Supervillainess (Part One) Read Online Free PDF Page A

woman in his house,
Kimber slept deep and late, not waking up until his phone rang and
pulled him out of sleep.
    “Hello,” he said groggily into the cell.
    “Kimmy, this is Julian.”
    “Oh. Hey. Are you getting ready to leave
home?” he asked.
    “I’m standing outside your building waiting
to come up. Your father isn’t used to being outdoors, so can you
ring us in?”
    “Yeah. Sorry.” Kimber was out of bed before
his stepmother finished her sentence. “How was your trip?”
    “Great until the airport. Did you forget
about picking us up?”
    That explains one of the
calendar alerts I missed. He glanced at the
time on the screen and grimaced. It was past ten in the morning. He
had either slept through his alarm or forgot to set it. “It was a
late night, Julian. I’m sorry about that.”
    “It’s okay. We had trouble finding someone
to bring us here with your father’s equipment.”
    Guilt slid through him. Tugging on jeans,
Kimber exited the hallway and stopped, blinking away sleep from his
eyes as he stared at the front door. “Hey, Julian, I’m ringing you
up now but it might be a minute.”
    “We have nowhere else to be.”
    He rolled his eyes at her tart response.
“Let me know if the elevators are working. If not, I’ll come down
and help.”
    “All right.”
    “See you in a few.” He hung up, hating the
disappointment in her tone but more confused by what was in front
of him.
    At some point during the night, someone – he
assumed Keladry – had moved most of the furniture he owned in front
of the door to blockade it. If that wasn’t enough, he spotted rope
stretched taut a foot above the flooring across each doorway,
including the opening to the hall.
    Kimber bent and touched the rope he
recognized from his mountain climbing days. She had to have found
it in one of the boxes. He stepped over it and followed it into the
living room, where it wrapped around a precariously balanced box on
the kitchen table. He went to the box and peered into it. It was
filled with fragile glassware.
    “What the hell?” he stood back to decipher
what Keladry had done. “She booby-trapped my home?” Or rather, she
had created a rustic alarm. If anyone tripped over a rope, it would
send the glassware smashing to the ground and awaken them both. He
didn’t have time to ask her what was going on, not with his family
headed up to his floor.
    Kimber quickly unwound or cut all the rope
in the house and tossed it into a box. At one point, he glanced at
the hammer resting on the windowsill. Certain he hadn’t left it
there, he paused by the window.
    Someone had nailed it closed.
    His eyes went to the neighboring window,
which had also been nailed closed.
    He stood in place for a long moment,
uncertain how he had slept through the racket. What the hell
Keladry was thinking when she decided to fuck up his apartment?
Bloodied carpets weren’t enough? She wanted to make sure he never
saw a penny of his deposit?
    A knock at the front door drew his attention
back to the blockade of furniture.
    “Just a minute!” he called. Kimber hurried
to the foyer and began tugging the loveseat back into the living
room.
    Ten minutes later, with the house almost
back the way it was, he ducked his head into the guest bedroom.
    Keladry was sound asleep. The blinds were
drawn again, and more blood was on the carpet. She’d ignored his
advice to rest, along with his suggestion not to wear the makeshift
mask. Kimber snatched towels from his bathroom and covered the
rusty maroon trail on the already stained carpet.
    He answered the door at last, breathless and
sweaty from his rush to undo what Keladry had done.
    “Kimmy!” his stepmother beamed and held out
her arms. Tall and slender, with gold-brown hair and heavy makeup,
the middle-aged woman smelled of lilac and wore her signature color
of blue. Mist sparkled in her coiffed hair.
    “Hey, Julian,” he said and hugged her. “You
look great.”
    “It’s this diet we’ve been