Supervillainess (Part One) Read Online Free

to close them. A trail of blood
led from the window to one of the boxes, which she had apparently
pried open to find clothing before staggering towards the bathroom
for band-aids and the knife he had used to cut away her clothing.
She had returned and collapsed in the middle of the guest
bedroom.
    That she was able to get out of bed
surprised him, and he tried to piece together what she had been
trying to do. Blinds, mask, butcher knife, band-aids.
    “I have no idea what this is,” Kimber said.
He didn’t have the brainpower to figure it out and crossed to her.
Plucking the contents of her hands free, he placed the items on one
of the boxes and picked her up.
    Setting her back on the futon mattress, he
tugged her mask off. He donned latex gloves and checked her wounds
once quickly and then a second time.
    And a third.
    Then a fourth.
    This isn’t
possible. Sitting on another box, he stared
at her, registering her features for the first time while he was
deep in thought.
    She was in her early twenties with straight,
dark hair, a pretty face and a toned body. Around five and a half
feet tall, she was a full foot shorter than him and likely a
hundred pounds slimmer. He inherited his linebacker stature from
his father, who had been a pro football player in his time before
the accident that left him a quadriplegic.
    Keladry was asleep. Some color had returned
to her pale features today – but it was the absence of color Kimber
noticed more. The bruises on her ribs were gone, as were most of
the other contusions on her body. The right forearm, whose damage
Kimber feared even a plastic surgeon couldn’t correct, had healed
to the point the torn muscle tissue had regrown and her skin was
starting to repair itself. Her bullet wounds remained open, as did
the deepest of the stab wounds.
    He expected those to remain as they were for
a few days, but the rest of her body?
    How was this woman alive at all?
    “I’m losing it.” While true, he hadn’t slept
much in the past week, he was usually much better at assessing a
person’s condition. Was he so tired he saw more damage than was
actually there? Was his head that messed up from lack of sleep?
    What if his faulty judgment got him into
trouble again, gave his boss reason to look more thoroughly into
why he was fired in Chicago? What if he endangered the lives of the
children he triaged and treated today with incorrect prognoses?
    With a shake of his head, Kimber stood and
went to the bathroom to begin the arduous task of cleaning it. He
could not doubt himself, not when his ability as a physician was
all he had anymore. He feared what would happen if he lost this
job, whether he’d mentally shatter again.
    An hour later, he sat with a glass of wine
next to a microwaved meal at the card table where he ate when he
wasn’t running out the door.
    Leaving the news on, in case they mentioned
his patient again, he paced back to the doorway of the guest
bedroom and rubbed the back of his head. Keladry Savage was
unconscious, completely vulnerable to any decision he made. In a
hospital, this type of dependency was routine. The most gratifying
part of his job was witnessing someone in a similar state recover
and leave, healthy and alive. The people he worked with felt the
same – they wanted to help others, or they wouldn’t be in such a
grueling field of employment.
    Could helping someone who needed it ever
really be bad, even if the hospital’s largest donor didn’t want
them to do it? Would his coworkers draw the line here, at the feet
of Keladry Savage, as his supervisor had?
    “This is the only hospital that would hire
me. Don’t ruin that,” he whispered to the sleeping woman before
leaving the doorway.
    Whether he was too tired to see her wounds
well last night, or she was a healing miracle, he had to do his
best to keep her hydrated and healing. He warmed up the contents of
a can of soup and returned to the guest room. Propping her up,
Kimber settled on a box beside the