The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 392

Chapter 392: 392 | You Handed Me to Your Mother’s Professional Apparatus [GT BONUS]

Six inches between the front of her sweater and my chest. Her heels had put her closer to my height and she was still craning, and the little bit of tremor that ran through her shoulders was the last honest thing in the conversation.

"I’m perfectly comfortable," Petra said, and lifted her chin, and put every generation of her family’s money into holding the eye contact.

Which, credit where it’s owed, was the single most impressive thing I’d seen her do.

Here’s where I want to be clear about who I am, because I spend a lot of time being funny about it and the joke has gotten thin. I could have kept going. She was ten seconds from cracking and I could feel the exact shape of the ten seconds, the sentence that would do it, the pressure that would take her from standing her ground to needing somebody to tell her what to do next. That was available to me. It was sitting right there on the table with a bow on it, and there was a version of this night where I took it, and she’d have thanked me for it by Friday and hated herself by Sunday.

The system would have paid me for that. The system would have paid me extremely well for that.

So I stepped back.

Two feet, unhurried, hands loose. The air between us came back and she took a breath that she was not prepared for anyone to hear.

"Here’s what happens now," I said. "Odette Reyes reached out to me twenty minutes ago. Candidate assessment, Lang Agency. Fifteen minutes, informal, my convenience."

"Odette." Petra blinked, and for a second the poise was just gone, and what was underneath was a girl who did not know her mother’s staff had gotten involved. "Odette doesn’t do first-years. Odette does contract renewals for people in the top hundred."

"Then somebody upstairs decided I was interesting." I let her sit in that, and watched her arrive at the same place I had, which took her about four seconds and cost her most of the color she’d gotten back. "You didn’t hand me to your parents, Petra. You handed me to your mother’s professional apparatus, and it’s already moving, and neither of us gets to call it back."

"I’ll speak to her."

"You’ll make it worse."

"I will speak to my mother," she said, and her voice found its spine again, and honestly the recovery speed was almost admirable. "Whatever you imagine about my family, I am not a decorative object in it. If I tell Margot Lang that an inquiry was filed in error, she will accept that, because she trusts my judgment considerably more than she trusts a nineteen-year-old analyst’s curiosity."

"And what do you tell her the error was."

"That I overreacted to a personal matter."

"Which personal matter."

The flush came back so fast it looked painful.

"That is none of your"

"You’re going to have to say it out loud to her." I put my hands in my pockets, because it made me less of a wall, and because I needed her thinking instead of reacting. "You’re going to have to explain to Margot Lang that you asked your brother to complain to your father about a boy in your cohort because you walked around a corner and saw that boy kissing someone else, and you’d rather she didn’t examine why that bothered you. That’s the sentence. You want to make that call, make it. I’ll even hold your phone."

Petra stared at me.

The sprinklers cut out somewhere near the tree line and the quiet that replaced them was enormous.

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