Chapter 531 | Sugar, It Can Wait [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 531: 531 | Sugar, It Can Wait [CASTLE BONUS]

The medical wing at two in the morning had a particular kind of quiet, the kind that came from expensive soundproofing and the low electronic breathing of machines Diane could not name but had learned to hate over the past twenty-nine hours.

She sat in the chair beside the bed, the one designed for family members expected to stay a long time, and watched Lukas not wake up.

He looked wrong. That was the word her mind kept returning to, the one it refused to soften into anything more manageable. Her boy had always looked wrong lying still, even as a child, because Lukas Belmont was not a person who sat quietly. He fidgeted and rolled his shoulder and cracked jokes at the worst possible moments.

The version in front of her did none of those things.

Bandages wrapped his torso from the waist up, layers of white gauze that Dr. Voss had personally applied and then replaced twice as the burns underneath decided how bad they intended to be. His left shoulder sat in a brace that looked like it had been engineered by someone who expected to make more of them. An IV line ran into the back of his hand, and a monitor tracked his heart with a steady green pulse that Diane had been counting for a full day now.

Twenty-nine hours. He had not opened his eyes once.

Her phone buzzed against her thigh. She looked at the screen without lifting it. Margot Lang, the fourth call in an hour, and behind Margot a queue of missed calls she had stopped reading: two Network liaisons, a Commission representative, three of her own clients whose PR crises had apparently not paused for the small matter of a coordinated terrorist assault on the world’s top academy. Victor Sterling had left a voicemail she deleted without listening because if Victor Sterling wanted her attention tonight he could set himself on fire again and see how she responded.

She turned the phone off. Held the button until the screen went black. Set it face-down on the bedside table beside a plastic cup of water nobody had touched, and watched the green pulse continue its steady count on the monitor.

The silence got quieter.

"You didn’t have to do that," Sloane said from the other chair.

Diane looked over. Her daughter sat with her feet tucked underneath her, wearing an oversized hoodie that Diane knew for a fact belonged to Lukas because it swallowed Sloane’s frame in a way none of her own clothes did. The sleeves hung past her hands. The hood pooled against the back of the chair. She had pulled it on sometime during the first night and had not taken it off since, even when the nurses had offered to bring her something fresh from the ward supplies.

Sloane’s right forearm was wrapped from wrist to elbow in gauze that had been changed twice already because the burns underneath were weeping through the dressings faster than Dr. Voss had projected. Her pink hair hung loose and unwashed, tangled in a way that would have irritated her under normal circumstances. Her blue eyes were red-rimmed in a way Sloane would deny if anyone commented on it, and Diane had no intention of commenting because she had cried enough for both of them in the private hours when Sloane had been sleeping upright in the chair and could not see.

"Do what, sugar?"

"Turn off your phone. People need you. Your agency, the clients." Sloane’s voice had none of its usual volume, none of the bright competitive edge that carried through every conversation she had ever had in her life. It sat flat in the small room, stripped down to something that sounded too much like defeat. "You’re the person who fixes things."

"I fix things during business hours." Diane reached over and adjusted the blanket across Lukas’s chest, smoothing a crease that did not need smoothing because the gesture gave her hands something to do that was not checking the monitor for the hundredth time in the last hour. "It’s two in the morning and my children are in a hospital. The phone can wait."

Sloane’s jaw worked. She looked at Lukas, then away toward the window where the sodium lights of the parking lot cast faint orange bars across the floor, then back, unable to hold the sight of him lying there and unable to stop returning to it.

"He jumped in front of me," Sloane said.

Diane already knew. She had watched the footage. She had watched all of it, every angle that had leaked to the internet before Halloran’s legal team scrubbed what they could scrub, and she had watched the specific nineteen seconds where the boy she had raised for nine years put himself between her daughter and a wall of black fire without a single instant of hesitation.

She had watched it enough times that she could close her eyes and see the gold light break across his back, could see the smoke rise off him in thin ropes, could see him stand up afterward with a spine that had no business straightening.

"I know," Diane said.

"No." Sloane’s hands curled into the sleeves of the hoodie. "You don’t. You saw the video. You didn’t feel it. I felt it. I felt everything. I felt him decide. There wasn’t even a pause, Mom. He didn’t weigh it. He just."

She stopped. Her throat moved. "The fire was coming for my arm. Thatch targeted my arm because it’s the structure, because I can’t charge without it. And Lukas took it on his back instead. And I was on the ground counting his breaths because I didn’t know if he was going to keep taking them."

The overhead light hummed. Diane had asked a nurse to dim it hours ago, and the room sat in a soft grey that made the burns under the gauze easier to not think about.

"His back," Sloane said, and now the anger arrived, the anger that had been building underneath the fear all day, the anger that Diane recognized because it was the specific fury of someone with power directed inward at the thing that power could not do. "I’m the one with the Legendary Aspect. I’m the one who’s supposed to be the top Hero. I trained since I was six. I have detonation output that craters training floors. And when it mattered, when the fire came, he had to save me. Me. And now his back is." She could not finish it.

She pressed the heel of her uninjured hand against her eye. "I’m supposed to protect people. That’s the whole point. That’s the entire point of all of it. And I couldn’t even protect myself."