Supervillainess (Part One) (3 page)

He met her gaze, alerted by the hushed note
in her tone.

“Stay focused on being the amazing doctor
you are. Don’t go asking too many questions about General Savage or
his policies, okay? You never know who’s listening,” Tish warned.
“Sand General helps so many people. No one wants to see that
change.” She glanced towards the hallway visible through the glass
door of her office. “Keep up the good work, Kimber.”

“Thanks,” he replied awkwardly, uncertain
what else to say.

“No problem.” Her smile was back.

That took an unexpected
turn
. Kimber forced a smile. He rose and
left.

It was beyond him how one man – even if he
was a mobster – could hold an entire city hostage.

Debating silently whether he should ask
someone else, Kimber made it to the locker room seconds before he
was paged via the intercom system.

“Fifteen car pileup on the interstate,”
another of the attending physicians in the ER for this shift told
him as he pushed his bag into his locker. “Tons of fatalities. One
of the vehicles was a school bus. They’re bringing all the kids
here.”

Concern consumed Kimber’s confusion.
Accompanied by several other doctors and nurses just arriving for
their shifts, Kimber hurried to the emergency room.

His day quickly became a blur of faces and
bodies, the blue sea of scrubs, frantic parents and hours beneath
too bright fluorescent lighting. Immersed in saving lives, he soon
forgot about the woman he had rescued the night before and the
lingering question he had about what to do with her.

***

Hours later, he ended his double shift with
a headache of epic proportions and the urge to sleep for two days
or more.

The first thing he did after returning home
from the gym, close to midnight, was drop onto his bed and lie
there until his tired brain had a chance to catch up with him.
Wriggling out of the straps of his backpack, he spotted the cell
phone he had left on his pillow. He had seen two more calendar
alerts earlier this morning and didn’t remember what they were for.
Whatever he had missed today, he hoped it wasn’t important.

It was not until Kimber forced himself up,
plugged in his phone and went to the bathroom for a quick shower
that he recalled last night. The sight of blood jarred him into
awareness for the first time since his failed attempt to discuss
Keladry Savage with his supervisor.

He walked through the apartment to the guest
bedroom, dreading what he was certain to find. With his luck
lately, the woman would be dead, and he would be stuck explaining
to the police why he had a bloody bathroom and dead criminal in his
house.

Upon reaching the doorway of the guest
bedroom, he paused.

Keladry Savage was alive, or had been
earlier today. She was sprawled in the middle of the floor, passed
out, wearing one of his black t-shirts and a pair of his boxers.
And … a makeshift mask. She had ripped one of his t-shirts and tied
it over her head.

A box of band-aids was clutched in one of
her hands and a butcher knife in the other. The blinds of the
window were closed and splattered with blood, as if she touched one
of her wounds before reaching up 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 futon and spooned soup into her
mouth.

Just as he finished and sat back, bleary
eyed and exhausted, the woman stirred.

Keladry Savage’s eyelashes fluttered open.
She gazed at the ceiling for a moment before looking at him with
large, dark eyes.

“Hi. I’m Kimber. Well, Doctor Kimber –” he
started.

“I can’t hear you.”

He blinked. Concerned about her more serious
wounds, he hadn’t thought to double-check her ears after his
initial assessment. Kimber reached for the first aid kit tucked
under the futon.

“Did you drug me?” Keladry demanded
quietly.

He straightened. “I gave you morphine.”
Realizing she wasn’t going to understand him, he pulled the bottle
of pills from the first aid kit and held them up.

“That’s why I can’t hear,” she said with a
frown.

Kimber pulled an otoscope free from his kit
and fitted it with a disposable tip. He gripped her ear and slid
the instrument into it, flipping on the light to see her
eardrum.

The woman batted his hand away. “There’s
nothing wrong with my ears,” she snapped.

He leaned back, studying
her pupils. She showed no signs of fever, and her pupils were the
correct size, indicating the morphine he’d given her twenty hours
ago had worn off. “So you
can
or
can’t
hear?” he asked, lowering the
instrument.

“Yes.” She shifted away from him as far as
possible and reached up to touch her face. “Where’s my mask?”

Raising an eyebrow, Kimber lifted the
t-shirt she’d put eyeholes in from its spot on the floor. She
reached for it, but he held it away. “Why don’t you keep it off for
now?” he suggested, beginning to wonder about the state of her
mental health. “Until you’re healed. You shouldn’t have anything
restrictive anywhere on your body.”

She considered him, as if the decision were
one of the more difficult ones in life, before relenting. “Very
well. You’ve already seen my face.”

“Guess you’ll have to kill me now, right?”
he teased.

“We’ll see how it goes. Did my father send
you?”

“No.”

She scoured her surroundings critically.
“What is this? A safe house? Prison? Am I under arrest?”

“No,” he said. “It’s my apartment.”

“Really?” She raised an eyebrow. “This shit
hole is where you live?”

“Shit hole?” he repeated. “Do you have any
idea what rent is in the city? This is nice compared to what my
other options were.”

“I’ve never been somewhere where blood on
the floor actually improves the carpet,” she said.

Not expecting her sarcasm, Kimber’s tired
mind was too surprised for him to form a response. The carpet was
old and smelled musty when it rained, but he hadn’t cared when he
moved in and didn’t care now.

At least I know she can
hear me.
He caught sight of the blood
seeping from her abdomen onto her blanket. While he didn’t know how
to take her frankness, he easily slid into doctor mode. “You need
to be still. You’re healing, and I don’t have a spare set of
bedding.”

Keladry glanced down then at him, brow
furrowed. “Who are you?”

“Kimber Wellington, ER physician at Sand
City General.”

“So I’m a hostage,” she said.

“Uh, no.” Kimber said. “I found you in the
alley. No one else would help you so I did.”

“Right. You’re something even worse than my
captor.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re an alleged do-gooder.”

“No
alleged
about it.”

“There’s no such thing, Kimber Wellington
from Sand City General.”

“You’re alive, aren’t you?” he retorted.

“If that’s what you call this,” she snapped
back. “I’ve seen torture chambers with more amenities.”

Did she just say what I
think she said?
Kimber opened his mouth to
respond when his patient swung her legs over the edge of the bed
and tried to stand.

“Hold on!” he exclaimed and rose. “You can’t
be doing that. You have a puncture in your -”

“I’m fine.” But her voice was faint, and she
wobbled the second her feet touched the ground.

Kimber caught her as her legs gave out, and
he lowered her back to the futon. “You’re not fine,” he said
firmly. “You need to rest.”

She sighed and pushed him away.

He released her. “Okay? Doctor’s
orders.”

Keladry squinted at him, as if trying to see
through him. “No more drugs, Doc,” she replied.

“You don’t move, and I won’t drug you.
Deal?” Kimber sat down as well, uncertain what to expect from his
patient.

“All right,” she said reluctantly. By the
lines of pain beneath her eyes, her attempt to stand had caused
some level of pain.

“What hurts?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she muttered.

“Come on. I can’t help you if you don’t tell
me.”

“You’re the doctor! You figure it out!”

Kimber drew a steadying breath. The past
month was a blur of double shifts, punctuated by a few hours here
and there to rest. For the sake of his patient, he swallowed his
frustration when all he really wanted to do was curl up in his bed
and sleep.

He glanced up, feeling Keladry’s intent
gaze.

“Where’s your accent from?” she asked.

“Chicago.”

“How long have you been here?”

“A year.”

“Did you call my father?” she pressed.

“No.”

“Police?”

“No,” he replied.

“So no one knows I’m here.”

“Not to my knowledge.”

Keladry studied him hard again, as if
suspecting he was lying to her. Finally, she allowed her head to
fall back onto the pillow.

“We good?” Kimber asked. “Or would you like
to interrogate me further?”

“Tomorrow, Doc. I’m pretty sure you won’t
kill me tonight, though I can’t promise the same for you after I’m
healed.”

“We’ll call it a draw for now.” He had never
met anyone quite like her. Keladry was beautiful, candid, brutally
direct – and mentally unstable. “Do you need anything?” he
asked.

“Cheeseburger.”

“Your body can’t handle that right now,” he
replied.

“Then put it in a blender,” she
returned.

“I’m a vegetarian. I don’t have meat in the
house.”

Her mouth dropped open. “This is hell, isn’t
it?”

A laugh burst from his throat before he was
able to stop it. “You’re welcome for saving you.” At his limit with
her after his week, Kimber rose. “I’ll bring you soup in the
morning. You have three bottles of water on the nightstand. Get
some rest.”