The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 468

Chapter 468: 468 | Compound Interest

The sound escaped her before she could stop it, a compressed noise from somewhere between her teeth and the back of her throat, and her eyes went wide and her flush erupted into a full crimson bloom that swallowed her throat and her ears and the line of her jaw, and she slapped her planner shut with a crack that sounded like a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence she would never finish.

"Did Petra Lang just make a sound?" Felicity whispered.

"She made a sound," Camille confirmed, and her grin had sharpened into something approaching delight.

"I did not make a sound."

"Babe, that was a sound."

"That was a dental consonant."

"That was a moan."

"It was NOT a moan, Hardy, it was an involuntary glottal response to insufficient oxygen intake caused by elevated ambient temperature in this room which is clearly not maintained to acceptable HVAC standards and I will be filing a facilities report on Monday."

Vivienne drew a small heart in the margin of her tablet and moved the needle to eighty-seven percent toward dangerous. The target was at eighty-five. The margin was two percent. Nobody drank. Petra looked like she wanted to evaporate through the floor on a molecular level.

The game continued for another forty minutes. My turn produced the spectrum OVERRATED to UNDERRATED and the clue "Halloran cafeteria ramen," which generated a twelve-minute debate that somehow became a referendum on sodium-to-broth ratios that Petra won through sheer argumentative stamina. Felicity’s next clue on the spectrum from COLD to HOT was "this room right now," and Camille suggested approximately ninety-eight percent toward hot while Petra insisted on seventy-four percent while her ears remained the color of a fire truck.

Vivienne contributed clues with surgical precision designed to extract maximum emotional response from the room. She chose the BORING to FASCINATING spectrum and delivered "watching Belmont try not to stare at four women simultaneously," which I protested on the grounds of personal attack and which landed at approximately ninety-two percent toward fascinating by unanimous vote.

Camille’s competitiveness intensified with each round. She argued positions with the same ferocity she brought to combat training, leaning forward to make her points and occasionally grabbing my forearm when she wanted emphasis, her grip firm and warm and accompanied by the faintest glow of orange at her palm that she probably didn’t notice but that I noticed because my body cataloged every place Camille Ortega’s skin touched mine with the precision of Percy’s notebook and approximately seventeen percent of the academic detachment.

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