Chapter 536 | My Job [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 536: 536 | My Job [CASTLE BONUS]

"How bad," I said.

"She’s not building leverage. She told me she cares that the numbers keep you alive and doesn’t care why. I believe her, which is inconvenient, because I know how to handle someone with a price and I have no idea what to do with someone who just wants the patient’s chart to make sense." Diane’s thumb moved against my knuckles again, an idle rhythm she probably didn’t know she was doing. "The whole internet watched you take that fire, Lukas. They have a hashtag. They have frame-by-frame analysis. Someone with too much time cross-referenced your costume against a leaked laundry manifest and put your name to it before I could get in front of it."

"So the secret’s out."

"The secret is bleeding out. There’s a difference, and the difference is the entire reason I still have a job." She sat back an inch, dragged a hand down her face, and when it came away she was already doing the thing she did, running the angles, sorting the crisis into things she could fix and things she’d fix anyway. "But that is tomorrow’s problem. Or the day after. Because right now there is exactly one thing I care about, and it is that you opened your eyes, and I get to be furious about the rest of it in the morning."

Across the room, Sloane stirred.

The bond spiked first, a jolt of surfacing awareness rolling through the tether before her body caught up. I felt her wake before she moved. The System’s permanent modification working exactly as advertised. Two-way emotional duplex within fifty meters, no option to turn it off, and what came through in that first second was relief so sharp it registered as pain.

Her eyes came open. Blue, red-rimmed, unfocused for exactly one beat before they found me sitting there awake and looking at her.

Everything in her face broke at once.

"Lukas." My name came out cracked down the middle, half word, half sound, the kind of noise a person makes when a thing they’ve been terrified about for a day and a half stops being true. She was out of the chair and across the room before I could get a word in, and then her hands were on my face, on my jaw, fingers sliding down to the collar of the hospital gown. Checking me the way she checked everything, with her hands first, needing to confirm through touch what her eyes were telling her. Her palm pressed flat over my heartbeat. She held it there.

"Hey, babe." I got the word out and it landed soft, none of the usual edge. "Careful with the ribs. They’re holding a grudge."

"You," she said, and stopped. Started again. Her thumb dragged across my cheekbone, rough at the edges, tender at the center. Her eyes were wet and she was too far gone to pretend they weren’t. "You absolute idiot. You had four percent stamina. You had a separated shoulder. You stood up anyway and then you jumped in front of me, and I felt it, I felt you decide, except you didn’t even decide, there was no decision, there was just you moving and me realizing what you were doing half a second too late to stop you, and then you were on the ground and you weren’t moving and I couldn’t—"

Her voice fractured. She sucked in a breath that didn’t steady anything.

"I couldn’t feel you through the bond. For three seconds I couldn’t feel anything and I thought—"

"Sloane." Diane’s voice, quiet.

Sloane pressed her forehead down against mine, careful of the brace, careful of the gauze, careful in a way that cost her something. The bond flooded between us until I couldn’t tell where her relief ended and mine started, this warm terrible feedback loop the System had built and then locked in place and made permanent, and for once I didn’t resent it.

"You don’t get to do that again," she whispered against my mouth, her breath hot, uneven. "You hear me? You don’t get to be the one who saves me anymore. That’s supposed to be my job. I have a Legendary Aspect. I train at five-thirty in the morning when most people are still dreaming. I’m going to be the number one Hero in this entire country someday, and you’re going to be second, which means second doesn’t get to throw himself in front of first. That’s not—that’s never been how any version of this was supposed to work."

Her voice caught on the last word. Frayed at the edges.

"The plan’s real flexible on the specifics," I said.

She let out a sound that might have started as a laugh. It came out cracked all the way through, raw in a way I’d never heard from her before, and then it broke into something else entirely. She buried her face against the side of my neck, shoulders shaking, and I managed to get my one functional arm up around her back and just held on. The bond pulsed warm and messy between us, her relief bleeding into mine until I couldn’t parse which emotion belonged to who.

Diane stayed in her chair, both hands folded neatly in her lap, watching us with an expression I had never once managed to catch on her face across nine full years of living under the same roof and trying to read her. Something softer than I thought her features allowed. Something that looked almost like grief except it wasn’t quite that either.

Then the door opened without a knock.

Juno Mak appeared in the frame, medical chart tucked under one arm, something wrapped in crinkly plastic in her other hand. She was chewing. Her dark eyes swept the room in one efficient pass—me on the bed, the monitor, Sloane still pressed against my neck with tears soaking into the hospital gown, Diane sitting perfectly still in that chair—and then settled back on me with the kind of flat, clinical attention someone uses when they’re reading data off a screen and the data isn’t doing what it’s supposed to.

"You’re awake," she said, around whatever she was eating. "Good. Your regeneration curve is doing something I’ve decided not to have feelings about." She crossed to the monitor, checked it, didn’t touch it. "Two of you should still eat something. I stand by the soup."

Then she looked at me directly, and for a second the flatness cracked into something closer to genuine curiosity, the kind a scientist gets when the results won’t behave.

"You," Juno said, "are a very interesting problem, Belmont."