The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 543

Chapter 543: 543 | Irregular Cardiac Event

The monitor jumped to ninety-four.

Sloane watched the number climb with the focused satisfaction of a girl who had spent nine years tracking my morning routine and was now applying that observational discipline to something considerably less wholesome. Her pink hair hung around her face in unwashed curtains and her blue eyes still carried the red edges of crying and she had never in her entire life looked more like someone who intended to destroy me.

"Hold still," she whispered, and her hand moved inside the blanket with the slow, firm authority of someone who had spent two months learning exactly what made me stop thinking.

I held still. The effort required a level of willpower that the System should have classified as an Epic passive trait and charged me accordingly. Sloane’s palm was warm from the bond and from the ambient heat her Aspect always generated, and when she freed me from the thin hospital pants the temperature difference made my whole body jerk and the monitor chirped a protest that neither of us acknowledged.

"Mmm." Her thumb dragged along the underside with agonizing slowness, tracing the vein from base to tip, and I felt the Sadism trait pulse once, a dark warm thing that amplified every nerve ending she touched and sent the sensation looping back through the Duplex into her body and then returning to mine stronger than it left. "You’re already this hard and I haven’t done anything."

"You’re breathing on my neck. That counts."

"That counts?" She laughed against my throat, warm and wet, and squeezed, and I made a sound that the monitor faithfully translated into a heart rate of one hundred and two. "Good. Stay quiet. There’s a hallway full of people outside."

She pulled the blanket lower. Just enough. The cool air hit my skin and she looked down at what she held and her cheeks went from pink to crimson in the span of a single heartbeat, her ears turning that specific shade of rose that matched her hair. Even after everything we had done over the past two months, Sloane Fitzgerald still blushed when confronted with visual evidence of what she did to me, and the contradiction between the girl who could crater training floors and the girl who flushed at her own boyfriend’s body continued to be one of my favorite things about being alive. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

She straddled the edge of the mattress and scooted lower, careful not to jostle my torso, positioning herself between the monitor and the door so her body would block the view if anyone entered. The strategic awareness was pure combat instinct repurposed for an entirely different theater of operations.

"If Juno walks in—"

"I’ll hear the door." Sloane’s head dipped. Her breath washed over me, hot and unsteady, and my hand found the back of her neck and gathered a fistful of pink hair and pulled, and the sound she made when I pulled was the sound that had gotten us into every situation Diane had ever needed to manage.

"Nngh—don’t pull my hair, I’ll—"

"You’ll what."

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