The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

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.

If she was outmatched, then it was time to even the odds.

They kept playing. Felicity switched them to Cards Against Humanity because she said Wavelength was too intense for three people who all thought they were geniuses, and the cards produced the kind of filth that would have made Steele confiscate the game and file a report, and Lukas won a round with a combination so unhinged that Felicity choked on her sparkling beverage and Camille laughed against her will, actually laughed, felt it come up from somewhere real before she could stop it.

And that was the worst part. That was the part that had her cursing under her breath in three different tenses. Because it was fun. Because he was funny, and quick, and he read her plays before she made them the same way she read his, and Felicity was funny too, sharp under the sweetness, and for stretches of minutes at a time Camille forgot she had come here for a reason and just played, just laughed, just existed in a warm room with two people who were good company.

Then Felicity would do something. Small. She would slide her hand up Lukas’s back to steal a card he was hiding. She would lean her whole weight against his side to see his hand. She would rest her chin on his shoulder to whisper a card suggestion, her mouth close enough to his ear that Camille could see the way it made him go still for half a second before he covered it. And every time, the knot in Camille’s stomach pulled tighter, and every time, Felicity looked over at her with those bright blue eyes and that perfect innocent smile that said nothing was happening here, we’re just friends, this is completely normal, and Camille wanted to scream.

Every woman at this school. Every single one. It was like the man secreted something into the air.

Sloane Fitzgerald, mid-A rank and prettier than she had any right to be, followed him around like she had installed a tracking device, which she probably had.

Felicity Hardy, who could have any guy on campus, was on his bed in booty shorts calling him bestie with her hand on his chest.

Petra Lang, who looked at everyone like they were furniture, had signed her family name onto his file and left a mark on his neck that half the building was still gossiping about.

Maribelle.

Everywhere she looked, another woman had decided that Lukas Belmont was the thing she wanted, and Camille was standing in line she had not chosen to join, and it made her want to put a rivet through something structural.

She excused herself to the bathroom.

She did not need the bathroom. She needed thirty seconds where she was not watching Felicity’s thigh against Lukas’s leg. She stood at the sink with the water running and looked at herself in the mirror, at the flush she could not blame on the temperature, at the way her eyes looked, and she made a decision she was going to regret and do anyway because that was the only kind of decision she made.

If she was outmatched, she needed reinforcements. She needed to change the shape of the board.

And the fastest way to do that was to stop pretending she was the only person with a stake in what was happening in that room.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!