The documents told him more than Felicia knew.
He'd spread them across his kitchen table three nights running, the Manila folders from Silvermane's safe, and the picture that came together was bigger than a Maggia franchise. Silvermane's network was being compressed. Territories shrinking. Revenue routes closing. Lieutenants going quiet, not because they'd been arrested or killed but because they'd been absorbed. Folded into a structure that didn't have a name in any of the documents but left a shape in the gaps, visible if you read the documents in order and tracked what stopped being mentioned.
The Hand. Felicia had mentioned them once, on the rooftop before the warehouse job, a throwaway line about an organization that operated in the spaces between organizations. He'd heard the name before. Not in this world. In the one where he'd watched Netflix on a couch in a body that was dead now.
The documents showed transfers. Money moving from Silvermane's accounts into holding companies that fed into other holding companies that terminated in account numbers with no names attached. Supply chains rerouting through ports that didn't appear on customs manifests. Personnel files for people who stopped existing on paper three to six months after their last documented assignment.
Somebody was eating Silvermane's operation from the inside and Silvermane either didn't know or couldn't stop it.
Troy closed the folder. Checked the time. 1:47 AM. Felicia was working a solo job tonight, a penthouse on the Upper East Side, easy money, didn't need him. He'd kissed her at the door at eleven and she'd tasted like toothpaste and adrenaline and she'd said "don't wait up" and he'd said "I always wait up" and she'd rolled her eyes and dropped off the fire escape.
He needed air.
Hell's Kitchen at two AM was a different city. The restaurants closed, the foot traffic gone, the blocks between Ninth and Eleventh quiet enough to hear the river if the wind was right. Troy walked west on Forty-Fourth, hands in his jacket, the cold cutting through the fabric. October was starting to bite.
He was thinking about the holding companies when the first one hit him.
A body coming out of a doorway, fast, silent, and a fist connecting with his kidney before he'd finished turning. The pain was a white flash from his lower back to his chest and his knees buckled and he caught himself on a parked car and the second punch came for his jaw and he blocked it.
Speed six. The block was clean, his forearm catching the attacker's wrist, and the reflex bonus from Felicia fired a fraction ahead of his conscious decision. He turned the block into a grip, yanked the arm forward, and drove his elbow into the man's face. Bone cracked. The attacker stumbled back.
Black clothes, mask over the lower face, soft-soled shoes. The man's eyes above the mask were steady, not surprised, and he reset his stance in under a second and came forward again.
Trained. This wasn't a mugger.
The second attacker came from the left. Troy's peripheral vision caught the movement and he pivoted, Strength five driving a palm strike into the man's sternum, and the impact knocked him back two steps. But the first one was already recovered, circling right, and Troy had two in front of him and no wall at his back.
He backed into the street. A parked cab. He put it between himself and the one on the right, which bought a second, maybe two.
"Where are the documents."
Accented. Japanese, maybe. The voice came from the left. The man he'd palm-struck was straightening up, and behind the mask his eyes were calm.
"What documents."
"Silvermane's files. You took them from the safe. We want them back."
We. That meant more.
The third one came from behind.
Troy heard the footstep a half-second before the knife reached him. The reflex bonus twisted his body sideways and the blade that was going for his spine caught his ribs instead. A line of fire from his left side to his back, three inches, and then the knife pulled free and his shirt was hot and wet and the pain arrived in a wave that made his vision pulse.
He spun. Caught the knife hand. Strength five against a wrist and the wrist lost, the bones grinding under his grip, and the knife clattered to the asphalt. He punched the third attacker in the throat and the man went down gagging. Read this novel at novelping . com for the best experience.
Two left. His side was bleeding. He could feel it soaking through his shirt, warm, spreading. The two remaining attackers looked at their fallen partner and looked at each other and they glanced at each other and both came forward at the same time.
Two at once was too many. He blocked the first strike and the second one got through, a kick to his wounded side that turned the line of fire into a wall of it and his legs almost gave. He grabbed the kicker's ankle and pulled and the man went down but the other one was on him, a forearm across his throat, driving him into the parked cab, and his air cut off.
His vision was going gray. His hands on the forearm, prying, but the man had leverage and training and Troy's Strength five wasn't enough against a chokehold from a fighter who knew where to press.
Blood on the asphalt. His blood. The knife wound leaking. The forearm crushing his windpipe.
She came out of the dark.
One second the street was two men and a chokehold and the next there was a shape behind the man who was strangling Troy and a hand found the attacker's chin and another found the back of his skull and the twist was fast and wet and the man's body hit the asphalt before Troy registered what had happened.
The second attacker turned. He got his hands up. She drove her palm into his nose and the cartilage flattened and he staggered and she hit him again, a strike to the temple with the heel of her hand, and his eyes rolled and he dropped beside the first one.
Two men down. Both dead or close to it. Three seconds.
The third one, the one Troy had punched in the throat, was scrambling up, coughing, running. She watched him go. Let him. Turned back to Troy.
The cage fighter. Dark hair pulled back. Tank top under a leather jacket. The same face from the ring, the angles and the olive skin and the flat expression that gave nothing.
She looked at his side. At the blood soaking his shirt. She crossed to him and pulled the shirt up without asking and her fingers pressed the edges of the wound and her hands were scarred at the knuckles, cold, steady, clinical.
"This is shallow. You'll live."
"Thanks."
"I wasn't complimenting you." She let the shirt drop. "Silvermane works for the Hand. Everything of his is theirs. The documents you took, the money, the network. You stole from the Hand and they're going to keep sending people until they get it back or you're dead."
She could have been reading a grocery list.
"How do you know what I took."
"Because I've been watching Silvermane's network for six months. You and your thief walked into my operation and started pulling threads."
Her eyes were dark. Close up, standing two feet from him with his blood on her fingers, they were darker than they'd looked across the cage. Brown so deep it was almost black.
"Elektra," she said.
She didn't offer a last name. She pulled a phone from her jacket. Not a burner. An older model, beat-up, the screen cracked in one corner. She held it up so he could see the number on the screen.
"Memorize this. If they come again, call it." She paused. "And they will come again."
"Who are the Hand." This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
"Call the number and I'll tell you."
She turned. Walked toward the alley between two buildings. Her footsteps were silent on the concrete.
"You just killed two people."
She stopped. Looked back over her shoulder. Her face in the streetlight, half-lit, the angles sharp.
"They were going to kill you." Flat. Correcting him. "You're welcome."
She walked into the alley and didn't come back.
Troy stood in the street with blood dripping from his side and two dead men on the asphalt and the number repeating in his head. His hands were shaking. Adrenaline comedown and knife wound and the fact that a woman had just killed two trained fighters in three seconds and given him her first name and walked away.
He looked at the dead men. Black clothes and masks and soft-soled shoes. No identification, no phones, nothing in their pockets except extra blades and small vials of what looked like ink.
Hand. The Hand was real. Not a Netflix show, not a comic book plot. Real people with real knives who'd come for him on a Tuesday night in Hell's Kitchen because he'd stolen a folder from a safe.
He pressed his hand against his side. The bleeding was slowing. She'd been right. Shallow. It hurt worse than it looked, which was the opposite of how knife wounds usually worked, but Durability four was apparently the difference between a cut that reached muscle and a cut that stopped at fat.
He walked home. Called no one. Cleaned the wound in his bathroom with hydrogen peroxide and gauze from a first-aid kit Felicia had left under his sink. The stitches were bad, uneven, pulled too tight on the left side. They'd hold.
He sat on the edge of the bathtub and opened the system.
NEW CONTACT DETECTED ELEKTRA NATCHIOS CLASSIFICATION: ENHANCED HUMAN / BORDERLINE POWERED AFFECTION: HOSTILE
Hostile. Of course she was.
She'd saved his life, checked his wound, given him her number, and told him the Hand was coming back.
Affection: Hostile.
"Great," Troy said to his bathroom mirror. The mirror didn't answer. The stitches were crooked. The cut burned under the gauze.
He memorized the number. Deleted nothing because there was nothing to delete. She'd shown him a screen and walked away.
Felicia would be back in a few hours. She'd see the wound. She'd ask.
He didn't know what he was going to tell her.