The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 408

Chapter 408: 408 | Inadequate Barriers [CASTLE BONUS]

"The lamp cord was a genuine concern that I have now confirmed was addressed." She crossed to me in three barefoot steps. "Everything else is a bonus."

She stood close enough that I could see the window light catching the silk of her camisole. Her blue eyes shifted. The CEO left. Someone else took her place. The version that existed in locked rooms and late hours, in the specific silence that settled between two people who had been building something for months without naming it.

"Three weeks," she said. Her voice dropped from professional to something lower, warmer. The Charleston drawl stretched vowels into long pulls. "Three weeks managing Victor Sterling’s approval rating. Reading your interview transcripts. Lying awake in that empty house wondering if my boy was eating enough protein. Sleeping enough. Staying out of trouble that requires my intervention."

Her hands found my chest. Palms flat. Fingers spread. She pressed against my shirt the way she’d pressed against bare skin in her bedroom, her home office, the kitchen at two a.m. when Sloane was asleep and the world was just us and the refrigerator’s hum.

"You’ve gotten stronger." Her palms moved up, over my collar, across my jaw. Her thumbs traced my cheekbones. "The shoulders. The jaw. Something’s different."

"Conditioning with Steele."

"Conditioning with Steele does not produce this." She held my face and studied me with the full weight of Read the Room, the Aspect that let her see gaps between projection and reality. "Conditioning with Steele does not make a boy look like he’s crossed a line he can’t uncross. What have you been doing, Lukas?"

Growing. Changing. Becoming something Cole Dravid’s Suppress couldn’t shut down. Absorbing abilities through a gacha interface nobody in this world could detect. Sleeping with your daughter in ways that permanently rewrote her power ceiling. Telling a girl with horns and a sheep tail that her combat potential terrified me. Kissing a classmate to avoid getting shot and triggering a cascade involving four separate women.

"I’ve been becoming someone worth seeing," I said.

Diane’s expression broke.

The CEO dissolved. The composure that had weathered twenty years of managing Heroes and impossible deadlines and the specific strain of raising someone else’s child cracked, and what came through wasn’t the professional or the strategist or the woman who could read any room.

Just Diane.

Her mouth found mine.

This kiss started soft.

Her lips pressed against mine with a tenderness that looked like it cost her. I felt the confession in the contact: she’d missed me in a way Read the Room could detect but not categorize. Three weeks of empty house and managed clients and professional composure concentrated into this single moment. The softness was her trying to communicate something her framework had no protocol for.

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