The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 461

Chapter 461: 461 | The Devastating Simplicity of a Dare [CASTLE BONUS]

"Dare."

No hesitation. The word arrived before the question finished leaving my mouth, carried on the same competitive instinct that made Camille Ortega the first person to finish every conditioning session and the last person to leave any training field. She did not consider consequences because considering consequences was for people who planned to lose.

"Take a drink."

She stared at me. "That’s your dare."

"That’s my dare."

"That’s the most pathetic dare in the history of the game. I came here expecting you to be interesting."

"Drink first. Be disappointed after."

Camille grabbed her glass and took a long pull, her throat working as the liquid went down, and I watched the tension in her shoulders dissolve by maybe fifteen percent which was exactly the margin I needed to make the next twenty minutes survivable.

She set the glass down and the flush on her neck had deepened. "Felicity. Truth or dare."

"Dare," Felicity said, matching Camille’s energy with the bright certainty of someone who considered backing down from challenges a personal moral failure.

Camille’s brown eyes held Felicity’s for two full seconds. Something passed between them that I could not decode, some frequency of female communication that operated in registers my one hundred Intelligence could identify but never fully translate.

"Sit closer to him."

Felicity’s lips parted. The dare was so simple it was devastating, because it acknowledged out loud what all three of us had been performing around for the last ninety minutes, the physical distance between my body and theirs, the careful geometry of proximity that allowed plausible deniability while creating enough friction to keep everyone’s pulse elevated.

Felicity moved. She shifted from where she’d been sitting at the bed’s edge to directly beside me, close enough that her thigh pressed flush against mine with no gap between the fabric of her shorts and the denim of my jeans, close enough that I could feel her breathing through the point of contact, close enough that her vanilla shampoo filled my next three inhales with the scent I’d been trying to ignore since she walked through my door carrying party games and plausible deniability.

"Better," Camille said, and her voice had dropped into the register she used during sparring when she’d identified an opening and was deciding whether to commit.

The game accelerated. Truths landed with increasing precision as each question peeled back another layer of the pretense we’d been maintaining, Felicity admitting she’d thought about kissing me since the entrance exam, Camille confirming through clenched teeth that she’d replayed the bathroom doorframe incident more times than she’d ever admit to anyone who asked twice, me telling Felicity her laugh was one of my favorite sounds at Halloran which made her go completely quiet for four seconds and her blue eyes get wet before she blinked it away and told me to stop weaponizing sincerity.

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