Chapter 568 | Shadow Marks

Chapter 568: 568 | Shadow Marks

"The workout I put you through? Sugar, I barely touched you."

"You made me ride him for like twenty minutes!"

"Seven minutes. I counted."

"It felt like twenty."

"That’s because you were doing it wrong for the first four."

I sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed, reaching for my discarded sweatpants. "I’m going to shower while you two argue about dinner."

"Use the guest bathroom," Diane said. "The master bath doesn’t have clean towels."

"Why doesn’t your bathroom have clean towels?"

"Because I’ve been at the hospital for eleven days, Lukas. Laundry was not my primary concern."

Fair point. I pulled on my pants and headed for the door, leaving the Fitzgerald women to their negotiations. Behind me I heard Sloane saying something about stuffed crust and Diane responding with something about nutritional density, and the normalcy of it all hit me like a physical weight.

A few days ago I’d been standing in a plaza watching a twelve-foot monster try to kill my instructors. I’d wrapped myself in golden light and electricity I didn’t fully understand and thrown myself between Sloane and certain death.

I’d died, technically, for three seconds that felt like three years while I floated in a blue void and almost remembered a name I’d buried so deep I’d forgotten it existed. The void had been blue and empty and I’d heard something calling my name in a voice that wasn’t quite a voice.

Then I’d woken up in medical with Juno standing over me looking like she’d found something interesting in my tissue samples.

Now I was walking down a hallway in Creston Hills, freshly fucked and hungry for pizza, listening to my girlfriend argue with her mother about toppings while my back still carried shadow marks from fire that shouldn’t exist. The transition from dying to domestic felt like narrative whiplash.

The human capacity for normalcy was genuinely remarkable. You could almost die, wake up in a hospital bed, get cleared by a doctor who definitely knew more than she was saying, and twenty minutes later you were standing in a shower thinking about pizza toppings. The brain just defaulted to the familiar because the alternative was processing trauma you didn’t have time to process.

The family bathroom was exactly where I remembered it, third door on the left past the linen closet. I stripped off my sweatpants and stepped into the shower, turning the water as hot as it would go.

The heat washed over me and I let myself just stand there for a moment, feeling the pressure against my shoulders, watching steam rise around me in thick clouds that smelled faintly of eucalyptus from whatever expensive soap Diane kept stocked in here.

My back still carried faint marks from the black fire. Not scars exactly, more like shadows on my skin that caught the light wrong, like someone had painted them on with ink that never quite dried.

They started at my right shoulder blade and traced down in patterns that reminded me of tree branches or lightning strikes, depending on how I tilted my head when I looked over my shoulder at the mirror. Juno had mentioned a residual energy signature in the wound margins during my discharge eval. Something she hadn’t identified yet.

Something that made her want tissue samples, which I’d politely declined because the last thing I needed was Halloran medical running analysis on tissue that might light up every scanner they had.

I didn’t know what that villain’s fire had done to me, not really. The System hadn’t offered any explanations beyond confirming I wasn’t dying anymore, and the blue void from my near-death experience had been more cryptic than helpful.

But I could feel something different in my body now, something that hummed underneath my skin like a second heartbeat. When I focused on it the sensation got stronger, like pressing on a bruise to see if it still hurt.

The answer was yes, it still hurt, but not in a way that suggested damage. More like something new trying to integrate with something old.

Probably nothing to worry about.

Probably.

I washed mechanically, running through the Monday debrief in my head. The Commission was sending someone to ask questions I couldn’t answer honestly. My options were limited: tell the truth and get dissected by institutional curiosity, or lie convincingly enough to survive the scrutiny.

Lying it was, then. I was good at lying. The whole Phantom Touch registration was a lie I’d been maintaining for months without breaking a sweat. This was just another layer on the same cake.

The bathroom door opened.

I turned, water streaming down my face, and found Sloane standing in the doorway wearing nothing but her black choker.

"Mom’s ordering pizza," she said. "Thirty minutes."

"And you decided to spend that thirty minutes in the shower with me?" 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"I decided to spend that thirty minutes making sure you’re really here." She stepped into the shower and the water hit her pink hair, darkening it to something closer to rose. "The bond says you’re fine. My brain still isn’t convinced."

"What would convince your brain?"

"I don’t know yet." She pressed herself against my chest, arms wrapping around my waist, face buried in the curve of my neck. The water fell around us like a curtain. "Maybe nothing. Maybe I’m going to spend the rest of my life checking that you’re still breathing every time you fall asleep."

"That sounds exhausting."

"Welcome to loving someone who throws himself in front of monsters."

I held her there, feeling the bond pulse between us with something quieter than passion. Sloane’s body fit against mine like she’d been designed for it, all soft curves and hard muscle, the contradiction that defined everything about her. She was the strongest person I knew in some ways and the most fragile in others.

The System had locked her Temptation Gauge at ninety percent minimum. Affection Anchor, the notification had called it. Her attachment to me had transcended circumstance.

I still wasn’t sure how I felt about that. The romantic in me wanted to believe it meant something real. The pragmatist knew the System had engineered this outcome from the beginning, had pushed us together through missions and proximity and the specific chemistry of two people who probably shouldn’t work and somehow did.

Did it matter? If the love was real now, did it matter how it started?

I didn’t have an answer. I wasn’t sure I wanted one.

"The pizza’s going to get here before we’re done," Sloane said against my neck.

"We could make it quick."

"When have we ever made anything quick?"

"There was that time in the classroom."

"That was quick because we almost got caught. Different circumstances."