The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 429

Chapter 429: 429 | A Little Procedural Concern

Three minutes early, collar buttoned over a bruise that Petra Lang had put under it on purpose, one shirt button short of regulation and running on a lunch I’d eaten standing up.

The fourth floor conference room still smelled like fresh paint and Odette Reyes’s perfume, which meant the room had now hosted two separate events I was going to be lying about for the rest of my life.

Petra had reset the table. Chairs squared, water glasses at each place setting, her brief in four collated copies with the corners aligned.

She sat in the same seat she’d occupied at two, blazer buttoned, hair rearranged into geometry that had not survived the last hour and had been forced back into it anyway.

"Belmont." She did not look up from her page. "You’re late."

"It’s three twenty-seven."

"You said you would review the brief before the meeting. The meeting begins in three minutes. The brief is eleven pages."

I sat down two seats away and pulled a copy toward me.

Somewhere under the paper her pen tapped once against the table and stopped.

"You’re doing the thing," I said.

"I am not doing a thing."

"You’ve squared that page four times."

She squared it a fifth time, which I chose to accept as a rebuttal.

I had, in the last four hours, sat through a federal-adjacent interrogation conducted by a woman who knew my dead mother better than I did. I had watched my guardian trade favors like ammunition while I signed forms. I had been handed six pages of paper that were currently the only thing keeping my entire existence legally breathable. And then I had made Petra Lang say something in French she absolutely did not authorize, which was its own category of tactical error.

And all I wanted was seven o’clock.

Seven o’clock was the co-ed window in the Prometheus bathhouse. Three temperature-controlled pools cut from natural stone. A cedar sauna that seated twelve. Towel service, all of it institutionally justified as muscle recovery and team cohesion because twelve years ago Halloran ran an exchange program with Shinshu Academy and came back with opinions about communal bathing that had somehow survived committee review and budget allocation. Steele had put us through hill sprints at six in the morning. My quads were filing complaints in triplicate. Caden had been evangelizing about the forty-one degree pool since Tuesday like a man who’d found religion in a basement and wanted to share the good news with everyone in range.

So yes. My immediate life goal, after surviving the day and the Fitzgerald household and whatever the System was going to decide I owed it for the Osei mission, was to sit in very hot water and think about nothing for approximately forty-five minutes.

Which meant this meeting had to go smoothly.

Which meant this meeting had two women in it who had never once in their lives let anything go smoothly, and I was about to find out whether the third person in the door was going to improve that ratio or make it statistically worse.

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