The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 393

Chapter 393: 393 | This is What Representatives Do. [GT BONUS]

"Petra."

She stopped again. The path lights along the west walk were the kind that only pretended to illuminate, and she stood at the edge of one of the yellow pools with her shoulders set like she was daring me to add anything to a conversation she had already decided was finished.

"I’m not done."

"You are remarkably comfortable making that determination for both of us."

"Come back here."

Nine feet of concrete, and she covered it in five steps, and I noticed that she did not make me repeat myself, which told me more about the last twenty minutes than anything she’d actually said out loud.

"Friday is the meeting," I said. "Friday is not the problem. The problem is the next eight months, because you and I are stuck in the same faculty conference room once a month until spring, and I need to know that when something happens between us that you don’t like, your first move isn’t a phone call to Wolfgang."

Her chin came up. "I have already explained"

"You explained why it happened. I’m telling you it doesn’t happen again." I kept my voice at the same level it had been the whole time, conversational, the register I use to order coffee, which is the exact register that makes people lean in without noticing they’re doing it. "Not with your brother. Not with your father’s legal department. Not with a friend of the family who happens to know somebody at the regional office. If you have a problem with me, you bring it to me. In a room. With your mouth. Like a person."

"That is an extraordinary demand from someone with no leverage."

"It’s not a demand. It’s a condition."

"Of what?"

"Of us functioning." I let that sit for a second, because she needed the silence more than she needed another sentence from me. "You want to run this cohort. Genuinely, not for the credential. You want the brief in your handwriting and the schedule under your control and you want Dravid to look at 1-B in three weeks and understand that somebody in the room was paying attention. I can hand you that. Steele already listens to me for reasons neither of us have to enjoy, and Radiant knows my name, and I’m the one who ends up in front of the cameras when somebody puts a camera in front of us. You want that pointed at your work instead of at me."

Her eyes narrowed. "You’re offering to be my mouthpiece."

"I’m offering to be your amplifier." I shrugged. "Or you can keep doing the thing where you sit in the top row with your planner shut and let everyone in that room believe you think you’re above them, and by finals you’ll have six votes and a reputation. Neither of them will be the one you wanted."

Something moved behind her face.

Not anger. Anger I would have known immediately. Anger from Petra Lang comes out cold and articulate and she’d been running it on me since move-in day. This was the other one. This was the thing that had cracked for a quarter second in Room 214 when Steele smiled at her answer about saving lives. She’d looked, for exactly as long as it took to be noticed, like a person who had never once in her life been told she got something right by someone who wasn’t being paid to say it.

She had that look again now. It lasted longer this time. Long enough that I could see her trying to figure out where I’d found it and what it cost me to point at it directly.

Then it was gone. Her posture reset. Her chin came up slightly, which meant she’d found the angle she needed to turn the read into something she could work with.

But she hadn’t corrected me.

Which meant I was right.

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