Chapter 620 | Sixty-Two

Chapter 620: 620 | Sixty-Two

I got out of his classroom.

Sloane was waiting in the hall with her arms folded and her pink ponytail swinging when she turned to face me. She searched my face for three seconds and then grabbed my wrist.

"What did he want?"

"He told me to go to bed. He threatened me with raccoons."

"Good." She tugged me toward the stairwell, and her grip tightened hard enough to leave a mark. "You’re going to bed, and I’m walking you there. Hale has me on evening drills at six, so I have ninety minutes, and I’m spending every one of them making sure you’re horizontal."

"That sounds like a threat, babe."

"It’s a threat," she agreed without breaking stride. "Also a promise. I contain multitudes."

We made it down two flights before Camille appeared on the landing below us, coming up in the opposite direction. She had on her orange-and-charcoal training suit, and the compression fabric pulled tight enough across her chest that I watched Sloane’s jaw go tense in my peripheral vision. Her two-tone hair was braided back off her face, and there was a fresh scrape across her knuckles from whatever heavy bag had lost the argument. She stopped when she saw us, and her gaze tracked from the bruise on my collarbone to Sloane’s hand wrapped around my wrist to my face.

"You look like death," Camille said. Her voice carried the flat certainty of someone delivering a medical diagnosis. "Not even a sexy death. You look like the flu decided to try cosplay."

"I’ve been awake for thirty hours," I said. "I carried a dragon’s paperwork across half of Verano and held a goth girl’s head while she cried on me. The Eastside happened. All of it."

Something shifted in her brown eyes, the warmth underneath the sharpness coming forward for half a second before she filed it back. She lifted one glowing orange palm and pressed two fingertips into the center of my chest, right over my sternum. The heat came through my shirt in a concentrated point that lasted maybe two seconds before she pulled back.

"Tomorrow at five," she said. "Field Epsilon. You owe me conditioning, and you’re going to be too tired to dodge properly, which means I finally get to hit you."

"He’s going to be asleep at five," Sloane said. Her voice had gone flat and cold in the specific register that meant she was two sentences away from starting a fight.

"Then he can be asleep on the field while I hit him. I’m flexible."

Camille dropped her hand and walked past us, and her shoulder brushed mine hard enough to register as intentional. Sloane watched her go until the door at the top of the stairs swung shut, and then she dragged me the rest of the way down without saying another word. Her grip on my wrist had tightened to the point where I was going to have finger-shaped marks later, and I decided not to mention it.

The walk back to Prometheus House took nine minutes by the clock and about four minutes by my actual memory of it. The eucalyptus trees smelled sharp and medicinal in the late afternoon sun, and the WARDEN pillar at the front entrance told me it was pleased I had survived my excursion. Sloane told it to mind its own business, and I laughed hard enough that I nearly tripped over the doormat Percy had bought me last week that said GO AWAY in block letters.

Room 205 was exactly where I had left it the morning before, which felt like a week ago by any reasonable accounting. Marcus and Reina smiled at me from the desk in the frame Diane had given me on move-in day, and the terrible mattress waited under the window with the sheets still tangled from whenever I had last slept in it. I got my jacket halfway off before my arms stopped cooperating with the plan, and Sloane finished the job for me without asking, yanking it off my shoulders and tossing it across the reading chair Diane had positioned specifically for the light from that window.

"Shirt," she said.

"You just want to see the bruise."

"I made the bruise, so I’m allowed to inspect it."

She pulled the shirt over my head and tossed it somewhere in the direction the jacket had gone, and then her palms were flat on my chest. She pushed before I could argue. I fell backward onto the mattress, and the terrible springs made their usual protest as she climbed on top of me with her knees settling on either side of my hips.

Her blazer went next, tossed toward the reading chair and missing by about two feet. Her shoes followed, kicked off somewhere behind her, and then she settled her full weight onto my stomach with her white shirt untucked and falling partway off one shoulder in a way that made it very clear she hadn’t bothered fixing it after the walk back. The ponytail was still half-collapsed from the training session, strands of pink hair falling loose around her face.

The interface flickered into my vision like it had been waiting for exactly this.

〘Heroine Proximity: SLOANE FITZGERALD.〙

〘Host Energy Reserve: Insufficient for the activity this position historically indicates.〙

I wanted to argue with it. I didn’t have the stamina left to win. Sloane leaned down and kissed me, slower this time, her mouth warm and soft and tasting faintly of the sports drink she’d downed on the walk back. Her hair fell around both our faces like a curtain, blocking out the afternoon light still filtering through the window. When she pulled back, she didn’t move far. She just put her ear against my chest and lay there, her breathing evening out into something quieter.

I felt her fingers tap lightly against my ribs, once, twice. Keeping time.

"Sixty-two," she murmured after maybe thirty seconds. Her voice was muffled against my sternum. "That’s your resting rate."

"I’m really going to sleep." My hand found the back of her head and stayed there, fingers in her loose ponytail. "Wake me up when it’s Friday."

"Wake yourself up, idiot. I have drills."