The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 617: 617 | The Rider Lives in a Coffee Can

Caden laughed so hard he kicked my chair into the desk. Across the room, Camille glanced over her shoulder with her two-tone hair falling across one eye, and she held my gaze for exactly one beat before she turned back around.

“Forty-seven is a lot of doors,” she muttered at her tablet, and nobody but me heard it.

Felicity leaned in close enough for me to catch vanilla under her shampoo. She slid her phone across my desk with one fingernail and kept her face perfectly pleasant, which meant she was furious about something.

The screen showed an Instagram post from an account called gloomswarm.official. It was a selfie of Ophelia behind her black lace parasol in the laundromat, grey eyes ringed in heavy liner and her pink curls a mess from sleep. Over her shoulder, with the parasol angled to cover everything above my chin, sat my Halloran jacket with a very visible wet spot on the collar. The caption said mr stitches found a new chair. It had eleven thousand likes.

“Who is she?”

Felicity’s whisper had the warmth of a dentist’s drill.

“She’s my supervisor’s administrative assistant. Her bear hates me.”

“She fell asleep on you.”

“She fell asleep on everyone in the room, and I was the room.”

“You know what, I’m going to need the full version at lunch. Every detail, and I mean including the drool.”

The interface chimed.

〘Heroine Reaction Detected: FELICITY HARDY.〙

〘Emotional State: Curious. Competitive. Personally offended by the parasol.〙

〘Temptation Gauge: 41% (+1).〙

Hero Law with Mercy started at nine-thirty, and by nine-forty I had achieved a state of consciousness that most monks spend decades chasing. My eyes were open and pointed at the smart board, where Mercy had written LIABILITY in her sharp block capitals. My brain had packed a bag and left. Mercy’s voice moved through the Accord’s damage provisions in clean, unhurried lines, and every sentence landed perfectly, and none of them stuck anywhere inside my skull.

Percy slid a folded note onto my desk at 9:51.

Your blink rate has dropped 40% below baseline. Mercy has looked at you twice. She will look a third time in approximately ninety seconds.

I sat up straighter. Eighty-seven seconds later, Mercy’s dark eyes found me from the podium and stayed there, and I gave her the most engaged face I owned.

“Belmont, tell me who pays when a provisional student damages private property during a supervised response.”

“The supervising agency pays, Ms. Mercy, through their Villain Insurance rider. In the Eastside, that rider lives in a coffee can behind the desk.”

The room laughed. Mercy didn’t, but the corner of her mouth moved a quarter of an inch, which for her counted as rolling on the floor.

“Correct, and disturbingly specific. Stay awake for the rest of my lecture.”

I stayed awake out of spite.

Lunch came at eleven fifty-two. I made it about forty feet down the Athena Wing corridor before the bond snapped into range and hit me in the ribs. Sloane had been fifteen miles away all night, and now she was eleven meters away and closing, and her emotional state landed on me like a truck full of electrical fires. The pull came from the stairwell on my left, where the door stood propped open by a pink sneaker.

She grabbed my collar the second I stepped through and hauled me down the half flight to the landing, out of sight of the corridor window. Her back hit the wall and mine hit her, and her other hand was already under my jacket, spread flat against my stomach to count my heartbeat through skin. She had on her Halloran blazer over a white shirt with the top two buttons undone, and her black choker sat tight against her throat. Her pink ponytail was coming loose, and her blue eyes had the red rims of someone who had slept in two-hour pieces.

“Twenty-six hours,” she hissed. “You were gone for twenty-six hours, and my bond was dead quiet for all of them.”

“Fifteen miles is past the range, babe. I texted you.”

“You texted me that you worked a case. You’re provisional. You’re not allowed to work cases.”

“I sorted paperwork and knocked on some doors. Legally, it was a community service.”

She pressed her nose into the side of my neck and breathed in, and her whole body went rigid against mine. Her thigh was already between my knees, and I felt every ounce of her muscle lock up at once.

“Why do you smell like strawberries?”

“That would be the pawn shop thief. She fell off a skylight, and I caught her belt.”

Her hand left my stomach and dove into my jacket pocket before I could stop it. She came out with the yellow sticky note, the one that said THX GOLDEN BOY in green ink with a dark plum lipstick print on the corner. She stared at it and then at me, and amber sparks started popping around her knuckles.

“She kissed a sticky note for you,” Sloane said, and her voice went flat and dangerous. “Did she kiss you?”

“She kissed her business card, and then she kissed a sticky note, and she never came within kissing range of my face.”

The interface wanted to add something about the pressure in her thighs being 340 PSI, and I closed it so hard it probably felt it.

Sloane folded the note once and put it in her own blazer pocket, and she did it the way a cop bags evidence. Then she grabbed my jaw and kissed me hard enough that my head bumped the cinderblock. There was nothing gentle in it. She kissed me like a girl who had spent the night checking a household app that couldn’t find me, and her teeth caught my lower lip and pulled. The bond flooded open between us, and her relief came through first, then something darker under it. She was furious at the distance between us, and that fury had nowhere to go but into my mouth.

My hands found her waist under the blazer. Her shirt had come untucked, and the skin above her waistband was warm and a little damp from her morning run. She arched into my palms with a sharp little sound, and her hips rolled forward in a slow grind that pinned me against the wall I was supposed to be pinning her to.

“You smell like five-spice and strawberries,” she muttered against my lips, “and some goth girl’s baby powder, and I hate every single one of them.”

“You can smell baby powder?”

“I can smell anything on you, idiot.” She tugged my collar aside and set her mouth on my collarbone, right where the pink curl had been stuck at dawn. She sucked hard enough that I knew it would leave a mark, and she held on until I had to brace one hand on the wall behind her. When she pulled back, she looked at the bruise with deep personal satisfaction.

“There. Now you smell like me, and everyone in Hero Brand can see it.”