Chapter 572 | A Second Heartbeat

Chapter 572: 572 | A Second Heartbeat

The corner of her mouth twitched, betraying the smile she was fighting, and I understood then that she wasn’t just prepping me. She was scared. Not the loud kind Sloane carried, the kind that popped and sparked. The quiet kind, the kind Diane got when something was genuinely wrong, the kind you had to learn to read because she’d never announce it. She was scared because for the first time in nine years the thing she was managing might be too big for her, and I could see her hating that in real time.

"I’ll be careful," I said. And then, because she deserved more than a line I’d feed a reporter, "I’ll be scared. Actually scared. I won’t have to perform it. That part’s true."

Something in her face loosened. "Good. Frightened boys get sympathy. Confident boys get audits."

"You’ve said that before."

"I’ll keep saying it until you stop being confident at the exact wrong moments." She pressed the folded boxes into the bin and dusted her hands, and just like that the CEO slid back into place, the vulnerability tucked away where only I’d seen it. "Bed. Both of you. You’re recovering and she’s insufferable when she’s tired."

"I’m always insufferable," Sloane called from the counter. "It’s a feature."

"It’s genetic," Diane and I said at the same time.

Sloane threw the last cheese slice, and this time it hit Diane in the shoulder, and the resulting standoff nearly cost me a wall as Sloane’s fingers started to crackle. I got between them before it escalated into property damage, wrapped an arm around Sloane’s waist, and hauled her toward the stairs while she protested that she’d been provoked and that she was an adult who could stand in a kitchen without being carried.

"You parallel parked into a fire hydrant," I said.

"That was ONE TIME."

"That’s what you always say."

Behind us, Diane laughed, and it was a real laugh, not the polished one she used at galas, and I thought about the woman calling a dead friend’s voicemail eleven days ago because she didn’t know if I’d live. I filed that next to everything else. The drawer creaked.

Sloane’s room hadn’t changed. Combat gear in one corner, laundry in the other, the color scheme her mother had vetoed in favor of burgundy that Sloane still insisted looked like a Valentine’s card under the lights. She’d been right, actually. The burgundy looked better. She’d never admit it.

She dropped onto the bed and pulled me down with her, and for a while we just lay there, her head on my chest, her hand splayed flat over my heartbeat like she was still counting. Through the bond I felt the slow bleed of the day’s fear draining out of her, replaced by something warmer and heavier. Her breathing evened. Her fingers stopped their nervous tracing.

"I keep waiting to feel it stop," she said into the dark. "Your heart. I know it won’t. Juno cleared you, Mom cleared you, you’re right here. But some part of my brain is still on the plaza floor waiting for it to stop, and I can’t turn that part off."

"It didn’t stop."

"For three seconds it did. The bond went dark. I couldn’t feel you at all." Her voice cracked on the last word, and she pressed her face into my neck to hide it, the way she always hid the things that got past her volume. "You died, Lukas. For three seconds you were dead and I was on the ground and I couldn’t do anything, and I’m the one with the Legendary Aspect, I’m the one who’s supposed to be the strongest person in every room, and I couldn’t do anything."

"You blew a hole in a wall to get to me."

"Too late. I got there too late."

"You got there." I turned my head so my mouth found her hair. "You always get there. That’s the whole thing about you. You don’t stop until you get there."

She didn’t answer, but the bond did, a slow warm pulse that meant she’d heard me and wasn’t going to argue for once. I held her while her breathing dropped into sleep, and I lay awake in the dark counting the ninety-six ceiling tiles I could see and thinking about a room on Monday and a director from Geneva and a lie built layer over layer, and underneath all of it a boy who wasn’t quite a boy anymore, wearing a body that wasn’t quite his, healing from wounds that shouldn’t have healed, with something new humming under his skin like a second heartbeat that answered when he pressed on it.

The System had nothing to say. The blue void was silent. For once, so was I.

Monday came the way bad Mondays always did, which was too fast and with too much light.

Diane drove. She’d swapped the silk robe for the armor, a charcoal suit with gold at her throat, hair pulled back into something that meant business. She looked like she was going to war, which she was, just the kind of war fought with word choice and eye contact instead of fists. Sloane sat in the back in her uniform, quieter than usual, the bond running low and steady with the effort she was putting into not being loud.

Halloran was still a ghost town. Scaffolding on the dome, workers in orange, the campus scrubbed of its usual chaos. We parked in the special-access garage and rode the elevator up in silence, and Diane spent the ride reciting the seating arrangement one final time like a prayer she didn’t quite believe in.

"Park sits at the head. You sit to her left, not across. Across is confrontation. Left is cooperation. Sloane, you’re at the far end with Theo and Percy. Felicity’s between you and Lukas because she was in the plaza. You don’t touch him. You don’t look at him too long. You saw a boy save your life and that’s all your face says."

"I’ve got it, Mom."

"Say it back."

"I saw a boy jump in front of fire. That’s the story. I don’t editorialize, I don’t defend, I walk out if she’s cruel about his parents."