The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 407

Chapter 407: 407 | Implied Enforcement Mechanisms [CASTLE BONUS]

Her boy.

There it was. The word landed differently now than it had when I was eight years old standing rigid beside two caskets, wearing a suit I didn’t understand and a grief that belonged to someone else. Diane Fitzgerald’s boy. The designation sat somewhere between proprietary and tender and carried the weight of a woman who had decided nine years ago that I belonged to her household and had never revised that conclusion regardless of what the household’s definition expanded to include.

"You look incredible," I said. True. Diane responded to honesty the way other people responded to compliments.

"I know, sugar." She tucked the collar adjustment into a full smoothing motion that ran both hands down the front of my shirt. Professional. Deliberate. Thorough in a way that let her palms map the territory beneath the fabric without anyone watching from the quad’s scattered benches identifying the touch as anything beyond a mother fixing her son’s outfit. "Now. I need thirty minutes with you before I meet this Odette woman and your little co-representative. The cafeteria is not where I intend to spend them. Where is your room?"

The cafeteria was four hundred feet to the west. My room was in Prometheus House, East Tower, second floor, room 205, with a locked door and a sage reading chair and a bed Diane had personally selected the mattress for during a shopping trip that felt like it had happened in a previous geological era.

"Second floor. East Tower."

"Then that’s where we’re going." She linked her arm through mine with the casual possession of a woman who had been claiming me in public spaces since I was eight years old and did not require anyone’s permission to continue doing so.

"I need to see your dorm anyway. I have opinions about the lamp cord situation that I expressed three weeks ago and suspect have not been implemented."

I walked Diane Fitzgerald across Halloran Academy’s quad toward Prometheus House. Her heels struck stone with the measured rhythm of someone who had never hurried anywhere in her life and saw no reason to start now.

Her arm through mine radiated warmth through my charcoal blazer, the contact carrying the kind of casual possession that didn’t require verbal confirmation because it had existed for nine years already and knew it didn’t need anyone’s approval to continue.

Students noticed.

Three second-years stopped mid-conversation to watch her pass. One of them clearly recognized her from somewhere in the agency circuit and nudged his companion hard enough that the companion’s smoothie hit the ground in a spreading pool of what looked like mango and regret.

Diane’s expression didn’t shift. She never acknowledged attention she hadn’t engineered herself. The attention existed. She had expected it the way someone expects gravity. Engaging with it would be redundant at best and mildly insulting at worst, like explaining to the sun that it was bright.

I closed the door. Locked it. The click of the deadbolt changed the acoustics of the room and the nature of our conversation.

Diane turned from the desk. In the enclosed space of a student apartment, with the door locked and the hallway empty and three weeks of absence pressing against every surface, Diane Fitzgerald’s presence filled the room completely, without effort, as a fact of her existence rather than a performance of it.

The blazer came off first. She draped it over the reading chair with the same care she gave to everything that cost more than most people’s monthly rent. Beneath it, a cream silk camisole clung to her body in ways I had not been prepared for despite spending the last nine weeks learning that I would never be prepared for the visual output of Diane Fitzgerald when she chose to be seen.

"You said you needed thirty minutes," I said.

"I said I needed thirty minutes with you." She stepped out of her heels and lost three inches of height. It made her look smaller without making her look less dangerous. "The distinction matters."

"And the lamp cord was just a pretense to get to my room."