The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 387

Chapter 387: 387 | A Woman on the PR Desk Who Owes Me Three Favors [GT BONUS]

Sloane didn’t hand me the phone. She turned the screen toward me and held it there, arm extended, like she wanted a witness before she committed to a reaction.

I read it twice.

Two hundred thousand views was a number I could file under good news and mostly believe it. Three agency scouts pulling my file was a number I filed somewhere considerably worse, in the drawer marked things that happen right before your entire life gets audited.

"Scouts pull files all the time," Sloane said. Her voice had gone flat and careful, which meant she’d already run the math and hated the answer. "First years get pulled. It’s not a big deal. My mother pulls twelve files a week."

"Your mother pulls twelve files a week and then she tells you what she found in them," I said. "That’s how you know when it matters."

She stared at the screen for another second. Then she pressed call and set the phone on the mattress between us, face up, speaker on, and folded her arms across her stomach in a way that had nothing to do with being comfortable.

Diane picked up on the second ring, which was faster than she picked up for clients.

"There you are." The drawl came through the speaker soft around the edges and hard underneath, the tone she used when she’d been waiting for a call and had decided not to mention that she’d been waiting. "Both of you? Good. Saves me the second conversation. Sugar, is he in your room right now?"

"He’s doing homework," Sloane said.

"Mm."

"He is."

"I believe you, honey." A pause with something underneath it. Ice moved in a glass. Six in the evening in Verano meant Diane had already closed one crisis and was pacing the kitchen with her sweet tea, phone in one hand, brand data in the other. "Lukas. Are you sitting down."

"I’m reclining aggressively."

"Sit up."

I sat up. Nine years of conditioning and my spine still answered that voice before my brain got a vote.

"Three pulls," Diane said. "The first one was Crestline out of San Diego, which I don’t care about, they pull two hundred files a season and sign eleven people, that’s a fishing net. The second was Halcyon, which I care about a little, because Halcyon has a scouting director who used to work for me and she does not waste her afternoons." Another pause. "The third pull came out of the Lang Agency."

The room got smaller.

Sloane’s head came up. "Margot Lang."

"Margot Lang," Diane confirmed, and the way she said the name made it clear this was a woman she’d sat across from at more than one table and lost nothing to. "Requested at eleven forty on Tuesday morning. Full registration packet, IHL diagnostic history, entrance examination scoring breakdown, and the manifestation timeline. That last one is the part I’d like you to focus on, baby."

I focused on it.

Everything I had was built on a story about a late manifestation at seventeen, cosigned by a doctor who owed Diane favors and buried under a progressive manifestation syndrome flag that Percy had spent one sleepless night reinforcing with thirty-six pages of insurance language. It held. It held the way a wall holds when you’ve patched it well enough that nobody looks twice. Margot Lang was not nobody, and she had pulled the exact page of my file that had the least actual paper behind it.

Sloane spoke before I did. "Petra pulled his file."

"Petra didn’t pull anything," Diane said. "Petra is eighteen years old and does not have credentialed access to IHL registration packets. Her mother does. Which means either Margot did it on her own initiative, or her daughter came home from her first three weeks at Halloran with a name she couldn’t stop saying at dinner."

I laughed. It came out wrong, more air than sound.

"Something funny, sugar?"

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