The laundromat on West 48th had been washing money longer than it had been washing clothes.
Troy leaned against the counter across the street, coffee going cold in his hand, watching the foot traffic through the window. Two-story brick walk-up. Chinese restaurant on the ground floor, laundromat behind it, and the money-laundering front on the second floor above a nail salon that never seemed to have customers. Maggia territory. Silvermane's people running cash through shell accounts that fed up through holding companies into the Hellfire Club.
Felicia sat on the fire escape above him with binoculars and a bag of trail mix. She'd been there since 6 AM. She liked early starts for surveillance because "nobody interesting is awake before nine, so nobody interesting is watching."
"Two guards," she said through the earpiece. "Front and back. Front is armed, right hip. Back is armed, left hip, and he's got a knife on his ankle. Rotation every forty minutes. Sloppy."
"Cameras?"
"Four visible. Probably two more inside that I can't see from here. Wired, not wireless. Old system. I could have this place open in twenty minutes."
"Not yet. I want the schedule for the week."
"Boring." She said it like a complaint and meant it as flirting. He'd learned the difference.
He checked his phone. The system's LP bar was idling, a passive trickle from a woman on the sidewalk who'd glanced at him twice. Background noise. Felicia's presence registered as a warm constant hum in the top left corner of the interface, her tracker reading POSSESSIVE in capital letters that felt like they were judging him.
She climbed down from the fire escape twenty minutes later. Civilian clothes: jeans, leather jacket, boots, hair in a ponytail under a baseball cap. She looked like a graduate student and she was still the most noticeable woman on the block because Felicia Hardy couldn't turn it off even when she was trying.
She took his coffee, drank from it, made a face.
"Cold."
"You've been up there for three hours."
"And you've been standing here looking pretty." She leaned against the counter next to him, close enough that her shoulder pressed his arm. She left it there. "I can handle the cameras. The guards are soft. The locks are commercial, not custom. This is an easy job, Troy."
"The money trail connects to the Hellfire Club. Nothing connected to the Hellfire Club is easy."
She looked at him. The ponytail pulled her hair back from her face and showed the sharpness of her jaw and the green of her eyes and the fading purple mark on her neck where he'd bitten her three nights ago.
"How's training going?"
She asked it like she didn't care about the answer. She picked at the lid of his coffee cup and didn't look at him.
"Fine."
"Where do you train?"
"Chinatown."
"Alone?"
He looked at her. She looked at his coffee cup. Her thumbnail was peeling the cardboard where the seam met the lid and she was doing it with the kind of focused attention she normally reserved for safes.
"You already know the answer."
"I want to hear you say it."
"Elektra is teaching me to fight. You know this."
"I know she gave you her number and I know you come home with new bruises every night and I know you showered before you got into bed last night."
The shower detail was specific. He'd showered because he'd been sweating for an hour in a dojo and he smelled like a gym bag.
But he'd thought about it. Standing under the water, he'd thought about the clinch and the choke and the fact that he'd been half-hard on the mat and whether Felicia would be able to tell.
"I shower because I'm covered in sweat from getting my ass kicked for an hour."
"Uh huh." She finished destroying the coffee lid. Dropped the cup in the trash. Put her hand on his forearm and squeezed, her thumb pressing into the inside of his wrist where the pulse ran close to the skin. "Just remember who got here first."
She walked away. He watched her go because she was putting her hips into it, deliberate, and she knew he was watching because she always knew.
His wrist was warm where her thumb had been.
Elektra hit him in the liver and he went down on one knee and stayed there until the room stopped tilting.
"You dropped your left side." This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
"I know."
"Then stop doing it."
Six days of training. The dojo and its fluorescents hadn't changed, and neither had the time. She arrived before him and left after him and in between she dismantled every bad habit his body had learned and rebuilt the ones she wanted. He was faster each session. His reactions were tightening toward a trained reflex that bypassed conscious decision entirely. The system gains from Felicia were translating directly into combat performance and he was defending combinations that should have taken months to learn and Elektra had stopped pretending she didn't notice.
She noticed by hitting harder.
Tonight she was using her sai. Blunted training versions, taped grips, still heavy enough to break a rib if she connected clean. She moved with them like they were parts of her hands, extensions of her forearms, and the steel blurred in the fluorescent light when she struck.
He blocked with a padded baton she'd handed him without explanation. The impacts traveled up his forearms into his shoulders and each block loosened his grip and each loosened grip earned him a correction that landed on his ribs or his thigh or the flat of his back.
"Your footwork is better."
He waited for the rest of the sentence. It didn't come.
"But?"
"I didn't say but."
"You were thinking it."
Her mouth twitched at one corner and then stopped. She came at him with a sai combination, high-low-high, and he blocked the first two and ate the third across the shoulder and spun away and reset his stance without being told.
"Better," she said again.
She was sweating. Six days ago she hadn't broken a sweat until the end of the hour. Tonight she was breathing harder by the thirty-minute mark and the tank top was sticking to her back and her hair was coming loose. He was lasting longer, making her work, and the effort was showing on her body in ways she couldn't control.
The sparring shifted. She put the sai down and came at him bare-handed and the grapples started. Her forearm under his chin, his hand on her hip trying to break the clinch, her thigh hooking his knee in a takedown attempt he sprawled out of for the first time. She grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him into a tie-up, chest to chest, her forehead almost touching his, and they struggled for position for ten seconds before she swept his leg and rode him down to the mat.
Her knee on his chest. Her hair hanging down over both their faces and neither of them could see anything except each other. She was breathing hard and he was breathing harder and she didn't get up.
She stood. Walked to the water bottle by the wall. Drank with her back to him.
"Your gains are accelerating," she said to the wall. "Faster than any training could account for."
"I told you. I'm something else."
"You told me you'd explain."
"I will. When I can."
She turned around. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her eyes were dark in the fluorescent light and her jaw was set and she was holding the water bottle with a grip that should have cracked the plastic.
"Tomorrow," she said. "Earlier. Six instead of eight. We're going to work on knife defense."
"Why the change?"
"Because the Hand uses knives."
She left through the window. He stood in the empty dojo listening to the fire escape creak under her weight and then silence and then the distant sound of vendors and traffic and a radio playing from the fish market below.
His body hurt and his shirt was soaked and there was a bruise forming on his thigh from a sai strike and the inside of his forearm was raw from blocking. He was getting better. She knew it. The system confirmed it. Better wasn't enough yet and the Hand wasn't going to wait until he was ready.
The money-laundering front was burning.
Troy saw the glow from six blocks away, an orange smear against the low clouds over Midtown. By the time he reached West 48th the fire trucks were already there and the Chinese restaurant's windows were blown out and black smoke was pouring from the second floor.
The Maggia guards were gone. Bloodstains on the sidewalk, no bodies.
He circled the block. The back entrance had been forced open, the door bent inward at the hinges, and there were footprints in the soot on the stairs. Soft-soled and tactical, multiple sets going up, fewer coming down. The ones coming down were deeper, carrying weight.
He pulled the fire escape ladder and climbed to the second floor. The nail salon was gutted. Whatever files, records, and cash the Maggia had kept in the back rooms were gone. The safes were open, drilled, emptied. Professional work done carefully by people who had time and used it well.
On the wall above the main safe someone had carved a symbol into the plaster with a blade. He'd seen it in the documents from Silvermane's vault. The Hand's mark.
They'd hit the target before Troy and Felicia could. And they'd hit it hard enough that the building was still burning.
"I see it. Are you there?"
"I'm inside. The files are gone. The safes are empty. The guards are dead or taken."
"Get out of there. If they're still watching the building—"
"They're not. They came, they cleaned, they left. This wasn't a raid. This was a consolidation."
He climbed back down and moved to the rooftop of the building across the street. From up here the fire was a contained thing, the trucks working on it, the block cordoned. Police cars with lights going. Civilians on their phones. A normal emergency on a normal night in a city that didn't know what was underneath it.
He stood on the rooftop with his hands in his pockets and watched the building burn.
"They're accelerating their timeline. Something spooked them."
He didn't flinch. He'd felt her arrive. Some combination of the system's proximity alert and the combat instincts Elektra herself had been training into him, a tightening at the base of his skull that said someone dangerous was standing behind him and to his left.
Elektra was on the roof. Dark clothes, hair tied back, sai on her thighs. She'd been watching the same fire from a different angle and she'd chosen this moment to step out because Elektra Natchios did everything on purpose.
"How long have you been watching?"
"Since before they breached the door."
"And you didn't stop them."
"Six Hand operatives with mystical blades and a fire mandate. I fight when the odds justify it." She stepped beside him. Their shoulders were a foot apart. She looked at the fire and her face was lit in orange and the scar on her collarbone was a white line in the glow. "This is the third Maggia position they've taken in two weeks. They're not fighting Silvermane anymore. They're replacing him."
"The documents I copied. They knew I had them."
"They knew weeks ago. They've been working around that information instead of trying to recover it. Smarter than sending assassins after you." She paused. "They sent assassins after you anyway."
"Mixed strategies."
"The Hand doesn't do mixed strategies. The ones who came for you were a different faction. Internal politics. Someone wanted you dead for personal reasons and used the document recovery as cover."
He filed that. Internal factions meant internal weaknesses meant leverage.
"What spooked them?"
"I don't know yet. But the timeline for their operation was supposed to be months. They're compressing it to weeks. Whatever they're building toward, they're building faster."
She turned her head. Looked at him. The firelight was in her eyes and her face was calm and her body was still and she was measuring him with the same attention she used when she was about to throw a punch.
"Your thief won't like what's coming."
"Felicia can handle herself."
"I wasn't talking about the Hand."
He held her stare. The orange light was dying below them and neither of them blinked.
"Go home," she said. "Your thief will be worried."
She dropped off the roof. No sound. When he looked at the ledge her boot prints were already filling with rooftop grit.
Troy stood on the roof for another minute. The fire was mostly out. The cops were doing their thing. Elektra was in the dark. Felicia was in his apartment. He should go home.
He went home. Felicia was on the couch with his laptop, running background checks on the laundromat's listed owners. She'd already heard about the fire. She looked up when he came in.
"You okay?"
"Yeah."
She searched his face for a long time.
"Shower first," she said. "Then talk."
He showered. She didn't ask about the bruises.