The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 457

Chapter 457: 457 | Time to Even the Odds

Camille beat that.

She beat it by four points, reading the target and giving a clue so exact that Felicity’s guess landed almost dead on, and the small victory sent a hit of something clean and sharp through her chest that she immediately recognized as the same thing she felt when she put three rivets through the same hole from thirty feet. Winning. Being good at a thing. Being the best in the room at a thing.

"Okay," Camille said, and she heard her own voice shift into the register she used when she stopped playing for fun and started playing to win. "Again."

Lukas caught the shift. She saw it in the way his posture changed, the way something behind his amber eyes woke up, and she realized with a jolt of recognition that they were the same, that he had the same thing in him she had, the same refusal to lose that turned every casual game into a war. His clue on the next round was so surgical it made Felicity groan, and Camille’s guess landed one point off, and she saw him fight down a grin and she wanted to throw the plastic wheel at his stupid handsome face.

"You two are impossible," Felicity said, delighted, sprawling backward across the foot of the bed with her legs kicked up so that the pink shorts rode even higher and her stomach caught the light. "You’re both so competitive it’s actually kind of terrifying. This is supposed to be a chill game."

"There’s no such thing as a chill game," Camille and Lukas said at the same time.

They looked at each other. Felicity looked between them. And then Felicity laughed, a real one, throwing her head back so her blonde hair fanned across the sheets, and she reached out and grabbed Lukas’s shirt and tugged him half a foot toward her without any apparent awareness that she was doing it or any concern about what it looked like.

"See, this is why game night was the right call," Felicity said. "You needed this. Both of you. You’re wound so tight you’re going to snap in half."

She said it to Camille too. Included her in it. Made it sound like the three of them were friends, like this was a group thing, like Camille had not walked in on something and was now being folded into it whether she liked it or not. And Camille recognized the maneuver for what it was. She had a passive read on the weak points of any situation, and the weak point of this one was that Felicity Hardy was doing something extremely intelligent by pretending she was doing nothing at all.

Felicity was letting Camille stay because Felicity had already won the position that mattered. She had the proximity. She had the ease. She had the physical comfort of a woman who could put her hand on Lukas Belmont’s chest and trace circles on his forearm and lean her thigh against his without a single hesitation, and she was letting Camille sit at the edge of that and watch, because watching it was worse than being told to leave.

Camille was outmatched. She could read a fight and she could read a room and she could read the way Felicity’s whole body arranged itself around Lukas like she had done it every night for a year, and she knew, with the cold clarity of her Precision Read finding the fracture line in a load-bearing wall, that she was losing a game she had not known she was playing until she was already three moves behind.

Fine.

Fine.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify