06 - Vengeful Read Online Free

few spots where angry red skin hinted at only first-degree burns. They were few and far between, however. “Hey,” I mumbled as I stood there at her side.
    She didn’t look at me. “You are all right, then.” She said it, didn’t ask, because after being my doctor for oh-so-many years, she just knew.
    “I am,” I said, regardless of the fact that we were both fully aware of my near-invincibility. I moved on from the comfortable to the question neither of us wanted to ask. “How’s he doing?”
    “Burns over ninety-nine percent of his body,” she said, as tonelessly as if she were delivering news about a patient she barely knew, not a man she’d been sleeping with for over three years.
    “But he’ll heal,” I said, taking a breath of relief.
    “Possibly,” she said, and here I caught the first hint of something wrong. “These were not third-degree burns … they stretched deep beneath the epidermis into the subcutaneous layer.” She swallowed visibly, and her hand clutched tighter at her throat, as though she were choking on the words she was trying to get out. “There are … complications. Inhalation—”
    “Is he going to live?” I asked, cutting right to the quick.
    She turned her head to look at me, and I saw a woman who didn’t honestly know the answer to the question. “I am not sure.”
    That one hit me right where it hurt. My stomach dropped like someone had just hit it and used a sledgehammer to do the job. I leaned against the bottom edge of his bed, felt the pressed wood crumple under my unexpected strength. I sucked in a deep breath like I had to fight to get it back, which I did. It felt a little like I’d been hit in the gut, hard, like I’d dropped out of the sky and landed belly button first on a flagpole. Which I had done, once, when I was still learning to fly. It hurts about as much as you’d expect.
    “The next twenty-four hours will be the most crucial,” she said, back to playing the role of the cool doctor and shutting off the fiery Italian lover like she was twisting a valve.
    “Okay,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
    We stood in silence for a while, maybe minutes, maybe hours, it was tough for me to tell. I got lost in a memory, the reminder of how Reed had approached me the first time I’d visited Zack’s grave, after—
    Well, after.
    “Do you know who did this?” Dr. Perugini asked, still fixed on Reed, standing in the middle of her damned domain, the medical world, and looking as helpless as I was.
    “No,” I said, “but I can guess. Eric Simmons. His little friend the Brain. They’re the ones with the grudge—”
    “What are you going to do about it?” she asked, and her hand moved like she wanted to touch him, but she held back.
    “I think you can guess.”
    Her fingers returned uselessly to the base of her throat. “He wouldn’t want that.”
    “He wouldn’t want me to catch who’s responsible?” I gave her one of those sidelong glances that they make internet memes out of, my best, Oh, you’re just an idiot look.
    “He wouldn’t want you to go after them furious,” she said.
    I listened to her words, read her movement. “You don’t mind, though, do you?” She tensed only slightly, and I asked a really stupid question that I was sure I already knew the answer to. “This is my fault, isn’t it?”
    She tilted her head to look at me as she answered, and she looked … thoughtful. “I don’t think so.”
    I blinked in utter surprise. “No?” I’d been ready for her to whirl on me, to start hurling insults and accusations right in my face, to let loose that full head of Dr. Perugini steam that she’d unleashed on more occasions than I could count. I wanted her to do it, to have my brother’s lover fuel my internal fury. I could feel it boiling inside, the guilt and the rage, looking for an outlet, already on the stove. I wanted someone else to stoke the flames, the give me that last push by making me