term, not the most impressive thing in the world from the outside.

Chloe’s found herself in many small shacks, many places that the snobs of the world would wrinkle their nose at, many tiny tombs and mausoleums that dot the world with their grim show of grief, but this…this is just somewhat sad.

Sure, not every place can be a shining base of magic with an infrastructure to run a small city and traps bleeding out every pore, but as she peers at the rather afterthought of a protection ward carved over the door of a wooden lean-to, she begins to doubt her research.

Next to her, Killian shifts from foot to foot, an odd little physical quirk, and she can't quite remember if he did it before the body change.

The guard had shifted like that while pointing the gun at her.

There's no other trace of magic, no flutters of power, no dark twists of demon abilities, just a shack against a dirty rock cliff.

And yet, her compass points directly into that little door.

"Can you sense anything deeper than just this?" Chloe asks, and though it feels like they haven’t spoken in hours, he raiseshis eyebrows at her. She's sweating, underneath her lightest rain slick, the humidity plastering her hair against her face.

He's unaffected, the water not even settling in his curls. They’re somewhere vaguely tropical, somewhere that grows vines thick and mist flows freely between the trees. Chloe didn’t recognize the name of the city closest to the spot delineated by the map, but Killian had been able to get them there pretty easily, only about a two hour tromp through mud and a twilight that never ends.

Killian tilts his head at the door, his eyes focusing on the demon ward hastily painted on the wood tucked under the meager excuse for a roofing.

"Not terribly," he says, crossing his arms, still staring at the ward. "Can you take that down without reaching it?"

She scoffs, drawing a smile from his lips. "It's a zone of effect. Of course I can." The writing's just a marker, not the totality of it. There were harsher wards on the cabin when they first got to it, more complicated traps fucking embroidered into the throw pillows.

It's almost pathetic.

Killian shoots her a grin, something small that makes her stomach turn over on itself, just that she’s able to see that. That he reserved it for her. That he’s smiling with all of him, not just the human skin on top, but the slightly sinister under-self as well.

That she cares about seeing it.

Chloe lets her eyes flutter shut, teasing her fingertips under the door frame, until they rest against the wooden door—they hadn't even bothered to sand down the splinters—and breathes out.

All it takes is a twist of her fingertips, embedding her mind in the sloppy work, and tugging it like a needle through a thread,and it dissolves into a pile of fragments, barely tingling in the palm of her hand.

"That was easy," Killian says, guarded, before stepping up until he's shoulder to shoulder with her, resting his hand next to hers on the door, his palm flattening. Their pinky fingers touch, barely, and Chloe represses the urge to shiver at such a little contact.

There's a few scars along the knuckles, like the guard had gotten into fistfights.

“Two locks, one vault, a small room encased in metal and one cage, very small,” he says, brow furrowing. “Too small.”

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