Page 63 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

“I’m not telling you,” he replies gruffly.

“Okay,” Chloe says, staring up at the painted wooden beams on the ceiling, like they could solve the boredom. “Why were you last here?”

“Are you trying to start a conversation because you’re bored or because you want to know?” he asks, shaking out his hand after setting another rune in place along the light switch.

“Yes,” Chloe says, and she doesn’t have to be looking at him to know he’s rolling his eyes. “It’s intel, at the very least.”

“Why would any demon be near here?” he says instead, skating around the answer, before crossing the small room in three strides and starting the runes on the window, pushing aside the camo curtains.

“We’re on the third floor, is that necessary?” Chloe asks and gets a dirty look in return. “I doubt the college will use drones to get at us.”

“You’re the one who asked for protection,” he responds, sketching a few runes along the cold glass. “I’d do the whole hotel, but it’s…a fair bit bigger than I can do while camouflaging our existence.”

She nods. Ambra’s said as much.

“When were you here?” Chloe asks, and he sighs, stepping away from the window and evaluating his work. “That at least could give us a time frame on what to expect for changes.”

“Four years ago,” he says, his tone a warning against additional questions, a warning she’s absolutely going to ignore. “Just long enough for tests.”

Chloe levels a look at him, and he meets it, crossing his arms.

“So just for tests and you thought you could swing in and take it down, got it,” she says, and she knows she’s probably being unfair, that there’s almost certainly some sort of trauma inherent in his time at the base.

Chloe certainly had nightmares for the three weeks after they took down Toronto, and Ambra flinches whenever they mention some of the bases she was held at, even if she doesn’t think she does.

His lips thin.

“I’m just saying, we should plan better than that,” she continues, softening her voice to go against the harshness of the knot in her chest. “Brute force will only get you so far.”

He points a finger at her. “Brute force can get you pretty damn far.”

“Sure, for you,” Chloe says, then sighs, staring up at the blessedly empty ceiling, before hauling herself up to the ubiquitous closet safe. “So you can’t teleport at all right now or is it just teleport in and out?”

He says nothing, so she ignores him, digging out her set of plain lockpicks from her bag.

“Wanna bet I can get this open in thirty seconds with no magic?” she says, weighing her picks in her hand. “Locks like this usually have sloppy tolerance.”

His gaze lays heavy against her shoulders, so she flashes the lockpicks to him, like a circus performer with cards.

“Go ahead, pick one,” she says, and he crosses his arms, leaning back. “Or don’t, I’m just trying to entertain myself.”

“By picking a safe?” he asks, skeptical. “A safe that would be easy for you to transform the walls into cardboard?”

“That’s not fun, though,” Chloe says, picking up her tension bar and the rake instead. With a few seconds thought, she closes the safe and engages the electronic lock, then steps back, showing him her hands.

He’s flatly unamused.

So she rolls her eyes, then inserts the tension bar, and pops the lock open with a few seconds of the rake.

This, at least, makes him raise his eyebrows in a flash, almost impressed.

“See,” Chloe replies, trying and failing to not be smug. “Easy.”

“And that’s just a skill you have? Not alchemy?” He would know, she’s one hundred percent sure he can tell when she’s using power. “Just for fun?”

“Had it before the college found me, certainly wasn’t gonna let that skill go away,” Chloe says, then closes the safe again, repeating the process. “I was not, as you say, a well-behaved child.”

He makes a sound suspiciously like a laugh, and she quirks an eyebrow at him, not even watching her hands as she pops the safe open a third time.

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