That night, Felicia and I stood on a rooftop in costume. I used the night vision built into my mask to look directly into Daves' house. His wife and kids were asleep, and he was alone in his study, poring over documents.
"So what exactly did this man do to earn your attention, Spider?" Cat asked, leaning back against the parapet.
"He controls the funding for homeless shelters across New York. Last month there was a shortfall and people were turned out onto the street on the coldest night of the year. If I hadn't stepped in, I'm fairly sure some of them wouldn't have made it," I said, trying to make out the documents through my mask. Unfortunately, I didn't have any kind of zoom function built in. I made a mental note to add one.
"Sounds like a real piece of work," Black Cat growled. "How does someone like that end up in power in the first place?"
"Is this your first corrupt politician?" I asked.
"No — but it is my first one where I have to stand out here freezing while waiting for him to do something interesting," she grumbled.
"Sorry." I glanced at her. She was shivering in the cold January night — I could see her breath misting in the air. "You really should think about upgrading your costume, you know."
Felicia blinked. "Why? What's wrong with it?" She looked down at herself. The black tracksuit was practical enough — gadgets clipped to a belt at her hips, domino mask covering her eyes — but it wasn't exactly the classic look I remembered from the comics. If she were wearing the full leather ensemble right now I'd be spending half the night concealing an extremely inconvenient distraction.
"It's not really designed for protection," I said, looking it over. "It's standard material, isn't it?"
"Well, excuse me for not having access to the Baxter Building and all their fancy equipment," Felicia huffed.
I chuckled. "Fair point...do you want me to make you something?"
"What?"
"Do you want me to make you a proper suit? Shouldn't be too difficult." I ran the idea through quickly. Stealing a SHIELD combat suit was out — Natasha would find out immediately, and then SHIELD would have Felicia on their radar if they didn't already. I'd have to build something from scratch.
"Wait...you'd actually do that for me?" Felicia looked genuinely surprised.
"Of course. If I didn't, you'd be out here fighting criminals in a tracksuit with no real protection," I said. "I'm your boyfriend. I intend to keep you around for as long as possible."
Felicia looked stunned for a moment, then jumped forward and wrapped her arms around my neck. "Thanks, Tiger."
"You don't need to thank me, Kitten — it's my pleasure." I held her properly.
"You know...when I found out who you really were, I thought you'd try to make me stop," she said quietly.
"Felicia, I remember the first real conversation we ever had — about how the name we choose for ourselves is the truest expression of who we really are. Do you honestly think I'd ever ask you to give that up?"
"I just thought...you know. I'm a criminal, and you're a hero. I figured you'd decide we were too different."
"What? I'm a criminal too," I laughed. "I'm currently conducting surveillance on a government official without a warrant. People may look at me as a hero or a saviour, but I break the law as well." I removed my mask and kissed her. "You aren't going anywhere, Kitten."
Felicia smiled, opened her mouth to say something — then gasped. "He's moving!"
"Ah — what?"
"Daves! He's leaving the house!" Cat broke away and moved to the rooftop edge, watching below. "He's in his car — we need to follow him."
"We were having a moment," I grumbled. I put my mask back on and wrapped an arm around her. "Alright — hold on. This should be interesting."
She grabbed on and we swung into the night, tracking the car below through shadows and lamplight.
Then Daves disappeared down into a tunnel. "Damn it," I hissed.
"I know where he's going," Cat said sharply. "There —" she pointed at a large upmarket hotel a few blocks ahead. "That tunnel leads to two exits: the highway, or a service road that goes straight to that hotel. He's not skipping town."
"I could kiss you right now," I said.
"Just don't drop me, Spider," Cat grinned as I swung toward the hotel, landing cleanly on a fifth-floor window ledge. We looked down in time to see Daves' car emerge from the tunnel and roll into the parking structure.
"We need to follow him inside," Cat said. "Can you get us in?"
"Absolutely." I crawled down the exterior wall with Cat holding on, found a service entrance near the back, and we slipped inside. We moved past a couple of hotel workers before I came across a security room — and the man who had just stepped out of it.
"Score," I whispered, beckoning Cat over. "How good are you at picking locks?"
Cat looked mildly offended. "The best. Stand back." She produced two pins, and in under five seconds the door was open.
"That was genuinely impressive," I murmured as we slipped inside and locked the door behind us.
"What exactly are we looking for?" Cat asked as she approached the security console, which gave access to every camera in the building.
"Him," I said, pointing at the monitor where Daves was stepping out of a lift on the tenth floor. We followed his progress carefully as I manually switched the feeds to cover every camera on that level.
We watched him knock on the door to room 1010. It opened to reveal a Black man in a well-tailored suit. I held up my data pad and scanned his face, storing the image. Daves stepped inside and they were gone from view.
"So he's in a suite on the top floor," Cat said, leaning back in the chair and crossing her feet on the console. "Now what?"
"Let's see if I can get some help." I transferred the face scan to my SHIELD phone and sent it to the tech department with a single message: *Need Identification.*
Long shot — but within minutes I had an email back with an attached file. I brought it up on my data pad and let out a low whistle.
"What? What did you find?" Cat got up to look.
"Do you know Dominic Marcelle?" I asked.
Cat groaned. "Yeah...major organised crime figure. His entire operation got shut down last year but he slipped the net. Police have been trying to track him ever since, but every time they get close he just...vanishes."
"Right. And the man we just saw? His name is John Travis — Dominic's right-hand man." I scrolled through the file. "There were rumours they were more than just business associates."
"Romantic?"
"Yeah," I said. "So if Travis is here..."
"Then so is Dominic," Cat finished.
"It makes sense," I said. "The police have never been able to hold Marcelle because he's had help from the inside." I looked up. "Nick Daves has been their inside man."
"So — what do we do now?" Cat asked.
I turned to her with a slow smile. "Feel like helping me catch a crime boss?"
We slipped out of the security room and back into the open air. Cat climbed onto my back and I jumped to the building's exterior wall, making our way up toward the tenth floor. We reached the penthouse level — wide balcony, outdoor swimming pool, and guards armed with automatic weapons.
I crawled around to the roof. Cat and I looked down from our position. Five guards outside in the cold, all armed. A quick scan through the penthouse windows suggested roughly a dozen more inside, though those appeared to be unarmed.
"I think you should sit this part out," I told Cat.
"What? Why?" she hissed.
"I'm bulletproof. You're not." I tapped my costume. "But — how good are you at recording video?"
Cat's expression shifted from offended to intrigued. "Very."
I handed her my SHIELD phone switched to camera mode. "We need proof of Daves working directly with Marcelle. If you can get footage of them talking together — confirming the arrangement — then we have something real." I pointed to a large window with a narrow ledge just beneath it.
Cat took the phone and frowned. "I thought you were going to give me a weapon."
"Sorry. I don't do guns."
"Whatever," she said, rolling her eyes. Then, with the grace of a trained acrobat, she dropped from the rooftop directly to the ledge ten floors up. My heart lurched — but she stuck the landing without a single wobble.
I exhaled. She moved to the edge of the window frame and eased it open just a crack, letting the sound from inside filter through to the recording.
Good. I turned to the guards. I cracked my neck, checked my web-shooters, and got to work.
"Hey, boys!" I called out. All five guards spun and levelled their weapons. "Is this the bathroom? I think I might be lost."
"What the —" I fired a web line at his chest and yanked. He came flying toward me and my fist met him halfway. A few teeth parted ways with his skull.
"Kill him!" another yelled, and they opened fire.
My spider-sense threw me backward onto the rooftop. The bullets couldn't follow me up there.
"Someone get up there and bring back the body!" a guard shouted.
A voice from inside: "What the hell is going on out there?!"
A man hauled himself up onto the rooftop — the last thing he saw was my foot connecting with his jaw, sending him back over the edge.
"He's alive!" they yelled.
"Eat webbing!" I dropped two lines, grabbed the nearest pair of guns, and jerked them out of their hands.
"What the —" I came down hard with a kick to the face, spun, and drove the last armed guard in the stomach before he could react.
I grabbed the remaining man standing and threw him bodily through the patio doors. He landed in the middle of the suite's living room.
"What in the hell is happening?!" a white man I recognised from the file — Marcelle himself — shouted as everyone in the suite scrambled to their feet.
I stepped inside through the broken doors, glass crunching underfoot. "Hello, Marcelle. Fancy meeting you here. You and Councillman Nick Daves — old friends, or am I reading the room wrong?"
"Kill him!" Marcelle roared, and he, Nick, and John Travis bolted for the door.
"Ah-ah. Not this time." I covered the door with my toughest webbing before any of them reached it.
"What the hell is this?!" Marcelle grabbed the handle and shoved hard. The webbing didn't give an inch.
"Now, there are two ways we can do this." I counted the men inside — roughly ten, armed with baseball bats and, inexplicably, a sword. Where did that come from? "You all know who I am, right? Spider-Man? The one who fought a man made of electricity and walked away? Took on a military-grade tank with a manhole cover and won? Do you honestly think I can't put every single one of you down right now?"
They looked at each other. Weapons lowered. Hands went up.
"Fight them, you useless —" Marcelle started.
"Excellent choice," I told the rest of the room. Even the man with the sword thought better of it. "Against the wall, slowly. Nobody needs to get hurt." I secured them all with webbing — just until the police arrived.
"You bastard!" John Travis yanked a gun from inside his jacket.
"Hell —" I threw myself sideways. Then something came sailing through the air and cracked John hard across the hand, startling him into dropping the weapon.
I fired a web line, pulled the gun to me, and hurled it out the window. I looked at the floor to see what had hit him — a TV remote, snapped cleanly in two. I blinked and looked toward the window. Cat was there, waving at me with one hand, the phone still raised and recording steadily with the other.
I waved back, then turned to the three remaining free men. I webbed them quickly and pinned them to the wall. I looked back at Cat and called over, "Thanks, Cat — but I had that handled."
"I'm sure you did, Spider," she smiled as she came in off the ledge, draping her arms around my shoulder and pressing a kiss to my mask. "You really need to do something about this stupid mask."
I laughed. "Alright. Promise."
We stopped recording and called the police with Marcelle's precise location. Then we climbed back to the rooftop and I reviewed what the camera had captured.
*"This is the third time, Nick,"* Marcelle's voice came through clearly. *"You can't keep asking for cash without showing results."*
*"Please — I need it. You have to pay this man off. If you don't, he'll kill us all!"* Daves sounded close to hysterical.
*"Right, so some stranger walks up to your office, tells you to hand over cash, and you just...do it?"* John said sceptically.
*"No! He sent me a package — with Cassy's hand inside!"*
*"Cassy? Who the hell's Cassy?"* Marcelle asked, reaching for his wine glass.
*"She was my mistress and she's dead! He said if we don't pay, my family is next!"*
*"Fine. I'll give you the money,"* Marcelle said at last. *"But you owe me, Daves."*
*"Thank you!"*
*"Why did he target you specifically?"* John pressed.
*"He said we were moving in on his turf. Your heroin supply is cutting into his business. He told me who he was — he called himself a member of the Hand, and —"*
And then my voice cut in from outside, greeting the guards. The camera followed the action as Cat reached through the window and launched the remote at John's hand. The frame then settled on her lips touching my mask as she kissed me — the microphone thankfully muffled in that moment.
"Not bad, Tiger," Cat smiled. "With this, there's nowhere left for him to hide."
But I wasn't listening. I wasn't paying attention to anything she'd said. I was frozen.
The Hand. Already? How? Had I truly stumbled this close to them? Would they come after me now?
No — wait. I'd just helped bring down one of their rivals. If anything, they'd be grateful.
I knew I should go down there and undo all of this before it was too late. But it was already too late — police sirens were already rising from the street below.
"Tiger? Are you alright? Peter?" Cat asked, touching my arm.
"I — yeah...it's just that name. The Hand. I know it." I wasn't going to tell her everything. Just enough.
"Really? From where?"
"An ancient Japanese criminal organisation. Rumours of demonic ties, ritual practices — I don't know the full picture, but every time I've spoken to anyone who knows even the slightest thing about them, they just shut down. Total silence. They're terrified."
"Someone who can put fear into every gang in New York? Now I really want to meet them."
"No!" I snapped — using her real name before I even thought about it. Something she had never once heard me do in the field. "If you ever so much as think the Hand is involved, you run. Do you understand me? You run and you don't look back."
"Peter, why? What makes the Hand different from anything else we deal with?"
"They are dangerous in a way most things aren't," I said carefully. "Promise me, Felicia. Promise me that if you ever think the Hand is involved, you call me immediately and you get out."
"Peter, I —"
"Please," I said quietly. My voice carried something she had never heard in it before.
She held my gaze for a moment, then nodded. "I promise."
I exhaled and pulled her into a tight hug. "Thank you, Kitten...if I ever lost you, I don't know what I would do."
She slowly wrapped her arms around me. "Don't worry, Tiger. You're not getting rid of me that easily."
We swung back to her place, where I used her computer to cut the footage down to just the sections where Daves effectively confessed to his crimes. We changed back into civilian clothes just as the video finished rendering.
I transferred the file to my phone and went to post it.
The post didn't go through. Two minutes later I had a message saying it had been denied. Before I could process that, my phone rang — number blocked.
I had a fairly good idea who this was. I put the phone to my ear. "Hello?"
"What in the hell were you thinking?!" Fury's voice came through.
"What do you mean?"
"You went after a crime lord on your own!" Fury shouted.
"No — I went after a corrupt politician who happened to be working with a crime boss. Entirely different."
"Do you have any idea what you almost did?! You nearly blew up a case the FBI has been building against Marcelle for four years! If that video had gone public, the whole thing would have been worthless!"
I winced. "Sorry."
"Next time you locate a fugitive crime boss, do the right thing and call the police! That is not your job!"
I sighed. "Understood."
"And next time, don't involve your girlfriend!" I paused. "Did you really think we couldn't extract the full footage from your phone? Come on, kid. I expected better. The Black Cat is a known thief — don't let Spider-Man get tangled up with her."
"No, Fury — this is where I draw the line. You don't get a say in who I choose to involve in my personal life. Are we clear?" I growled back. Felicia said nothing but watched me carefully.
"Actually, I do. You're my agent. Don't forget that."
"I'm your agent. You are not my father. Don't forget that. Spider-Man doesn't exist for you to carry around on your shoulder — he's me, and I will associate myself with whoever I damn well please. Are we understood?!"
Fury's line went silent. I was fairly certain I'd just been fired. Then, after a long pause: "Speak to me like that again and you're done."
"I don't think I am. You need me — I know that sounds arrogant, and it is — but give me a real mission, Fury, and I swear you won't regret it."
"Fine. You want a mission — you'll get one." He hung up.
I smiled. Sucker.
"What was that?" Felicia asked quietly. Her arms were crossed, expression guarded, a little frightened. I sighed. This was going to need some careful explaining.
"Well...you remember Electro, right?" I sat down on her bed, removing my mask and web-shooters.
"Kind of hard to forget nearly dying and — wait." Felicia's eyes went wide. "You saved me that day. Oh my God. I didn't even realise."
"Yeah. You're welcome," I said with a small smile. "But anyway — after that, a man broke into my house and introduced himself as Fury. Director of SHIELD."
Felicia blinked. "What?"
"Spies," I said simply. "He knew everything about me — including who I really was. He offered me a position in his organisation. Training, equipment, anything I needed in exchange for my skills. That was him just now. I tried to post the video but SHIELD monitors all my Spider-Man accounts and blocked it. Too risky, apparently."
"So...what you're telling me is that you're a spy."
I shrugged. "If you want to put it that way — yes."
"You ass!" she yelled. "Why didn't you tell me?!"
"Honestly? I thought you'd hate me for it. You're not exactly thrilled that I'm a superhero — I was nervous about how you'd react to finding out I was also a spy."
"What did you expect?! You're a spy!"
"In training," I pointed out. At her glare, I immediately backed down. "Which isn't really the important part right now."
"And — oh my God. Do they know about me?!" Felicia asked in genuine horror.
I shrugged. "No, I doubt it. And even if they did, they wouldn't really care yet. People like you and me are too small on their scale — they see me as a tool. You might eventually get on their radar, but not for a long time."
Felicia looked worried, and I couldn't blame her. She sat on the bed with her head in her hands.
I sat down beside her and placed a hand on her leg. "Felicia," I said her name gently, like it was something fragile. "I promise they will never hurt you. I won't allow it. Nobody in this world will hurt you while I'm here, and if anyone tries — I don't care what the consequences are. They won't get the chance. Do you understand?"
"Peter, you don't —"
"No, Felicia. I will." I cupped her cheek. "I'm not going to tell you that you're the woman I'm going to marry or say something equally clichéd. But I do love you. I do care for you. You are my responsibility, and I will never allow anything to harm you — because I would rather die than watch the things I love get hurt. Do you understand me?"
Felicia looked into my eyes for a long moment. Then she leaned forward and covered my lips with hers. I ran my fingers through her hair and slowly drew her down.
She moaned against the kiss. And then her door swung open and a cold, sharp voice cut through the room.
"What exactly is going on in here?"
We moved like we'd both been electrocuted — upright in an instant. I turned to the doorway. Felicia's mother stood there, staring at us both.
Felicia sighed. "Hey, Mum. Great timing." I said absolutely nothing, because I had absolutely nothing useful to say. All I knew was that I did not like the way she was looking at me — and I was deeply, profoundly glad we had changed out of our costumes before this happened. Because that particular conversation would have been significantly more complicated.