Chapter 535 | A Work of Fiction [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 535: 535 | A Work of Fiction [CASTLE BONUS]

Not to blue this time. To off-white ceiling tile and soft medical lighting turned down to nighttime dim, and the green pulse of a monitor to my left keeping honest time with my own heartbeat.

And to two hands wrapped around my right one, holding it the way you hold something you’ve decided not to let go of regardless of what the situation thinks about that.

Diane.

She was leaning forward in a chair pulled tight to the bed, her pink hair loose and un-styled in a way I had seen exactly twice in nine years, both times in the kitchen at home with the armor off. No blazer. A silk camisole gone soft with wear, sleeves pushed up. Her cold blue eyes were fixed on my hand, not my face, like she’d been watching for movement in my fingers instead of my eyelids and hadn’t caught up yet.

She looked tired. Diane Fitzgerald did not look tired. It was against her entire operating philosophy. She managed exhaustion the way she managed everything, out of sight, behind the presentation, and the fact that it had leaked through to the surface told me more about the last however-many hours than any headcount could.

I opened my mouth. What came out was a croak, dry and useless, the vocal equivalent of a car turning over in the cold.

Her eyes snapped up.

For one second she didn’t move. Just looked at me, the whole of her attention, the Read the Room Aspect she’d built an empire on burning through whatever performance I might have tried to put up and finding nothing but a boy who hurt everywhere and was extremely glad to be looking at her. Whatever she saw made the tension go out of her shoulders in a single long exhale I felt more than heard.

"There he is," she said, low and Charleston-slow, and her thumb pressed once against the back of my hand. "Welcome back, sugar."

"Water," I managed.

She was already reaching for it. Held the straw to my mouth, tilted the cup, and I drank in small pulls while my throat came back online. She didn’t rush me. Didn’t fuss. Just held the cup steady with the same competent patience she’d probably applied to keeping herself from falling apart for a day and a half.

"How long," I said, when the straw came away.

"Twenty-nine hours." She set the cup down. "Give or take. Long enough that I’ve had opinions about the machine soup at the end of the hall, and long enough that I’ve turned my phone off, which I want you to appreciate, because Margot Lang has called it eleven times and I have not answered once."

"You turned your phone off." I tried for the dry register and mostly landed it. "For me. I’m honored. I’m going to have this framed."

"Don’t get used to it." But there was no edge under it, just relief wearing sarcasm like a coat. She reached up and pushed a strand of hair off my forehead, the touch featherlight over a scar I hadn’t earned, on a face that had never been mine. "You’ve been asleep so long your girlfriend threatened to detonate the medical assistant."

That’s when I noticed the second person.

Sloane was in the other chair, and she was asleep, which was the only reason I’d missed her, because a conscious Sloane took up the entire room by policy. She’d folded herself into the seat sideways, knees up, one of my black hoodies swallowing her whole, pink hair a tangled disaster across her face. Her right forearm was wrapped in gauze that had gone a faint pink at the edges where the burns underneath were still weeping through.

The bond told me she was there before my eyes finished confirming it. Even asleep, even fifty feet inside its range and no farther, the Devotion’s Echo hummed low and steady against whatever was left of my chest. Exhaustion. Fear worn thin from being held too long. And underneath both of those, banked but not gone, a slow-burning fury that hadn’t found a target yet and was patiently waiting for one.

She’d taken the fire on her arm for me. No. I’d taken the fire on my back for her. I kept getting the direction wrong because both of them were true and both of them made my chest do something I didn’t have the stamina to examine.

"She hasn’t slept properly," Diane said, following my eyes. "She’s been counting your breaths. I told her that was my job now and she could take a shift."

"Her arm."

"Second-degree, mostly. Dr. Voss is confident. Juno keeps saying she’s fine, which from Juno I’ve learned is a full paragraph of reassurance compressed into one word." Diane’s mouth did something complicated. "The two of you are going to give me a heart attack, and I want you to know that Reina would have been furious with me for letting it happen, and she’d have been right."

There it was. The name she used when the armor was all the way off. Reina, my mother, who I’d never met, whose grief I carried like an invoice for a meal somebody else had eaten. Diane said it soft, the way you set down something you’ve been holding too tight, and for a second I saw the whole shape of the last nine years in it. The promise. The guest room that stopped being the guest room. All of it.

"Hey." My voice came out rougher than the joke wanted it to be. "I’m hard to kill. It’s kind of my thing now. You should see my file."

"I have seen your file." She leaned in, and her eyes went sharp under the fatigue, the CEO surfacing through the woman like a shark under still water. "Your file is a work of fiction I helped author, and it is currently the second most dangerous document in the state of California, because a medical assistant named Juno Mak looked at how your burns are closing and told me, to my face, that a Rare-tier Channeler does not heal the way you’re healing."

The floating feeling wanted to come back. I held onto her hand instead.