Chapter 532 | A Smart Call [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 532: 532 | A Smart Call [CASTLE BONUS]

Diane let her daughter say it. She had learned a long time ago that Sloane needed to finish the thought before she would accept anything else, that interrupting the spiral only extended it.

"You want me to tell you it isn’t your fault," Diane said when the quiet came back.

"Don’t."

"I wasn’t going to." Diane turned in the chair to face her daughter fully. "Because you already know it isn’t your fault, and you don’t want to hear it, and telling you would just give you something to argue with. So I’m not going to say that." She kept her voice level, the drawl slowed to the register she used when she needed someone to actually listen.

"I’m going to tell you something else instead. That boy is in love with you and when the moment came where loving you meant standing in front of a fire aimed at you, he didn’t decide anything, because there was no decision to make. There never was. Not for him. You didn’t fail to protect yourself, sugar. You got protected by someone who was always, always going to protect you. Those are not the same thing."

Sloane’s face crumpled and reassembled. She stared at Lukas.

"I hate it," she whispered.

"I know."

"I hate that I needed it."

"I know that too."

The door opened without a knock.

Diane looked up. A young woman stepped inside, and Diane’s first assessment, the automatic one that twenty years in an industry built on appearances had wired into her, cataloged the woman before she had crossed the threshold.

Compact. Five-four, maybe, with a build that the standard-issue medical coat did nothing to hide and everything to draw attention to, hips and thighs that made the loose garment sit strangely across a frame that was otherwise slender through the shoulders.

Jet-black hair in two messy buns with strands falling across a face that carried the specific blankness of someone who had been awake far too long and had stopped being polite about it.

Dark eyes, half-lidded, a small beauty mark below the left one. A silver ear cuff. And on her breath, when she got close enough, the faint sweetness of something Diane could not identify mixed with the antiseptic of the wing.

The woman held a chart. She did not look at Diane or Sloane. She looked at Lukas, and her eyes did the thing that certain kinds of professionals did, the scan that took in a body and produced a conclusion faster than the process that generated it was visible.

"He’s fine," the woman said.

Sloane sat up straight. "Who are you?"

"Juno Mak. Medical assistant." She flipped a page on the chart without appearing to read it. "Dr. Voss has the two faculty members in critical. Steele’s arm and Dravid’s chest. I’m handling the rest of the wing, which right now is this room, because everyone else got discharged or moved."

"You said he’s fine." Sloane’s voice cracked back into volume. "He hasn’t woken up in a day. His back is."

"His back is healing at a rate that would concern me if it were slower and concerns me more because it isn’t." Juno set the chart down at the foot of the bed. She lifted the corner of the gauze at Lukas’s shoulder with two fingers, glanced under it, and let it settle again.

"The burns should have taken skin grafts and six weeks. They’re closing on their own. The rib fractures are knitting. There’s a spleen contusion that stopped bleeding twelve hours before anyone told it to. He’s not waking up because his body decided sleep was a better use of resources than consciousness. It’s making a smart call. I’d respect it if I were you."

Diane watched the young woman’s face. There was nothing performed in it. No bedside softening, no attempt to reassure that carried the particular texture of a professional managing a family. Juno Mak said what was true and moved on from it, and the thing she said was better than any comfort Diane had received from anyone else in twenty-nine hours.

"You’ve seen a lot of injured people," Diane said.

Juno’s dark eyes came to her for the first time. Held for a second. "Yes."

"And his don’t add up."

Something moved behind the half-lidded gaze, a flicker that Diane, who read people for a living, recognized as recognition. Juno had noticed the same thing Diane had noticed nine years ago and again three months ago and again in a training room security feed at eleven forty-seven PM. The gap between what the file said and what the body did.

"His file says Rare-tier Channeler," Juno said. "His recovery rate says something else. His burn response says something else. I’ve treated Branded who heal fast. I’ve treated Flux users who rebuild. I’ve never treated a Channeler whose tissue does this." She tucked a strand of black hair behind her ear, the one with the cuff.

Diane held very still.

The words landed in a place she had prepared for, because she had known this moment was coming since the day Lukas manifested a second Aspect on a training room floor and lied about it with a story he had clearly rehearsed. She had known someone would eventually look at the boy and see the wrongness and refuse to look away. She had planned for it to be Charles Weber, whom she owned, or an actuary from Halcyon she could bury in paperwork. She had not planned for it to be a twenty-something medical assistant who ate something sweet during a two AM shift and delivered the observation with all the drama of a weather report.

"And what do you want," Diane said, "in exchange for not writing it down?"

Juno blinked at her. "Nothing. I don’t care why his numbers are wrong. I care that they’re wrong in a direction that keeps him alive. If they were wrong in the other direction we’d be having a different conversation." She picked the chart back up.

"People do this a lot. Assume I’m building leverage. I’m building a treatment plan. The two look similar from your side of the table."