Chapter 543 | Irregular Cardiac Event

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.

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."

"I’ll be loud." She said it like a warning and a threat and a promise, all compressed into two syllables that vibrated against the sensitive skin of my lower stomach. "You know I’m loud."

I knew she was loud. The dormitory walls at Halloran had been specifically engineered to contain Aspect discharge and structurally reinforced against detonation-class impacts, and Sloane still managed to test their acoustic limits on a regular basis. The hospital wing had no such reinforcement. The walls were standard institutional drywall. Diane sat somewhere down the hallway making phone calls to people who influenced federal policy. Camille, Petra, and Felicity occupied the common area eating soup. Percy had not slept and was maintaining a headcount with the dedication of someone who considered allowing people to vanish a personal failure.

The risk was catastrophic and I should have stopped it immediately and I did not stop it because Sloane’s mouth opened and she took me inside with the warm, wet, devastating commitment she brought to everything she cared about, which included combat and training and me, in an order she would deny if asked directly.

"Hhhh—" The sound escaped before I could catch it, low and guttural, pulled from somewhere deeper than my ribs. The monitor spiked to one-twelve.

Sloane hummed around me and the vibration traveled through my entire pelvic floor and up my spine and the Sadism trait converted the sensation into a feedback loop that made my vision blur at the edges. Her mouth was soft and hot and she moved with the specific rhythm she had learned from Diane’s instruction and her own determined practice, and I was going to die in this hospital bed, not from the rib fractures or the spleen contusion but from Sloane Fitzgerald’s tongue doing something that defied the documented capabilities of the human mouth.

Her head bobbed lower and my hand tightened in her hair and she moaned, a full-throated, shameless sound that punched through the quiet hospital room and probably traveled through two walls and a fire door.

"Sloane—" I pressed my palm over her mouth from above, holding her jaw closed around me, and her blue eyes snapped up to mine with an expression that mixed outrage and arousal in proportions I could not calculate even at one hundred Intelligence. "Quiet. You promised."

She pulled off with a wet pop that was itself louder than most conversations. "I didn’t promise anything. You told me to behave. That’s different."

"It is extremely not different."

"It is." She licked her lips and the sight made my stomach drop through the mattress. "You said behave. I said I would hold still. These are separate commitments with separate enforcement mechanisms."

"You sound like Petra."

That was the wrong thing to say. Sloane’s grip tightened with competitive force and she sank back down with zero warning and zero mercy, taking me deep enough that her nose pressed against my pelvis, and the sound I made in response was loud enough that the monitor beeped three times in rapid succession and a red alert flagged on the screen beside my bed indicating an irregular cardiac event.

"FUU—"