The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 584

Chapter 584: 584 | The Shadow Ones [CASTLE BONUS]

"You’re allowed to knock."

"That’s what you keep saying." She looked at the mug. "I brought tea. It’s for you. It’s chamomile, which is the boring one, but you almost died so I didn’t think you needed the caffeine one."

I took it. Our fingers touched on the handle and she didn’t pull back, which three weeks ago she absolutely would have.

"You want to come in?"

"Is that allowed?"

"WARDEN hasn’t said anything, so probably."

That got a laugh out of her. Small, real, gone fast. She stepped past me into the room and stopped in the middle of it, hands empty now and clearly wishing they weren’t, and turned around to face me.

"Percy says your spine grew back," she said.

"Percy talks a lot."

"Percy talks to me a lot." Her tail gave one twitch. "He says the burn margins closed in four days and that a normal person would still be in a bed. He wrote nine pages about it. He wanted me to tell you that he isn’t going to report it, and that he isn’t asking, and that he put that in writing so you’d know it was on the record."

"That’s very Percy."

"He was scared." She said it plainly, and then the purple eyes came up and found mine, and every apology fell out of her voice at once. "So was I. You should know that part. Everybody keeps telling you they’re glad you’re alive like it’s a greeting card, and I didn’t want to do that, so I’m telling you the real one. I sat in the corridor and listened to Percy count and when he got to your name and nothing came back I made a sound I’ve never made before."

The temptation gauge shifted in the corner of my vision. Twelve had become nineteen sometime in the last eleven days and neither of us had been in the same building for any of it.

"Rina."

"I’m not finished." Her chin came up. "You told me I was terrifying. On a bench, at one in the morning, before anybody knew who you were. And then you told me my Aspect was one of the most dangerous things in either cohort, and Steele said it too, and I didn’t believe either of you until I watched twenty men sit down in flood water because I couldn’t hold the wool steady and my hands were shaking."

"You held."

"You told me to." Something in her face cracked and rebuilt itself. "That’s my point. You were on the ground, you had nothing left, you’d already been thrown through a pharmacy, and you looked up at me and told me I was helping. And then you got up and did it again. Nine more times. I counted. I count things now, Percy’s a bad influence."

I set the mug down on the desk next to my parents.

"You promised me Field Zeta," she said. "Before all this. You said you’d help me find out what the rest of it looks like. The part they trained out of me at Saint Catherine’s."

"I did."

"I want it Saturday."

There it was. No hedge, no sorry, no offer to reschedule if it inconvenienced me in any manner whatsoever. Just a girl who’d spent three years being filed under support-tier telling me where to be.

"Saturday," I said. "Oh six hundred. Nobody’s up, no cameras, and Ren owes me a ramp."

Rina let out a breath she’d clearly been holding since the hallway. Then she crossed the last two feet and put her palm flat on my chest, right over the sternum, exactly where the second beat sat.

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