The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 456: 456 | Your Turn, Ortega

Camille stepped into the room and immediately regretted every decision that had led her here.

She had come with a plan. A stupid plan, sure, but a plan. She had spent forty minutes in her room rehearsing what she would say, how she would say it, the exact angle of casual she needed to hit so that showing up at Lukas Belmont’s door on a Saturday evening looked like something other than what it was. She had settled on tactical debrief. She was going to talk about the Crucible, about positioning, about the way the two of them read a field, and if the conversation drifted somewhere else, well, that would be an accident. A completely unplanned accident that she had planned in detail.

And now Felicity Hardy was standing in the middle of it wearing shorts that qualified as underwear and holding a bottle that was definitely not soda, and the whole room smelled like sage and vanilla and the specific frustration of a plan collapsing before she got a single sentence out.

"Puta madre," she muttered under her breath.

"What was that?" Felicity asked, her smile not moving.

"Nothing." Camille crossed her arms. Uncrossed them. Crossed them again. "What are you playing?"

Felicity gestured at the bed like she was presenting a prize on a game show. "Uno, Cards Against Humanity, this thing called Wavelength that’s supposed to be really good for figuring out how people think, and I brought drinks. You should stay. Game night’s better with more people."

Camille’s eyes moved to Lukas, who sat in the reading chair looking like a man watching two separate storms merge over open water and calculating whether he had time to reach shore. His amber eyes met hers and something in her chest did the thing it kept doing, the thing she hated, the thing that started three days ago in a bathroom doorframe when he pinned her wrists and told her later that she tasted like cardamom.

He had told her no. In his room, two nights ago, with her standing in his doorway wearing the closest thing she owned to lingerie, he had told her to leave because he wanted her to walk through his door with her eyes open and her pride intact and nothing forcing the moment. She had spent two days processing that. Two days replaying it. Two days deciding whether it made her want to kill him or something significantly worse.

And now here was Felicity, who had clearly not been told no, who had clearly been invited, who was setting up card games and sparkling beverages in his room like she had done it a hundred times before.

"Mierda," Camille said, quieter this time, more to herself than the room.

"You keep doing that," Lukas said.

"Doing what?"

"Cursing in Spanish. Under your breath. You do it when you’re recalibrating."

She hated that he had noticed. She hated more that he was right. "I’m not recalibrating anything. I came to talk about the Crucible."

Felicity’s smile shifted by a single degree, and Camille caught it, caught the exact moment where the sweet best friend expression cracked just enough to show the thing underneath, the sharp thing, the thing that had gotten Felicity Hardy through eighteen years of being underestimated by everyone who saw the blonde hair and the freckles and stopped looking.

"The Crucible’s not for two weeks," Felicity said, warm as sunlight. "You have so much time to strategize. Sit down. Play a game. You look like you need to relax, Ortega."

It was a dare. It was framed as kindness, delivered with genuine warmth, and it was absolutely a dare, and both women knew it, and Lukas knew it, and the only difference between them was that Camille never backed down from a dare in her life and Felicity had counted on exactly that.

Camille sat down on the bed.

"Fine. One game. What’s this Wavelength thing?"

Felicity clapped her hands together and dropped onto the mattress with the boneless comfort of someone who had already claimed this space as hers. She landed close to Lukas, closer than the bed required, her bare thigh ending up against his knee where he had shifted from the chair to the edge of the mattress. She did not move it. He did not move away from it. And Camille watched them settle into that proximity with the easy familiarity of two people who had done this before, who had crossed the threshold where touch stopped being a decision and started being a default, and something in her stomach twisted into a knot she did not have a name for.

"Wavelength is amazing," Felicity said, pulling the box open and setting up a plastic wheel with a hidden dial. "So there’s a spectrum, right, like hot to cold or safe to dangerous, and one person sees a secret target on the dial and gives a clue, and the other people have to guess where on the spectrum the target is. It’s all about how well you understand each other’s brains."

"That sounds fake," Camille said.

"It’s not fake, it’s psychological." Felicity spun the dial and covered the reveal window with the plastic shield. "Okay, I’ll go first. Lukas, you guess. The spectrum is boring to exciting." She peered at the hidden target and her eyes lit up. "My clue is: a Tuesday afternoon lecture from Professor Mercy."

"That’s not a clue, that’s a personal attack on Mercy," Lukas said.

"Guess."

He leaned in to look at the dial, and the movement brought his shoulder against Felicity’s, and she leaned into it instead of away, and Camille watched his hand move to the guessing dial while Felicity’s fingers rested light on his forearm like they belonged there. Like this was normal. Like the two of them curled together on his bed over a board game was just a thing that happened on ordinary Saturdays.

"Slightly toward boring," Lukas said, turning the dial. "Mercy’s competent but she delivers everything in the same register. You’d have said ’a Dravid pop quiz’ if you wanted full boring."

Felicity lifted the shield. The guessing marker sat one notch off dead center of the hidden target.

"See!" She grabbed his arm with both hands. "This is why you’re my favorite. You get it. You get how I think." She turned to Camille with the brightest, most genuine smile in her arsenal.

"Your turn, Ortega. Beat that."

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