Title: All the Wrong Reasons

Author: Sebastian Hansen

Publisher: NineStar Press

Release Date: 12/28/2021

Length: 111700

Genre: Fantasy, LGBTQIA+, Romance, urban fantasy, action, family-drama, superheroes, gay, nonbinary, trans, BDSM, secret identity, billionaire, Dom/sub relationship

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Description

The day after telekinetic supervillain (and billionaire philanthropist), Stetson Nadenheimer dies, he wakes up on the autopsy table and falls in lust with the man hired to cut his cold, dead corpse open. The problem is that the forensic pathologist is Doctor Julian Dandridge, the part-time superhero, Scatter. It’s probably a bad idea for a supervillain to get into bed with a superhero. Probably.

Not that it stops him, but trying to start a relationship with a reluctant hero without getting caught turns out to be easier said than done. Between midnight meetings over games of checkers and kinky secrets, Stetson and Julian begin a tremulous romance. Unfortunately for them, there’s an actual villain watching from the shadows, waiting for Stetson to stumble.

All the Wrong Reasons
Sebastian Hansen © 2021
All Rights Reserved

Julian

 

I stared at the corpse on the table, then back to my best friend and medicolegal scene investigator, Angie. She shrugged and said, “Don’t look at me like that. He was definitely dead when I brought him in. This isn’t your first BB.”

BB is short for bounce back and refers to the weird habit supers have of coming back from the dead. Not every super does it, but plenty do. Nobody knows the rules for BBs. Nobody knows who’s going to wake up on the table and ask for a glass of water.

(They’re always thirsty for some reason.)

The only “rule” I knew of was this: only supers bounced back and even then, it was a flip of the coin. Also, there’s never been a case of someone bouncing back twice. You only get one second chance.

I sighed and pinched my nose. “Did the Major request you on the scene?”

“No. Tom was on a call already, and I was the only one available. And I’ve already gone through the paperwork on that, thanks.”

I nodded. Kinsley City had a dearth of both medical examiners and scene investigators. People don’t like working around death. Most forensic pathologists make a fraction of what a surgeon does. Why go through years and years of medical school if you’re not going to make a bundle when you’re done?

In my case, I liked working with dead people—they didn’t talk back (usually…). They also presented interesting puzzles and challenges. Finding out why someone died is way more interesting to me than trying to figure out why someone has a cough.

The problem here was that I was a member of the Guild and Angie was Major Bigstuff’s daughter (and a super, though not a member of the Guild herself). The guy on our table had been killed in a fight with the Major. The words “conflict of interest” kept clanging around in my head.

The autopsy wasn’t scheduled for tonight. I wasn’t foolish enough to take that project on all alone. When the city hired me, they specifically did so because I was a super and they intended that I should handle all super cases, regardless of circumstances. The chief ME, Dr. Carter, didn’t agree, but when dealing with bureaucrats, it’s hard to argue sometimes. We got around the possible conflicts by making sure I had an audience at every super autopsy and that Dr. Carter was on hand to assist.

I glanced down at one of the scene photos. The deceased’s body was in a traumatic state of disrepair. And now…

Well, to make matters even worse, the asshole was bouncing back.

Gone were the signs of trauma. His head was stubbornly in one piece (as opposed to the pieces it’d come in as), his chest wasn’t a concave mess, and his limbs all appeared untwisted and unbroken. Any and all signs of the damage done by the wall were slowly but surely going away.

We had another problem.

We’d both reviewed the security footage of the fight from the bank (which had somehow leaked to the press), and both come to the same conclusion.

“This is wrong, Julian,” Angie said, and I nodded vaguely.

“Do we have an ID yet?” I asked, sifting through the photos.

She shook her head. “No. Fingerprints came up empty, and his head’s just now getting back to normal. I could take a pic and throw it through the database, but this guy doesn’t have a record.”

I turned to look at the corpse.

Well, I suppose it would technically be a former corpse at this point. He had a pulse—faint but growing stronger by the minute. I sighed. If pressed into being honest, the man on the table was handsome. He kept his hair tied back and hidden in a top hat, his face covered by a masquerade mask. The bank robber, Jester, was…popular, as far as the media was concerned. He was charming, good looking, and tended to run away from supers trying to stop him.

He wasn’t a fighter, and the newspapers liked to paint him as a sort of Robin Hood figure. Nobody could figure out what he did with the money he stole—which was never more than a few thousand dollars—but there were rumors it ended up in the pockets of people who desperately needed it. Of course, people in those positions didn’t typically come out and say they’d been gifted cash by a bank robber. That’d be intensely foolish.

Still, people liked Jester. Even the people he was robbing liked him.

 

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Sebastian Hansen (she/her) is a non-binary mess of a person. She lives in the Midwest with her husband and herd of opinionated cats, where she spends most of her time playing video games, reading comic books, and writing about superheroes. She likes strawberries and is easily frightened by the Internet.

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