A Superpowered Warrior in the Body of a Fake Heiress novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: A Slap in the Face
Gordon slaps Kerensa over her adopted sister's bleeding palm; she slaps him back, proves the cut is staged, and walks out into a stranger's offer.
Gordon Haglund slapped her across the face in front of his whole family and two dinner guests.
Kerensa's head turned with the blow.
The chandelier over the long table was blinding, and her ears were still ringing from his shouting.
"You will apologize to your sister," Gordon said. "Is that what those foster people taught you? No manners at all?"
She ran her tongue over her lip and tasted blood.
Two days ago she had been lying in wet leaves on a ridge, waiting to ambush an S-class beast.
Then she had opened her eyes in a hospital bed, in a body that was not hers.
Ever since her SSS ability awakened, nobody had dared to raise a voice at her, let alone a hand.
Now a man in a dark suit was raising his hand again.
Kerensa caught his wrist in the middle of the swing.
She slapped him back.
It was not a hard slap, by her standards.
Gordon left the floor anyway.
He flew backward across the carpet and hit the oak sideboard with his shoulders.
The sideboard cracked down the middle, and every glass on it fell.
Nobody spoke.
"Idiot," Kerensa said. "What is wrong with you? You think you can just..."
She stopped.
The body's memories had arrived all at once.
A small white house in the country, and a foster mother who sang off key.
A letter two months ago, saying a DNA test had found her.
A father who had never once changed her diaper, never once held her hand across a road, and now wanted to teach her a lesson.
His name was Gordon.
The girl crying at the end of the table was Lorna, the daughter the Haglunds had adopted to fill the space the real one left.
Kerensa was the real one.
She was also, according to the registry, an unawakened F, and the whole family treated her as a stain.
She had been raised by strangers who sang off key, and she did not know how a blood family was supposed to feel.
She did know what a lesson from a stranger was worth.
"Teach me a lesson?" she said. "Try it again. Slowly."
Gordon pulled himself up on the broken sideboard, blinking.
"Ward!" he said.
Her brother stepped in and caught her arm.
"Kerensa, what the hell is wrong with you? You hit Dad!"
She turned her forearm, and his grip opened on its own.
Ward stumbled back, shaking his hand.
"He hit me first," Kerensa said. "In front of guests. I'd like that remembered."
Lorna made a small, wet sound.
She sat with her right hand held out in front of her, palm up and red, her eyes full.
Her pink cardigan was perfect and her lashes were wet.
She looked fragile and helpless, and every face at the table hardened against Kerensa for it.
"I told everyone it was an accident," Lorna whispered. "I said you didn't mean it."
The room waited for Kerensa to say sorry.
Kerensa looked at the palm.
It was one clean line, straight across, with sharp edges.
Then she looked at the floor by Lorna's chair, where a blue vase lay in four pieces.
"Show me that hand again," she said.
Lorna pulled it against her chest.
"I didn't even notice I'd scratched it."
"That's not a scratch," Kerensa said. "It's glass. It's the edge of that vase."
She pointed at the shards.
"I was standing at the window, clear across the room from her chair."
She turned to the two dinner guests, a man and his wife who had been very interested in their plates.
"Where was I standing?"
The wife cleared her throat.
"By the window," she said. "She never moved."
Nobody said anything.
Kerensa held up her left hand and turned the palm toward the light.
It was sewn shut with black thread, small even knots in a clean line across the skin.
The loose white stitches in her chin were the hospital's.
These were somebody else's.
"This is my cut," she said. "I'd like to know why I'm the only one here who can tell the difference."
Ward's face had gone red.
"When I walked in," he said slowly, "Lorna was on the floor, screaming. Her hand was bleeding. You were right there."
"I was at the window."
"Lorna pulled me aside first," Ward said. "She said, don't be hard on her, she didn't mean it."
"Before anyone asked her anything," Kerensa said.
Ward looked at his sister, and then at his shoes.
Lorna's mouth opened, and what came out was a small sob.
Gordon was on his feet now, one hand pressed to his shoulder.
"Whatever happened with that vase," he said, "you struck your own father in this house."
"You struck me first," Kerensa said.
"You will apologize, or you will leave."
Kerensa looked down the long table at the people who shared her blood and her face.
Not one of them looked at her split lip.
So she took her coat from the chair and the single bag she had brought home from the hospital.
"I'm leaving," she said.
"If you walk out that door, don't come back."
"I wasn't planning to."
She walked out through the front hall.
A tall man in a gray coat had been standing by the door the entire time, hands in his pockets.
He had not moved when Gordon swung.
He did not move now, except to look at her stitched palm, and then at her face.
Rain was coming down on the gravel.
He followed her outside and stopped her at the bottom of the steps.
"The registry says you're unawakened," he said. "No class, no ability."
"Does it?"
"Gordon Haglund just went through a sideboard."
A black car idled at the end of the drive with its back door already open.
"Get in, Miss Haglund," he said. "In an hour half this city will know what you are."
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