Chapter 541 | The Warranty Is Slightly Damaged

Chapter 541: 541 | The Warranty Is Slightly Damaged

Sloane’s jaw worked once, and then she nodded, and I felt the last of the amber charge draining out of her hands through the bond like water going down a slow drain.

Diane collected her phone off the chair, slipped her feet back into the heels she’d abandoned sometime in the last twenty-nine hours, and became six feet of executive again in the time it took to stand. She crossed to the bed. Her fingers brushed my hair back from my forehead, and the gesture was maternal and light and it landed somewhere lower in my chest than it had any right to.

"I have calls to make, baby," she said, and the endearment carried nine years and about two months of complications folded into two syllables. "Margot Lang, three Network liaisons, and a Commission representative who thinks I’ve been dodging him." Her mouth curved. "I have been dodging him."

"Diane."

She paused at the door.

"Thank you," I said. "For the twenty-nine hours."

Something moved across her face too fast to catalog even at a hundred Intelligence, and then it was gone, filed, sealed behind the professional calm she’d worn to close a hundred deals. "Don’t make it weird," she said, which is a Sloane line, which told me exactly where Sloane got it. The door clicked shut behind her.

And then it was the two of us.

The monitor kept its steady green rhythm. The medical wing hummed the way expensive buildings hum, a sound engineered to be almost silence and therefore somehow worse. Sloane stood beside the bed with her arms crossed over Lukas Belmont’s black hoodie, the one she’d stolen, the sleeves swallowing her hands, her pink hair a disaster and her eyes red-rimmed and her right forearm wrapped in gauze that had bled through in two places, and she looked at me like she was still deciding whether to be furious.

The bond told me she’d already decided. She just hadn’t given herself permission to stop yet.

"You can sit," I said.

"I know I can sit."

"You’re not sitting."

"I’m processing."

I patted the mattress beside my hip with my good hand, which cost me a rib and was worth it. "Process here. My neck’s getting tired looking up."

She glared. She sat. Carefully, on the edge, hip against my leg through the blanket, and the second her weight settled the bond went quiet in the specific way it goes quiet when Sloane stops fighting the thing she’s feeling and just feels it.

"You died," she said.

"Three seconds. I’ve heard. Rude of me."

"Lukas."

"I’m here." I found her uninjured hand with mine and turned it over, thumb across her knuckles, the same knuckles that had cratered a training floor and folded grown men into concrete forty hours ago. "Feel that? Pulse. Working. Slightly damaged model but under warranty."

Her breath hitched. Not a sob. Sloane doesn’t do sobs, she does the thing where her whole body locks up trying not to and the effort is louder than crying would have been. "I felt it stop," she said, low. "The bond. Three seconds of nothing. And I couldn’t do anything, I was on the ground with my arm on fire and you were just—gone—and I—"

"Hey." I squeezed. "Look at me."

She looked at me.

Up close, with the medical light soft on her face and her guard down to the studs, Sloane Fitzgerald looked younger than her Legendary aspect and her top-five combat score and her plan-in-seventeen-drafts. She looked like the girl who’d stood in a kitchen doorway when she wanted to talk and didn’t want to admit she wanted to talk. She looked like mine. The bond agreed. The bond had locked that in at one hundred percent and made it structural, and somewhere underneath the System’s cold architecture the thing was real anyway, had been real since a training mat and a refusal to stay down, and I stopped being able to tell where the machine ended and I began a while ago.

"I’m not going anywhere," I said.

"You keep saying that."

"I keep meaning it."

She leaned in. Slow. Her forehead found mine and the bond flooded warm and messy between us, relief and residual terror and something underneath both of them that neither of us had said out loud in that exact configuration yet, and her nose brushed mine, and her breath went shallow.

"Careful of the ribs," I murmured.

"I hate you."

"You love me."

"I hate that I love you." Her lips brushed the corner of my mouth, feather-light, testing. "Do you have any idea how annoying it is? To feel everything you feel? I felt you decide to stand up. I felt you decide I was worth it. You didn’t even hesitate and I have to live inside that now, I have to carry it around—"

I kissed her.

Soft, because the ribs, because the shoulder, because a hospital and a monitor and Diane one hallway away, but I kissed her and Sloane made a sound against my mouth, small and broken and relieved, and her uninjured hand came up to cup my jaw like she needed both eyes and both hands to confirm the same fact.

"Mmh—" She pulled back half an inch, breathing uneven. "This is a terrible idea. You’re in traction."

"I’m in a brace. There’s a difference."

"You have three broken ribs."

"Two. The third’s a hairline. Juno was very specific." I traced my thumb along her jaw, down the line of her throat to the black choker she’d worn since she was fourteen, and I felt her pulse jump under my fingertips. "You should see the other guy."

Her laugh cracked out of her, wet and ugly and real, and she pressed her face into the side of my neck and stayed there, and I held her with my one working arm while the monitor counted a heartbeat neither of us was going to stop trusting anytime soon.

The bond hummed low and steady.

I would like to report that I was being noble. That I held my girlfriend in a hospital bed forty hours after nearly dying and felt nothing but tender relief and the clean warmth of survival.

I would be lying.