The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 540

Chapter 540: 540 | A Lesson in Authority [CASTLE BONUS]

Felicity made a sound that was half laugh and half something wetter, and she pressed her lips together, and I watched her decide not to cry in front of Camille and Petra and win that decision by a margin of about a millimeter.

Which is when I felt it.

The bond went hot. Not the warm, complicated, relieved hot of the last half hour. This was a different frequency, a rising pressure at the base of my skull that I have learned to associate with the very specific moment when Sloane Fitzgerald’s containment threshold begins to fail, and I turned my head on the pillow to find her standing beside the bed with her jaw set and her hands at her sides and a faint amber flicker crackling around her knuckles.

Pop.

A tiny spark jumped off her right hand and died in the air.

"Sloane." Not warning her. Just naming it.

"I’m fine." She was not fine. The bond told me she was not fine. The bond told me she was watching three girls stand around the bed of the boy she loved, each of them touching or wanting to touch or having just admitted in their own language that his stopped heartbeat had done something to them, and Sloane’s entire nervous system was interpreting this as a threat and reaching for the only response it has ever known.

Pop. Pop.

Two more sparks, brighter, off both hands now. Camille’s head turned toward the sound. Petra took a half-step back. Felicity, to her enormous credit, did not move, because Felicity Hardy has read every room she has ever been in and understood exactly what she was standing in the middle of.

"I just—" Sloane’s voice came out tight. "I’ve been here twenty-nine hours. I’ve been counting his breaths. And now everyone’s—"

Pop pop pop.

The air around her hands started to shimmer with heat, and the monitor beside me registered nothing but my heart rate ticking up, and I ran the fast math on how a detonation-triggered structural failure in a medical wing full of unconscious patients would play, and the answer was badly, and I opened my mouth to say something de-escalating and probably stupid—

Diane cleared her throat.

That was all. One sound, low, unhurried, from the chair in the corner where she had been sitting with her phone in her hand and her legs crossed and an expression of patient neutrality, and it landed in the room like a dropped anvil.

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