The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 536

Chapter 536: 536 | My Job [CASTLE BONUS]

"How bad," I said.

"She’s not building leverage. She told me she cares that the numbers keep you alive and doesn’t care why. I believe her, which is inconvenient, because I know how to handle someone with a price and I have no idea what to do with someone who just wants the patient’s chart to make sense." Diane’s thumb moved against my knuckles again, an idle rhythm she probably didn’t know she was doing. "The whole internet watched you take that fire, Lukas. They have a hashtag. They have frame-by-frame analysis. Someone with too much time cross-referenced your costume against a leaked laundry manifest and put your name to it before I could get in front of it."

"So the secret’s out."

"The secret is bleeding out. There’s a difference, and the difference is the entire reason I still have a job." She sat back an inch, dragged a hand down her face, and when it came away she was already doing the thing she did, running the angles, sorting the crisis into things she could fix and things she’d fix anyway. "But that is tomorrow’s problem. Or the day after. Because right now there is exactly one thing I care about, and it is that you opened your eyes, and I get to be furious about the rest of it in the morning."

Across the room, Sloane stirred.

The bond spiked first, a jolt of surfacing awareness rolling through the tether before her body caught up. I felt her wake before she moved. The System’s permanent modification working exactly as advertised. Two-way emotional duplex within fifty meters, no option to turn it off, and what came through in that first second was relief so sharp it registered as pain.

Her eyes came open. Blue, red-rimmed, unfocused for exactly one beat before they found me sitting there awake and looking at her.

Everything in her face broke at once.

"Lukas." My name came out cracked down the middle, half word, half sound, the kind of noise a person makes when a thing they’ve been terrified about for a day and a half stops being true. She was out of the chair and across the room before I could get a word in, and then her hands were on my face, on my jaw, fingers sliding down to the collar of the hospital gown. Checking me the way she checked everything, with her hands first, needing to confirm through touch what her eyes were telling her. Her palm pressed flat over my heartbeat. She held it there.

"Hey, babe." I got the word out and it landed soft, none of the usual edge. "Careful with the ribs. They’re holding a grudge."

"You," she said, and stopped. Started again. Her thumb dragged across my cheekbone, rough at the edges, tender at the center. Her eyes were wet and she was too far gone to pretend they weren’t. "You absolute idiot. You had four percent stamina. You had a separated shoulder. You stood up anyway and then you jumped in front of me, and I felt it, I felt you decide, except you didn’t even decide, there was no decision, there was just you moving and me realizing what you were doing half a second too late to stop you, and then you were on the ground and you weren’t moving and I couldn’t—"

Her voice fractured. She sucked in a breath that didn’t steady anything.

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