Chapter 542 | Doctor’s Orders

Chapter 542: 542 | Doctor’s Orders

Because Sloane Fitzgerald had spent twenty-nine hours in that chair, and she smelled like sweat and chemical fire and underneath it the vanilla shampoo that my brain had filed as critical infrastructure, and her hip was pressed against mine, and her mouth was on my throat, and the bond was carrying her relief straight into my chest where it curdled into something warmer and considerably less appropriate for a medical setting.

Then Sadism woke up. The trait I never asked for, the one that makes hurting things feel good and makes intimacy feel like a live wire, and it took the tender relieved thing in my chest and it added teeth.

I felt Sloane feel it.

She went still against my neck. Her breath changed. The bond runs both ways within fifty meters and she was well inside fifty meters, she was inside my hospital gown, and whatever spiked in me spiked in her a half-second later, and I felt her thighs press together where she sat on the edge of the mattress.

"Lukas." Her voice had dropped an octave. "What is that?"

"What’s what."

"That." She lifted her head. Her pupils had gone wide, her cheeks flushed, and the red-rimmed grief in her eyes had been joined by something a lot more dangerous. "I feel it. In the bond. You’re—" She swallowed. "You’re supposed to be dying."

"I’m supposed to be recovering. There’s a difference."

"You keep saying that."

"It keeps being true." I let my hand drift from her throat down over the collar of the hoodie, my hoodie, to the strip of skin at her collarbone where the fabric had slipped, and Sloane’s breath caught. "You’ve been counting my breaths for a day and a half. Maybe I want to give you something better to count."

"That’s the worst line you’ve ever—" Her voice broke on a gasp as my thumb traced the line of her collarbone. "Oh—that’s not fair, you can’t—the monitor’s right there, it’ll show my—it’ll show everything—"

"It’s showing my heart rate," I said, watching the number climb on the screen beside me. "It doesn’t know whose fault that is."

"Everyone will know it’s my fault."

"Then behave."

She did not behave.

She leaned back in and kissed me, and this one had none of the careful softness of the first, this one had the twenty-nine hours in it, the three seconds of nothing, the fury and the relief and the specific hunger of a girl who’d almost lost something and needed to reclaim it with her whole body, and her tongue slid against mine and I forgot about the ribs entirely for approximately four glorious seconds.

"Mm—Sloane—" The ribs remembered themselves. I grunted against her mouth. "Careful."

"You started it." She pulled back just enough to breathe, lips swollen, and I felt the shift in the bond as she moved from grief into want with the specific total commitment she brought to everything, combat and training and this. "You had to feel all smug and—and alive—right when I was busy being terrified—"

"I contain multitudes."

"That’s Felicity’s line."

"Everyone’s stealing everyone’s lines today." My good hand slid under the hem of the hoodie to the warm skin of her waist, and Sloane’s whole body shivered, and the bond lit up so bright it made my teeth ache. "You’re wearing my clothes."

"They were closer." A lie. The bond said it was a lie. She’d worn my hoodie because it smelled like me and she’d needed that while she counted my breaths, and now she was in it while she straddled the edge of a decision, and the two facts sat right next to each other and made my chest do something complicated.

Her hand pressed flat against my sternum, feeling the heartbeat again, and then it slid lower, down over the gauze wrapping my ribs, careful now, deliberate, to the edge of the thin hospital blanket at my waist.

"Sloane."

"You’re the one who woke up horny in a hospital bed." Her voice had gone breathless and low and her cheeks were burning. "I’m just—responding. To the bond. It’s your fault. Everything is your fault."

"That’s the Fitzgerald family motto."

"Shut up." Her hand slid under the blanket.

The monitor beside me chirped, my heart rate spiking twelve points in the space of a breath, and Sloane’s eyes went to the screen and then back to me and a slow, dangerous, absolutely deranged smile spread across her face, the smile of a girl who had just discovered a weapon.

"Oh," she breathed. "This is going to be so much fun."

"There’s a monitor."

"You said it doesn’t know whose fault it is."

"That was before you—ngh—" Her fingers found me through the thin fabric, warm and careful and completely without mercy, and the number on the screen jumped again, and somewhere down the hall Diane Fitzgerald was making calls to Margot Lang and the Commission with no idea that her daughter was about to give a heart monitor a very confusing story to tell. "Sloane. The nurse. Juno comes back at six."

"It’s four."

"That’s a lot of time for someone with broken ribs."

"Two broken ribs." She leaned down, her mouth against my ear, her breath hot, and the bond flooded so completely with her want that I couldn’t tell my arousal from hers anymore, the way the Emotional Duplex blurred everything at close range until we were one shared circuit running too hot. "One hairline. Juno was very specific." Her hand tightened and I bit down on a sound. "You can hold still, right? Doctor’s orders. I’ll do all the work."

"That’s—" My hips shifted before my brain approved it. "That’s very generous."

"I’m a generous person."

"You threatened to detonate the room forty minutes ago."

"That was before." She kissed the corner of my jaw, my throat, the pulse point below my ear that made my whole nervous system light up, and the monitor sang another twelve points higher. "Now I just want to feel your heart rate spike. For science. To confirm you’re alive."