Colleen Wing sat with her weight settled evenly in a resting squat as she looked out at the brownstone across the street, her jacket closed to ward off the evening chill. She'd found a comfortable spot where she would be mostly hidden from prying eyes, partially concealed by the rooftop's ledge and the lee of the building stairwell's rooftop enclosure. The curtains of the apartment she was watching from her vantage point were drawn shut, and she couldn't see any lights or movement inside. Most likely, no one was home.

  She'd been here for an hour, just watching the place, while her mind circled around and around, trying to work out what her next move would be. It had taken weeks of legwork to track Wanda Maximoff to this address, but now that she was here, she wasn't even sure what to do next. The woman would return at some point, but then what would Colleen do? Knock on the front door and politely ask her to explain herself? By all accounts, she was an extremely powerful Enhanced, and Colleen wasn't stupid. If it came to a fight, Maximoff would probably squash her like a bug. But if she really was responsible for the deaths of the Fingers, Colleen couldn't let her get away with it. She owed Bakuto too much—for what he'd done for her personally, and for all of the others that he'd lifted up. For every person he'd selflessly reached down a hand to in the darkest times of their lives.

  It wasn't just a matter of revenge, either. Over the last few weeks, several of Colleen's other contacts in the Hand had gone quiet. She wasn't sure if they were just trying to keep their heads down, but in the wake of the Fingers' deaths she had a sick, worried feeling that something more sinister was afoot, and her intuition told her that, if it were, then Maximoff would be involved.

  Colleen had never actually killed anyone before—never taken that final, lethal step—but if she couldn't even avenge her mentor's senseless death, how worthless would that make her? But it was more complicated than that. Colleen hated the idea of simply striking first. Ideally, she wanted to confirm her information and give the Maximoff woman a chance to explain herself before deciding whether she needed to die. But forfeiting the element of surprise meant that Colleen would almost certainly lose any confrontation between them. It was a situation with no good answer.

  The feel of her grandfather's katana, its sheath slung across her back, lent her some small amount of comfort, but it also sharpened her unease. It was an honourable weapon, a warrior's promise… not the blade of an assassin.

  Her thoughts—indecisively turning the possibilities over and over again in her mind—were interrupted by the barest scrape of a footstep on the rooftop behind her, so faint and hidden by the sounds of the city that Colleen only really registered it on a subconscious level, her body already reacting before her brain realised what was happening.

  She pitched forward, cushioning her fall with her hands as she kicked out backwards with a foot, trying to catch the person sneaking up on her in the shins, but the lithe, dark figure easily jumped over her outstretched leg and lunged forward. Colleen twisted into a roll, narrowly avoiding the strike, then lashed out with a fist of her own. Her opponent deftly blocked it with the flat of her forearm, backing up a little. Colleen had space to recover, so she kipped up onto her feet in a quick motion, settling into a tight combat stance, her heart pounding in her chest from the sudden jolt of adrenaline.

  The woman standing across from her was tall and lean, with her dark hair pulled back in a loose knot, dressed in a sleeveless black outfit, black gloves covering her hands and a deep crimson undershirt that seemed to extend upwards into a ninja-like half-mask that covered her face from the nose down. She was olive-skinned, with a hint of East Asian heritage in her features.

  She regarded Colleen's ready stance with dark, almond-shaped eyes glimmering with amusement. After a moment of silence, the woman reached up and pulled the fabric of her mask down to reveal a playful grin. The faint glow of the city lights cast delicate shadows across high cheekbones and a sharp jawline. "Good instincts," she said, sounding pleased. Her accent was refined—French, Colleen guessed, with a touch of British inflection to it.

  Colleen didn't respond, watching her assailant's movements carefully.

  "Oh, come now," the woman said, giving a small shrug as another playful smile quirked at the corners of her lips. "I was just having a bit of fun." She turned and took a half-step toward the edge of the roof, leaving herself completely open as she looked across the street toward the brownstone that Colleen had been watching. "If I had to make a guess, I'd say you're here for Wanda Maximoff, right?"

  Colleen remained stubbornly silent, still ready to snap into an immediate attack or defence. Though the woman seemed relaxed—almost completely unconcerned—there was something about the way she moved, the way she stood, that put Colleen on edge. She couldn't put her finger on what it was, exactly, but all of her instincts were screaming that the woman in front of her was extremely dangerous.

  "Are you here to kill her? Are you an assassin?" the woman asked, a touch of excitement in her tone as she lifted her chin to indicate the sword slung across Colleen's back. When Colleen still didn't respond, she pursed her lips. "Come on, pet—don't be a spoilsport. I'm not here to ruin your fun, if that's what you're worried about."

  "I'm not here to kill her," Colleen said, her voice tight and low.

  "Well now, that doesn't sound entirely true," the other woman responded, a gentle admonishment in her tone.

  "Who are you? What do you want?"

  She shrugged again. "Just someone who finds Wanda Maximoff rather curious, myself. She's been interfering with someone I care about." Her eyes flashed brightly. "I wasn't expecting an assassin to be stalking her, though. This is getting rather interesting."

  "I'm not an assassin," Colleen said testily. There was something about the woman's words that didn't sit right with her—she was dissembling, not telling the whole truth.

  "If you're not an assassin, then why are you skulking about up here, spying?"

  "None of your business."

  "I think life would be dreadfully boring if I only ever paid attention to things that were my own business," the woman responded. "I expect you were waiting for your prey to get home before you plotted your next dastardly move. What if she stayed out all night? Were you planning on just staying up here 'til morning?"

  Colleen bit her tongue and said nothing, squashing down the vague feeling of embarrassment at her own indecision regarding what she was even doing here.

  The woman wrinkled her nose briefly, then flicked her head toward the apartment. "You can be boring if you want, but I've got a better idea: Let's go have a bit of a sneaky poke around. See what we can snoop out."

  Once again, Colleen didn't respond. She'd be lying if she said she hadn't thought about breaking in, rather than just sitting around waiting for Maximoff to get home, but it wasn't something she'd ever actually done before. There could be alarms—what if the police showed up?

  "Well, I'm going to go have a look around. You can stay up here if you like, but honestly? I'm a little disappointed in you, Colleen. I thought the Hand trained braver soldiers." She stepped up onto the ledge of the roof as she spoke.

  A jolt of tension ran through Colleen. "Wait—how do you know my name? What do you know about the Hand?"

  The woman turned to face her, eyes twinkling with mischief, and once again jerked her head toward the building across the street in a 'follow me' gesture. "Only one way you can find that out now, isn't there?" she teased.

  "Who are you?"

  "Elektra," the woman said, then promptly stepped backwards off the roof, giving Colleen a little wave as she fell out of sight.

  Colleen darted forward, peering over the edge for a brief moment, just in time to see the woman catch herself on the fa?ade, swiftly and expertly climbing down the side of the building with a series of controlled falls. Swearing under her breath, she turned and ran back to the stairwell, heading back down toward street level as quickly as she could.

  This woman—Elektra?—was clearly dangerous, but she knew who Colleen was. About the Hand. If she were here, that meant she might know exactly how Wanda Maximoff was involved in the deaths of the Fingers. Colleen needed to be careful, but she couldn't pass up an opportunity like this.

  By the time she reached the street, there was no sign of Elektra. The woman had, however, helpfully left the front door of the brownstone wedged open. Colleen slipped inside, letting the door close properly behind her so as not to arouse suspicion if anyone came through. She looked around—it was a nice building, dark wood finishings lit by sheltered wall lamps. Perks of working with the Avengers, Colleen supposed. Ascending the steps to the third floor quickly and quietly, she found that the door to the apartment had also conveniently been left ajar for her, light spilling from the gap.

  Taking a deep breath, she stepped cautiously inside, her senses alert, and closed the door gently behind her. Elektra's voice suddenly came from ahead of her and she tensed. "Alarm's been disabled," the woman said brightly, her head briefly poking around the corner of a doorway at the far end of the hall across from where Colleen was standing. "Three separate main circuits, motion and infrared, with a sneaky little fourth monitoring the first three—it seems our mutual friend's rather paranoid."

  Colleen glanced to either side as she moved forward, taking in the lounge and kitchen/dining space. It all looked… normal. Just an apartment. She wasn't sure why, but she'd been expecting more somehow. There was a blanket and pillow bunched on the couch across from the TV in the lounge, as though someone had recently slept there.

  Though she felt a little reluctant to share information with Elektra, at least until she knew what her involvement with Wanda and the Hand was, it was hard to not be glad that the woman at least seemed to know what she was doing. "The apartment belongs to Natasha Romanoff, under a false name," Colleen said, torn between raising her voice a little so that Elektra could hear her and keeping her tone appropriately hushed, considering that they'd just broken in.

  "The Black Widow? Ah. Well, that explains that, then."

  Hesitantly, Colleen followed Elektra into the bedroom, still unsure whether she was being dragged deeper into a dangerous mistake. The other woman was already poking delicately through the room with the sort of practiced, surgical care that told Colleen this was far from the first time she'd ever done something like this. She rifled through the contents of the wardrobe, taking care not to disturb the shape of the hanging garments, before moving on to the drawers of the dresser. As she checked each one, she ran her hand along the underside of it before inspecting the contents, occasionally lifting something to look beneath it, then carefully putting it back exactly as it had been.

  Colleen lingered by the doorway, arms crossed, trying not to look like she was second-guessing every life decision that had led her to this point. She wasn't even sure what she was doing here. This wasn't who she was. This wasn't how she did things.

  "What do you know about the Hand?" she asked, her voice quiet but steady. "And what's your interest in Wanda Maximoff?"

  Elektra fished out a small handgun that had been hidden under the rim of the topmost drawer, weighing it thoughtfully in one hand before returning it. "That's a complicated pair of questions," she responded nonchalantly, like she was barely paying attention. "Not ones that can be answered quickly or easily, either. As always, the Devil's in the details." She let out a small, amused huff, like she was enjoying some private joke.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  "Can you give me a straight answer, please?"

  The woman flashed her a brief smile as she turned up a second gun hidden behind the headboard of the bed. "I'd love to, pet, but I do rather think that distracting conversations like that are best saved for when we're not in the middle of breaking into someone's home, don't you? Why don't you take a look around, see if you can find whatever it is you're looking for here?"

  Colleen suppressed a sigh, anxiety still heavy in her chest. "Fine. But once we're done here, I need to know what you know about… what happened."

  "Pinky swear. I'll tell you everything I know."

  Casting a final glance around the bedroom, Colleen stepped across the hall to peek into the bathroom. It was clean and impersonal—white tiles, a few folded towels, unopened shampoo bottles. Nothing obviously visible that gave anything away. It was just a bathroom. She felt incredibly uncomfortable about poking about under the sink or in the medicine cabinet, so she didn't. Instead, she returned to the living room, pausing beside the couch, where the blanket and pillow had been left bunched up. Someone had definitely slept there recently.

  Her gaze drifted across the wooden coffee table and TV unit that stood opposite the couch. She wasn't sure what she'd been expecting. It was just a home, where people lived. What did she think she'd find? A notebook with 'Top Secret Plans' scribbled across the cover?

  The soft click of the front door opening made her freeze in her tracks, heart suddenly pounding. She didn't have time to move—as she spun around to face the entrance, a figure stepped in with sharp, efficient movements. A blonde woman, already pulling a pistol from a harness hidden under her leather jacket.

  "Hiiiiii!" the new arrival called, her voice soft as she levelled her firearm at Colleen. The door clicked closed behind her.

  Tight panic rose up in Colleen's chest as she stared, wide-eyed, at the barrel of the gun. She didn't know guns very well, but it was compact and dark—a Glock of some kind, she thought. There had only been a few times in Colleen's life when someone had pointed a gun at her before, and each time it had happened, it was just as scary. If anything, this situation was the scariest so far.

  As relatively normal as the woman holding the gun on her looked, Colleen was pretty sure she knew who she was: Yelena, Natasha Romanoff's sister. Her existence wasn't necessarily widely known or talked about, but Colleen had been poking around for a while, so she was extremely aware that the blonde woman had been trained as an assassin by a Russian spy agency. And she'd just caught Colleen breaking into her home, red-handed. She might actually just shoot her.

  "Put your weapon on the ground. Slowly," Yelena instructed her in low tones, tipping the barrel of the gun minutely to indicate the sword on her back. "Then kick it over here."

  Taking care to make no sudden movements, Colleen unslung her grandfather's katana and laid it carefully down on the ground before straightening back up. As she put her foot against it, she very briefly considered kicking it up into Yelena's face as a distraction, but she was about ninety-nine per cent sure that the trained assassin would be expecting something like that, and all she would really be doing is getting herself shot. Instead, she offered a silent apology to her grandfather as she did as she'd been instructed.

  The other woman gently raised her own foot to catch the sword as it slid over to her, then flicked it back into the kitchen behind her with a practised motion. She took a cautious step forward, keeping just outside of arm's reach, her eyes still fixed on Colleen. "Good. Thank you. Next, tell me who you are, why you're here, and—"

  She stopped speaking abruptly as a faint noise from the bedroom at the end of the hall drew her attention. It was a momentary lapse—a reflexive glance to check to make sure she wasn't about to be ambushed, taking her eyes off Colleen for only the barest instant. It was enough.

  Colleen lunged forward, her hand coming up and slamming into the other woman's wrist, shoving the firearm roughly upwards just as it went off. The closeness of the gunshot made Colleen's heart leap into her stomach. Yelena reacted instantly and there was a brief flurry of moves and countermoves—Colleen desperately trying to stop the former Widow's attempts to bring the weapon back down to bear on her.

  Yelena managed to get a hold of Colleen's wrist and twisted her arm in a brief lock, spinning her around one-eighty degrees. Luckily, she didn't have enough time to secure the hold as Colleen used the momentum of the spin to keep going and twist out of her grip, completing a full rotation just in time for her eyes to widen as the gun came up toward her face. Panicked, she yanked her head to the side as Yelena pulled the trigger again, wincing as the second painfully close gunshot stung her ears. She scrabbled at Yelena's wrist, trying to grab hold, but the woman broke free by dropping down and ducking under her arm, skipping briefly across the wooden floor on her thigh as she moved past her. Frantically, Colleen threw herself bodily backwards to land against Yelena's back, then twisted and wrapped her arms around the woman's waist.

  Yelena brought her feet forward then threw herself sideways in a single, smooth motion, bringing Colleen with her as she rolled once, narrowly missing the coffee table. The two of them both managed to get their feet under themselves again just as Yelena twisted in Colleen's grip and whipped her gun hand down and back, firing just as Colleen managed to get her leg out of the way, the bullet lodging in the floorboards instead. The move took her slightly off-balance and Yelena tried to press the advantage, twisting in the opposite direction and tucking the gun around under her other armpit to try to shoot Colleen in the gut.

  Colleen let go of the woman's waist and pulled back a step, her open palm managing to slap the gun to the side as it fired again. This time, the sudden lack of pressure meant that it was Yelena who was off-balance, and Colleen clamped both of her hands over the woman's gun hand, taking several steps and dragging Yelena along with her as she tried to dislodge her grip, before flinging an elbow back into the other woman's face. Yelena managed to block the elbow with her free hand, but the distraction was enough that when Colleen reversed the move into a chop onto the woman's wrist, she was able to wrench the gun away. She wasn't interested in using it herself, so she immediately flung it away out of reach. It thunked against the wall before dropping out of sight behind the couch.

  As Colleen turned to face her opponent, she caught sight of Elektra—the woman had emerged from the hallway and was idly leaning against the wall, watching the fight with an amused expression on her face.

  Yelena ducked in close, managing to lock her hands behind the nape of Colleen's neck before leaping up and using her full body weight to wrench her downward and flip her, again trying to smash her into the sturdy-looking wooden coffee table. Colleen threw out a hand as she fell, managing to shove the table out of the way—it slammed into the TV unit, which wobbled ominously but didn't fall—just as Yelena tried to grab her other wrist and wrap her legs around her shoulder in an armbar. Colleen wriggled free just before Yelena could lock the position and wrenched the other woman to the side, flipping her over onto her stomach.

  "Are you going to help?" Colleen hissed from between clenched teeth, tossing a look in Elektra's direction as she lunged desperately forward, struggling to lock her arms around Yelena's ribcage.

  "Oh! I'm sorry, you needed help?" Elektra responded teasingly, a note of feigned surprise in her tone. She didn't move.

  Once again, Yelena flicked her legs out from underneath herself with incredible flexibility, wrenching sideways out of Colleen's grip. Colleen's forearms slammed painfully against the floor as she caught herself but, at the same time, Yelena bounced on her rump and used her momentum to roll back over Colleen's shoulders in what was essentially a cartwheel. As part of the same motion, she wrapped her bicep around Colleen's neck, getting her in a front headlock as she landed on her knees in front of her.

  Colleen tried to twist out, but the former Widow had managed to actually get a good grip this time, tucking her other arm under Colleen's armpit before flipping her over and securing the hold. Colleen's other arm wasn't pinned, but it was an incredibly awkward angle to try to get any leverage. Still, she frantically grabbed at the arm around her neck even as she realised it was useless—she'd been caught in a textbook sleeper hold. All Yelena had to do was keep applying pressure and Colleen would be out like a light in a second or two.

  Instead, however, Yelena immediately released the hold and shoved Colleen roughly to the side, rolling to her feet in the opposite direction to avoid Elektra's foot as it slammed down where her head had been. Colleen scrambled away on her hands and knees, crawling over to where her grandfather's katana was lying on the kitchen floor. Scooping it up in one hand, she staggered back up into a standing position. She was breathing heavily, her head light and slightly fuzzy.

  Across from her, Yelena had kipped up as well—she flicked a few quick jabs at Elektra, who deftly blocked the first two before ducking low under the third. As Elektra swept downward her hand snaked out and grabbed Yelena's leg, just above the ankle. With a grunt of effort, she wrenched the former Widow's leg out from under her, flipping her over to land heavily on the wooden coffee table.

  The woman bounced and rolled off, but Elektra was already following her, planting one hand on the edge of the table as she brought her leg up and over in a sweeping scissor kick. She was fast, with a lot of reckless, explosive energy behind each movement—like she didn't particularly care if she hurt herself in the doing. Yelena barely had time to pull herself back out of the way, landing heavily on her backside even as Elektra landed on the coffee table in a kneeling crouch.

  Yelena flung herself to the side, tucking her body into a tight roll, but Elektra was faster, dropping down next to her and bouncing back to catch the former Widow with a kick that snapped her head back and took her off her feet, landing on her back on the coffee table. Yelena seemed dazed, but Elektra didn't stop, seizing her arm and then cartwheeling over her to brace her own shoulder against the wooden table, using it as leverage, to fling the former Widow bodily into the TV. Yelena bounced off with a crunch, the screen smashing under her, and dropped back down onto the coffee table for a third time, groaning in pain as Elektra loomed over her. The ninja-like woman struck again, and the former Widow stopped moving.

  Though her heart was still pounding in her chest, Colleen had enough presence of mind to dart forward, stepping past Elektra and dropping to one knee as she re-slung her grandfather's katana over one shoulder. With slightly-shaking hands, she checked Yelena's breathing and pulse, making sure that the woman was just unconscious, not dead. Which she thankfully was. Even so, this had already gone far worse than she'd anticipated it would. She let out a sigh of relief, then straightened and turned to shoot a resentful, accusing look at Elektra.

  The woman just grinned at her, eyes sparkling with amusement. "What?"