Ethan Kane leaned back in his chair, watching the “delivered” receipt blink beneath his st message to Peter. It had been a calcuted move—strategic, precise, and perfectly timed.

  “Oops,” he had written, feigning nonchance. Almost forgot to mention. And then dropped a truth bomb that would shake Peter Parker to his core: Aunt May wasn’t dead. Norman Osborn, aka the Green Goblin, had staged the entire thing. The woman Peter buried wasn’t even reted to him. Now he was also attacking Peter’s identity as Spider-Man, which Ethan thought was a pretty good pn to systematically destroy Peter.

  Ethan tapped the edge of his phone, absently watching a subtle background program trail the RFID ping on Peter’s card as it moved through the city. It wasn’t intrusive surveilnce—he hadn’t set it to record or intercept—just a soft confirmation that Peter was moving, presumably toward the address Ethan had included.

  He leaned forward slightly, steepling his fingers. “He should find her tonight,” he murmured to himself. “And by morning… we’ll have our answer.”

  It wasn’t a full victory—not yet—but he was sure it was 98% sealed. Peter’s heart would be anchored to him with a feeling of gratitude. The same heart that had made him vulnerable in the first pce would now bind him to Ethan’s cause. Ethan didn’t need Peter. He simply liked him — a good character in a broken story. Peter was the one who reminded him of himself the most. Making his life better felt like a cosmic act of defiance, ie, a cosmic screw you.

  Regardless, there was nothing more he could do for Peter, so it was time to shift focus.

  Two names sat at the top of his mental checklist, highlighted in metaphorical red: Delih and Emma Frost.

  Delih was a weapon still loyal to a sinking ship. A bruiser for Jacob Conover, the crime boss who went by the name Rose, with enough power to ftten city blocks, able to go toe to toe with Spider-Man, which made her dangerous when cornered. Ethan didn’t want to corner her too much. He wanted her desperate, disillusioned… and open to something new.

  Spider-Man would, of course, help with his more heroic missions, but not with criminal things, so he needed an enforcer for his criminal aliases.

  Emma Frost, on the other hand, was a queen by all the definitions of the word, which is why she went by the moniker White Queen. Untouchable. Unreadable. Her telepathic reach, psychic defenses, and political instincts made her the most dangerous wildcard on his board. Recruiting her wouldn’t take charm or force. It would take leverage. Something rare for someone to have over her. It’d have to be something she wanted but didn’t know how to achieve. Something like the salvation of all mutant kind.

  And both would require money. Serious money. The leverage that Emma required would also require Ethan to control an information network that he didn’t have in pce yet. Hence, he wanted to start the newspaper with Peter.

  He turned to his encrypted ptop and opened the interface for his offshore account, buried behind seven yers of misdirection, triple firewalls, and quantum-hashed proxies. The numbers fshed on screen as the system decrypted.

  Account Bance: 3,674,223.42

  Ethan exhaled, a small, satisfied smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. The penny skimmer was continuing to do a good job.

  He hadn’t touched the account since moving money out after its creation, and truthfully, he’d half-forgotten about it. The program was designed to be invisible—to siphon one penny for every 10 transaction processed through Red Lion National Bank, Fisk’s financial undering arm. Slow, silent, and beautifully undetectable. It was his first attempt at writing a program, and it was well done in his opinion.

  He remembered the infiltration clearly. Pretending to run a deposit errand for his father, slipping the disk into the exposed disk port, and removing it while the teller turned to fix a paper jam. The code had slipped into the system like a whisper, embedding itself deep into the bank’s root structure.

  Now, nearly two and a half weeks ter, the drip had become a flood.

  Nearly 3.7 million.

  And best of all? Fisk still didn’t even know it was missing. The kill code and virus that would activate a week and a half ter would also ensure that he would never find out.

  Ethan pulled up an expense spreadsheet he’d built the day before. There were already columns beled “Felicia – Equipment,” “Three companies,” “HQ 1 Renovation,” and “Printing Press HQ – Proposed.” Now, he added two new tabs: “Delih – Extraction & Stabilization” and “Emma Frost – Contingency Pn.”

  He started with Delih. She was a physical asset, not psychic. That made her easier to approach… but also more votile. Ethan would need a persona that was involved in the criminal world—someone she would respect and was sure could take care of her so long as she remained loyal.

  He settled on the alias “Luc Moreau,” a soft-spoken European broker who trafficked in bck-market logistics and discreet supply lines—elegant, urbane, but never ostentatious. Someone who might slip into her world just as everything else began to colpse.

  And colpse it would. He’d already started loosening the threads of her life. He anonymously tipped off the police about one of Rose’s safehouses, timed perfectly with the Bck Tarantu’s test assault on their operations—pressure applied from both sides.

  In one window, he drafted a list of systems to breach and crash under Luc’s name, to cultivate a legend of controlled chaos and build reputation among the underworld brokers. In another, he opened Delih’s psychological profile. Studying her, Luc—or rather, Ethan beneath the mask—smiled faintly. Every enforcer had a name. Every name, a weakness.