The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 542

Chapter 542: 542 | Doctor’s Orders

Because Sloane Fitzgerald had spent twenty-nine hours in that chair, and she smelled like sweat and chemical fire and underneath it the vanilla shampoo that my brain had filed as critical infrastructure, and her hip was pressed against mine, and her mouth was on my throat, and the bond was carrying her relief straight into my chest where it curdled into something warmer and considerably less appropriate for a medical setting.

Then Sadism woke up. The trait I never asked for, the one that makes hurting things feel good and makes intimacy feel like a live wire, and it took the tender relieved thing in my chest and it added teeth.

I felt Sloane feel it. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

She went still against my neck. Her breath changed. The bond runs both ways within fifty meters and she was well inside fifty meters, she was inside my hospital gown, and whatever spiked in me spiked in her a half-second later, and I felt her thighs press together where she sat on the edge of the mattress.

"Lukas." Her voice had dropped an octave. "What is that?"

"What’s what."

"That." She lifted her head. Her pupils had gone wide, her cheeks flushed, and the red-rimmed grief in her eyes had been joined by something a lot more dangerous. "I feel it. In the bond. You’re—" She swallowed. "You’re supposed to be dying."

"I’m supposed to be recovering. There’s a difference."

"You keep saying that."

"It keeps being true." I let my hand drift from her throat down over the collar of the hoodie, my hoodie, to the strip of skin at her collarbone where the fabric had slipped, and Sloane’s breath caught. "You’ve been counting my breaths for a day and a half. Maybe I want to give you something better to count."

"That’s the worst line you’ve ever—" Her voice broke on a gasp as my thumb traced the line of her collarbone. "Oh—that’s not fair, you can’t—the monitor’s right there, it’ll show my—it’ll show everything—"

"It’s showing my heart rate," I said, watching the number climb on the screen beside me. "It doesn’t know whose fault that is."

"Everyone will know it’s my fault."

"Then behave."

She did not behave.

She leaned back in and kissed me, and this one had none of the careful softness of the first, this one had the twenty-nine hours in it, the three seconds of nothing, the fury and the relief and the specific hunger of a girl who’d almost lost something and needed to reclaim it with her whole body, and her tongue slid against mine and I forgot about the ribs entirely for approximately four glorious seconds.

"Mm—Sloane—" The ribs remembered themselves. I grunted against her mouth. "Careful."

"You started it." She pulled back just enough to breathe, lips swollen, and I felt the shift in the bond as she moved from grief into want with the specific total commitment she brought to everything, combat and training and this. "You had to feel all smug and—and alive—right when I was busy being terrified—"

"I contain multitudes."

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