The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 433

Chapter 433: 433 | My Jealousy Is a Legendary-Tier Aspect

She was right. She was catastrophically, structurally, load-bearingly right, and the part of me that wanted to argue was immediately overruled by the part of me that had watched Sloane Fitzgerald run diagnostics on my emotional architecture since the morning I woke up in this body and found her standing at the refrigerator in compression shorts with her pink hair up and her blue eyes already suspicious.

I sat back down. I put my hands on the table where she could see them, palms up, fingers open, the universal posture of a man who has lost and knows it.

"You’re right."

"Obviously I’m right."

"The bruise is from Lang."

The silence that followed was not empty. It was the kind of silence that happens when you pull the pin and the grenade doesn’t go off immediately and you have to stand there holding the thing while it decides whether to detonate now or in three seconds, and either way your hands smell like cordite.

"Lang," Sloane said.

"Lang."

"Petra Lang."

"There’s only one Lang."

"The girl who thinks her planner is a personality trait."

"That’s the one."

Her jaw moved twice. Left, right, left. The bond transmitted a sequence of emotions that arrived in layers: the sharp heat of jealousy, the colder burn of betrayal, the unexpected pressure of something that lived underneath both and did not have a name I was willing to assign to it, and then, at the very bottom, the flat bedrock certainty that she had known this was coming because she always knew.

"In this room."

"In this room."

"During the meeting with the agency woman."

"After the meeting."

"While I was forty minutes away reviewing Hale’s training footage and texting you about the Crucible and thinking about what I was going to wear to the bathhouse tonight."

"Yes."

She closed her eyes.

I watched her process it. I watched the bond carry her through the sequence: anger that crested and fell, hurt that swelled and held, possessiveness that dug its claws into the base of her spine and refused to let go, and then the thing I loved and feared about Sloane Fitzgerald in equal measure, the thing that made her different from every other person the System had flagged in my orbit. She decided.

Not in the way most people decide, gradually and with revision and with the option to change their minds. Sloane decided the way she fought: forward, committed, and with the full understanding that the decision carried consequences she would pay in full when they arrived.

She opened her eyes.

"You’re not getting the bathhouse tonight."

"I understand."

Sloane looked at me for a long time. Long enough that the afternoon light shifted by two degrees across the floor and the distant sound of someone running conditioning drills floated up through the window from Field Epsilon.

Then she flicked me on the forehead, hard, with the casual accuracy of nine years of practice.

"Ow."

"We’re okay." She walked toward the door, her hips moving in the specific rhythm that meant she was holding back from saying something and also knew I was watching and did not care about either of those facts. "We’re always okay. That’s the problem."

"That’s the feature."

"It’s both." She reached the door and put her hand on the handle and turned back, and in the angle of her jaw and the brightness of her eyes and the way her choker sat against the column of her throat I saw the girl who had watched a man part floodwater when she was seven years old and decided that was who she would become. "Lukas."

"Yeah."

"I love you."

"I love you too."

"And if I find out Lang marked you anywhere below the collar I will detonate her entire bloodline and blame it on a training malfunction."

"That’s fair."

"It’s not fair. It’s jealousy." She pulled the door open. "But my jealousy is a Legendary-tier explosive Aspect attached to it, so it’s functionally the same thing."