The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 580

Chapter 580: 580 | A Public Relations Liability

Tuesday started with Sloane’s knee in my ribs at five-forty in the morning, which was either affection or attempted murder, and with her I’ve honestly stopped trying to distinguish.

"Up," she said into my shoulder blade.

"It’s dark out."

"It’s always dark when we train. That’s the point." She shoved me with her foot. "Steele’s arm is wrecked and Dravid’s chest is held together with surgical staples and nobody’s running conditioning until Thursday. You think that means we stop?"

"I think it means I get one morning where my spine doesn’t file a complaint."

"Your spine grew back in four days." She sat up, hair a catastrophe, choker still on because she slept in the thing like it was load-bearing. "Juno told my mom. Four days, Lukas. Normal people get grafts."

So we trained. Down in the gym Diane had renovated with money from a client who’d punched a reporter, on mats that still had the impact crater from a Wednesday three months ago where I’d sent a heavy bag through drywall and then spent seventeen hundred dollars learning how to patch it.

Sloane ran me through footwork drills with her burned forearm wrapped in fresh mesh, refusing to favor it, refusing to let me favor it either, which meant she hit me in the chest with an open palm every time my guard drifted and her open palm carried mid-A rank output even at ten percent.

"Your hands drop when you’re thinking," she said. "You’ve done it since day one."

"I’m processing."

"You’re showing off. There’s a difference and you know exactly which one you’re doing."

By seven we were both soaked and my ribs had reintroduced themselves. Diane came down at eight in a silk camisole, hair still pinned, coffee in one hand and her phone in the other, and stood in the doorway watching her daughter drive her elbow into my sternum.

"Breakfast in twenty," she said. "Sloane, stop hitting him in the chest cavity. He was in a medical bed on Sunday."

"He’s fine."

"He’s fine because his body is doing something the IHL doesn’t have a category for. That’s not the same as fine."

Sloane hit me in the chest cavity.

Wednesday was quieter. Diane worked from the kitchen island with three monitors set up on her dining table like a war room, and I learned more about crisis communications by osmosis in six hours than I had in three weeks of Crane’s lectures.

She fielded Margot Lang twice. She gutted a puff piece a Sacramento outlet wanted to run about GoldCloak and replaced it with something so boring the writer thanked her for the access. She told Victor Sterling, out loud, in her kitchen, at eleven in the morning, that if he posted one more unvetted photograph she would personally confiscate his phone and mail it to his mother.

"You enjoy this," I said.

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