The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 541

Chapter 541: 541 | The Warranty Is Slightly Damaged

Sloane’s jaw worked once, and then she nodded, and I felt the last of the amber charge draining out of her hands through the bond like water going down a slow drain.

Diane collected her phone off the chair, slipped her feet back into the heels she’d abandoned sometime in the last twenty-nine hours, and became six feet of executive again in the time it took to stand. She crossed to the bed. Her fingers brushed my hair back from my forehead, and the gesture was maternal and light and it landed somewhere lower in my chest than it had any right to.

"I have calls to make, baby," she said, and the endearment carried nine years and about two months of complications folded into two syllables. "Margot Lang, three Network liaisons, and a Commission representative who thinks I’ve been dodging him." Her mouth curved. "I have been dodging him."

"Diane."

She paused at the door.

"Thank you," I said. "For the twenty-nine hours."

Something moved across her face too fast to catalog even at a hundred Intelligence, and then it was gone, filed, sealed behind the professional calm she’d worn to close a hundred deals. "Don’t make it weird," she said, which is a Sloane line, which told me exactly where Sloane got it. The door clicked shut behind her.

And then it was the two of us.

The monitor kept its steady green rhythm. The medical wing hummed the way expensive buildings hum, a sound engineered to be almost silence and therefore somehow worse. Sloane stood beside the bed with her arms crossed over Lukas Belmont’s black hoodie, the one she’d stolen, the sleeves swallowing her hands, her pink hair a disaster and her eyes red-rimmed and her right forearm wrapped in gauze that had bled through in two places, and she looked at me like she was still deciding whether to be furious.

The bond told me she’d already decided. She just hadn’t given herself permission to stop yet.

"You can sit," I said.

"I know I can sit."

"You’re not sitting."

"I’m processing."

I patted the mattress beside my hip with my good hand, which cost me a rib and was worth it. "Process here. My neck’s getting tired looking up."

She glared. She sat. Carefully, on the edge, hip against my leg through the blanket, and the second her weight settled the bond went quiet in the specific way it goes quiet when Sloane stops fighting the thing she’s feeling and just feels it.

"You died," she said.

"Three seconds. I’ve heard. Rude of me."

"Lukas."

"I’m here." I found her uninjured hand with mine and turned it over, thumb across her knuckles, the same knuckles that had cratered a training floor and folded grown men into concrete forty hours ago. "Feel that? Pulse. Working. Slightly damaged model but under warranty."

Her breath hitched. Not a sob. Sloane doesn’t do sobs, she does the thing where her whole body locks up trying not to and the effort is louder than crying would have been. "I felt it stop," she said, low. "The bond. Three seconds of nothing. And I couldn’t do anything, I was on the ground with my arm on fire and you were just—gone—and I—"

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