The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 532

Chapter 532: 532 | A Smart Call [CASTLE BONUS]

Diane let her daughter say it. She had learned a long time ago that Sloane needed to finish the thought before she would accept anything else, that interrupting the spiral only extended it.

"You want me to tell you it isn’t your fault," Diane said when the quiet came back.

"Don’t."

"I wasn’t going to." Diane turned in the chair to face her daughter fully. "Because you already know it isn’t your fault, and you don’t want to hear it, and telling you would just give you something to argue with. So I’m not going to say that." She kept her voice level, the drawl slowed to the register she used when she needed someone to actually listen.

"I’m going to tell you something else instead. That boy is in love with you and when the moment came where loving you meant standing in front of a fire aimed at you, he didn’t decide anything, because there was no decision to make. There never was. Not for him. You didn’t fail to protect yourself, sugar. You got protected by someone who was always, always going to protect you. Those are not the same thing."

Sloane’s face crumpled and reassembled. She stared at Lukas.

"I hate it," she whispered.

"I know."

"I hate that I needed it."

"I know that too."

The door opened without a knock.

Diane looked up. A young woman stepped inside, and Diane’s first assessment, the automatic one that twenty years in an industry built on appearances had wired into her, cataloged the woman before she had crossed the threshold.

Compact. Five-four, maybe, with a build that the standard-issue medical coat did nothing to hide and everything to draw attention to, hips and thighs that made the loose garment sit strangely across a frame that was otherwise slender through the shoulders.

Jet-black hair in two messy buns with strands falling across a face that carried the specific blankness of someone who had been awake far too long and had stopped being polite about it.

Dark eyes, half-lidded, a small beauty mark below the left one. A silver ear cuff. And on her breath, when she got close enough, the faint sweetness of something Diane could not identify mixed with the antiseptic of the wing.

The woman held a chart. She did not look at Diane or Sloane. She looked at Lukas, and her eyes did the thing that certain kinds of professionals did, the scan that took in a body and produced a conclusion faster than the process that generated it was visible.

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