The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 278

Chapter 278: 278 | A Seventeen-Step Failure

The sheets twisted around Petra’s legs like restraints she couldn’t escape.

She turned onto her side. Then onto her back. Then onto her stomach with her face pressed into the expensive Egyptian cotton pillowcase that her mother had insisted on shipping to the dorm because Lang women did not sleep on institutional fabric. The pillowcase smelled faintly of the lavender mist she sprayed every night as part of a seventeen-step skincare routine that had never once failed to put her to sleep within twenty minutes of completion.

Tonight the lavender did nothing.

Her brain refused to cooperate. Every time she closed her eyes, the same images played on repeat like a film reel she couldn’t shut off. Amber light reflecting off crystalline barriers. The sound of her wall shattering inward. The impossible speed of his constructs wrapping around her arms before she could generate a defensive response.

And then.

The weight of him against her when they fell.

Petra’s eyes snapped open. She stared at the ceiling of her single-occupancy room, the same institutional white as every other ceiling on campus, distinguished only by the designer light fixture she had installed herself during move-in because the fluorescent panels gave her migraines. The soft glow from the fixture illuminated the carefully arranged space around her. Matching furniture in cream and emerald. Framed photographs of achievement ceremonies. A leather planner on her desk already filled with the next three months of scheduling.

Everything in its proper place. Everything under control.

Except the memory of Lukas Belmont’s chest pressed against hers while his constructs held her pinned to the floor of room 2C.

She turned again, the silk of her nightgown sliding against sheets that suddenly felt too warm. The fabric caught on her hip and rode up her thigh, and she kicked at it with more force than necessary, tangling herself further in the process.

This was absurd.

Petra Lang did not lose sleep over boys. Petra Lang did not replay combat encounters in her head like scenes from the romance novels hidden in the false bottom of her luggage. Petra Lang certainly did not think about the way a delivery boy’s amber eyes had darkened when her struggling pulled them closer together instead of further apart.

Except she was doing all of those things. Right now. At eleven thirty-two at night when she should have been recovering from the first day of classes that had somehow transformed into the most humiliating afternoon of her entire life.

The footage existed. She knew this because Camille had mentioned it with the specific cruelty of someone who understood exactly how much institutional embarrassment Petra was facing. High-definition cameras. Multiple angles. Twenty classmates watching in real time as her costume shifted and her composure cracked and Lukas Belmont’s constructs wrapped around her body in ways that the academy’s documentation department would probably have to blur before archiving.

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