The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 531

Chapter 531: 531 | Sugar, It Can Wait [CASTLE BONUS]

The medical wing at two in the morning had a particular kind of quiet, the kind that came from expensive soundproofing and the low electronic breathing of machines Diane could not name but had learned to hate over the past twenty-nine hours.

She sat in the chair beside the bed, the one designed for family members expected to stay a long time, and watched Lukas not wake up.

He looked wrong. That was the word her mind kept returning to, the one it refused to soften into anything more manageable. Her boy had always looked wrong lying still, even as a child, because Lukas Belmont was not a person who sat quietly. He fidgeted and rolled his shoulder and cracked jokes at the worst possible moments.

The version in front of her did none of those things.

Bandages wrapped his torso from the waist up, layers of white gauze that Dr. Voss had personally applied and then replaced twice as the burns underneath decided how bad they intended to be. His left shoulder sat in a brace that looked like it had been engineered by someone who expected to make more of them. An IV line ran into the back of his hand, and a monitor tracked his heart with a steady green pulse that Diane had been counting for a full day now.

Twenty-nine hours. He had not opened his eyes once.

Her phone buzzed against her thigh. She looked at the screen without lifting it. Margot Lang, the fourth call in an hour, and behind Margot a queue of missed calls she had stopped reading: two Network liaisons, a Commission representative, three of her own clients whose PR crises had apparently not paused for the small matter of a coordinated terrorist assault on the world’s top academy. Victor Sterling had left a voicemail she deleted without listening because if Victor Sterling wanted her attention tonight he could set himself on fire again and see how she responded.

She turned the phone off. Held the button until the screen went black. Set it face-down on the bedside table beside a plastic cup of water nobody had touched, and watched the green pulse continue its steady count on the monitor.

The silence got quieter.

"You didn’t have to do that," Sloane said from the other chair.

Diane looked over. Her daughter sat with her feet tucked underneath her, wearing an oversized hoodie that Diane knew for a fact belonged to Lukas because it swallowed Sloane’s frame in a way none of her own clothes did. The sleeves hung past her hands. The hood pooled against the back of the chair. She had pulled it on sometime during the first night and had not taken it off since, even when the nurses had offered to bring her something fresh from the ward supplies.

Sloane’s right forearm was wrapped from wrist to elbow in gauze that had been changed twice already because the burns underneath were weeping through the dressings faster than Dr. Voss had projected. Her pink hair hung loose and unwashed, tangled in a way that would have irritated her under normal circumstances. Her blue eyes were red-rimmed in a way Sloane would deny if anyone commented on it, and Diane had no intention of commenting because she had cried enough for both of them in the private hours when Sloane had been sleeping upright in the chair and could not see.

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