The dojo was empty.
Troy stood in the middle of the floor with his bag over his shoulder and the fluorescents buzzing the same frequency they always buzzed and the heavy bags hanging still and the weapon rack untouched. He'd been coming at six every evening for a week and this was the third night in a row the door was locked from the outside and no one had picked it.
He called her number. It rang four times and went to a voicemail that didn't identify itself. He didn't leave a message.
He tried again from a payphone on Canal Street. Same result. Four rings. Dead air.
Elektra Natchios had said "This doesn't happen again" and she'd meant the sex but what she'd done was disappear entirely. The sparring, the training, the knife drills, the hand-to-hand sessions where she'd been rebuilding him from the ground up. All of it gone because they'd fucked in a warehouse and she'd let him see her face when she came and that was worse than the sex, apparently. Apparently letting someone see you come was worse than letting them see you kill.
"This doesn't happen again" covered more than she'd intended.
He locked the dojo door behind him and walked home through Chinatown. His body missed the training before his brain caught up. His arms felt wrong without the impact of blocking her strikes. His Speed was still at 6, his Strength at 5, but without her to test them against he felt slower. Duller. A blade that nobody was sharpening.
He stopped at a convenience store and bought coffee and rice crackers and stood on the sidewalk eating them and watching the street and waiting for a shadow on a fire escape that didn't appear.
Felicia was at his apartment when he got home.
She had a key. They'd never discussed the key. She'd had one made during a job three weeks ago and started using it and he'd started expecting her and neither of them had named what that meant because Felicia Hardy didn't name things until she was ready to fight for them.
She was on his couch with her laptop, running financial traces on a shipping company connected to Silvermane's network. Civilian clothes. Hair up. Glasses she wore for computer work and pretended she didn't need. She looked up when he came in.
"How was training?"
"Closed. Third night."
She looked at him for a long time. Her eyes tracking across his face, his neck, the collar of his shirt. Her gaze pausing on each mark, and the marks she was finding weren't from training.
The bite mark on his neck had faded to yellow-green. The scratches on his back were healing but the shirt collar sometimes shifted and showed the tops of them. The bruise on his shoulder where Elektra had bitten through his shirt was still purple at the center.
Felicia looked at all of them. She didn't ask.
"Come here," she said.
He sat on the couch beside her. She closed the laptop, set it on the floor, and climbed into his lap. Straddled him, her knees on either side of his hips, her hands on his face. She kissed him slowly. Her mouth was soft and warm and she tasted like the tea she'd been drinking and she kissed him like she was trying to memorize him.
She pulled back. Her thumbs on his cheekbones. Her green eyes on his face, reading him, and whatever she found she kept to herself.
"Stay tonight," she said.
"I'm here."
"Stay. The whole night. Don't get up at 3 AM to look at documents. Don't check your phone. Just stay."
He stayed.
She pulled him to bed. Pushed him down. Climbed on top and pinned his wrists above his head and rode him until the headboard cracked against the wall and her thighs were shaking and she was loud, "there, right there, don't stop, don't you fucking stop" with her nails cutting crescents into his shoulders over the fading marks another woman had left. She came with her teeth buried in the muscle where his neck met his shoulder, grinding down hard, clenching around him in pulses he felt in his spine. She didn't let go after. Stayed on top of him with her forehead pressed to his collarbone, breathing hard, her hips still rocking in small circles while the aftershocks ran through her like she was afraid he'd disappear if she let go. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
Afterward she curled against his chest, her leg thrown over his, her hand flat on his sternum. She traced the healing scratches on his shoulder blade with her fingernail, light, following the lines another woman had left on his body.
She didn't ask.
In the morning she was still there. She was always there now. She made terrible coffee and burned toast and sat across from him at the kitchen table in his shirt and nothing else and the morning light caught the platinum of her hair and the green of her eyes and the purple mark she'd left on his neck last night, layered over the yellow one underneath.
"I have intel on the dock shipment," she said between bites of burned toast. "Heavy security. Six guards visible, probably more inside. The cargo is mystical. Crates marked with the Hand's symbol. They're moving it in three days."
"Can you get us in?"
"Us means me and you. You're not a thief and you're not a combatant at that level. Six trained Hand operatives with mystical weapons is not a two-person job."
"Elektra was supposed to—"
"Elektra's gone." Felicia said it flat. A fact, reported and filed. "She left. That's what she does. You need someone else or you need to wait."
The toast was very burned. He ate it anyway.
He spent the afternoon on the documents.
The files he'd copied from Silvermane's vault were memorized now, the holding company names and account numbers and routing codes branded into his brain through repetition. He'd been mapping the network on paper, actual paper, because digital left traces and the people at the top of this network could afford to find digital traces.
The money moved in a pattern. Silvermane's cash went into a holding company called Westbridge Associates. Westbridge fed into two subsidiary accounts that fed into an investment firm called Meridian Capital Partners. Meridian's board was a list of names that meant nothing until you cross-referenced them with public records and then three of those names appeared on the guest list of an organization that didn't officially exist in any government database.
The Hellfire Club.
Troy had heard of it. In his old life, in the comics, the Hellfire Club was a shadow power in the Marvel universe. Old money, old influence, mutant elites playing chess with human civilization. They'd clashed with the X-Men. They'd manipulated governments. They operated in the space between legitimate power and absolute corruption and they had resources that made the Maggia look like a street gang with ambition.
One name appeared at every junction in the money trail. Meridian's board, Westbridge's founding documents, the Hellfire Club's Inner Circle membership listed under a title that sounded medieval because it was.
Emma Frost. White Queen.
He pulled up everything he could find on public record. CEO of Frost International. Board memberships across four Fortune 500 companies. Philanthropist. Education advocate. A face that showed up at galas and charity events and Senate committee hearings. Blonde, beautiful, photographed in white at every public appearance.
Telepath. Omega-level. One of the most powerful psychic minds on the planet.
In his old life he'd read about her. The White Queen who could crack open a human mind like Felicia cracked a safe, clean and without leaving marks. She could rewrite memories, project illusions, make a room full of people forget she'd been there. And when telepathy wasn't enough she could shift her entire body into organic diamond, functionally indestructible, immune to everything including her own powers.
The money trail from the Hand went through her corporate structure at every level. Shell companies, holdings, investment funds. Emma Frost was either funding the Hand's expansion into New York or she was facilitating it, and the third option where she didn't know about it was the least likely because Emma Frost didn't let things happen under her name without knowing.
He wrote her name on the paper. Circled it. Drew lines from it to Silvermane, to the Hand, to the Hellfire Club.
Felicia was asleep.
Moonlight through the bedroom window hit the pillow and turned her hair silver-white against the cotton. She slept on her stomach with one arm under the pillow and her face turned toward the wall and the sheet pulled down to her waist showing the line of her spine and the curve of her shoulder blade and the marks on her skin, the ones he'd left and the ones he hadn't.
She was beautiful and she was his and she was sleeping in his bed because she'd made a key without asking and started showing up and stopped leaving and never said the word "girlfriend" and he hadn't said it either and neither of them needed to.
Troy sat at the kitchen table with the documents spread in front of him and Emma Frost's name circled in pen and the system interface floating at the edge of his vision, the LP bar ticking at its passive idle rate, Felicia's tracker glowing POSSESSIVE in the corner.
Felicia was asleep down the hall. Elektra had vanished. And the name circled on the paper in front of him was Emma Frost.
And he was about to walk toward a third who could read every thought in his head.
Emma Frost was a telepath, Omega-level, connected to everything in this city that had money or power, and the Hand was a logistics problem compared to what she could do to him if she decided he was interesting.
He looked at the name on the paper, then at the bedroom door. His phone sat dark and silent on the table.
"I'm going to die in this universe too."
He said it to the kitchen. Half a joke. Half not.
The system's LP bar didn't react. It didn't have a setting for gallows humor.
He turned back to the documents and worked until the moonlight moved off the pillow and the first gray light of morning came through the window and Felicia's alarm went off in the other room. He heard her stretch. Heard the sheets rustle. Heard her feet on the floor.
She appeared in the kitchen doorway in his shirt, hair wrecked, eyes barely open.
"You didn't stay."
"I stayed until you fell asleep."
She looked at the papers on the table, the circled name, his face.
"Who's Emma Frost?"
"Trouble," he said.
Felicia sat down across from him. Took the pen from his hand. Pulled the paper closer. Read the name, the connections, the lines he'd drawn.
"Trouble," she repeated. "The kind that's going to get us killed, or the kind that's going to walk through our door wearing white and smiling?"
"Both."
Her eyes went to the bedroom door and his neck before she looked down at the paper.
"I'll make coffee," she said.
The coffee was terrible. He drank it anyway.