The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 426

Chapter 426: 426 | Oh, Lang

Petra Lang did not require a mirror to know she looked ruined.

The button was in her blazer pocket. Her knees had not fully recovered their load-bearing function. The skin on the insides of her thighs still tingled from where his stubble had grazed during the kiss, and the bruise forming below her collar would need concealer from the emergency kit she maintained in the third compartment of her bag for situations that, until twenty-two days ago, had never actually occurred.

She walked the fourth-floor corridor at her standard pace. Her heels struck the linoleum in the same rhythm she had maintained since age twelve when her mother enrolled her in deportment courses at the insistence of a woman whose opinions about posture carried federal implications. Nothing in her gait communicated that approximately nine minutes earlier she had been sitting on a conference table with her skirt around her waist and Lukas Belmont’s hand between her legs while she made sounds in a language she did not consciously speak.

French. She had spoken French.

Petra took the stairs rather than the elevator because the elevator stopped on every floor and contained reflective panels and sometimes other human beings, all three of which she refused to tolerate in her current condition. The stairwell offered privacy, poor lighting, and an echo chamber that swallowed the single breath she allowed herself before resuming the descent.

The button sat heavy against her hip through the blazer lining. She had taken it because taking things from people who made her feel uncontrolled represented the only strategy she had ever developed for regaining authority after losing it. Her father collected fountain pens from the desks of people who disagreed with him in board meetings. Her mother collected entire agencies. Petra collected a shirt button from a boy whose registered Aspect could not possibly account for what his hands had just done to her nervous system, and she put it in her pocket, and she called it leverage, and saying the word leverage while her voice still carried the raw edge of an orgasm she had not authorized was the single most humiliating moment of her life including the Building C incident and everything that followed.

She reached the third floor. The female changing room sat at the corridor’s end past the water fountains and a bulletin board nobody read. Through the door came voices, steam, the heavy chemical sweetness of institutional soap mixed with fourteen different personal care products. Petra checked her watch. Two thirty-one. Her uniform had survived the encounter intact except for the missing button and a wrinkle pattern across the back of the skirt that she could attribute to sitting in a hard chair for an extended meeting, which was technically what had occurred.

She pushed through the door.

The 1-B women’s locker room ran long and narrow with grey tile, white lockers in double rows, and overhead lighting designed by someone who hated the concept of flattering angles. Wooden benches bisected each aisle. The shower block sat through an archway at the far end, visible through hanging steam that caught the light and turned everything soft.

Nine of them. All present.

Camille Ortega occupied the bench nearest the door with one leg crossed over the other and her two-tone hair still damp, wrapping athletic tape around her right palm with the focus of someone loading ammunition. Her blazer hung open over a sports bra that she wore because the regulation shirt restricted her rivet deployment and she had told Steele as much on the second day and Steele had said nothing, which Camille interpreted as permission. Her brown eyes found Petra the instant the door moved.

"Meeting ran long."

Camille’s voice carried the weight of a thrown object. Observation wrapped in accusation wrapped in the specific tone she had been deploying since the hallway incident, since she walked into Belmont’s room wearing a crop top at midnight and found Petra already inside wearing silk, since they both realized the other one had the same idea and neither could claim moral superiority.

Petra set her bag on the bench at the far end of the row without responding.

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