Viper saw Daisy's slender hand drifting toward her skin again. She broke.
"I'll talk. I'll talk."
She wet her lips and steadied herself. "Someone inside S.H.I.E.L.D. wants you dead."
Daisy blinked — not quite expecting that — but kept her composure. Plausible, even if it wasn't the answer she'd been fishing for. "Who?"
In her mind she was already running through the candidates: Alexander Pierce, former S.H.I.E.L.D. Director. Jasper Sitwell, the bald one. Grant Ward, the name now notorious partly thanks to a certain Jurassic Park lead. All of them had motive.
But none of them could give orders to Viper. She was a senior HYDRA figure — the woman who would one day carry the title of Madame HYDRA. In practical terms, her standing in the organisation outranked Pierce's. You don't send the board of directors to run errands for a regional manager. The logic didn't hold.
To be safe, Daisy stepped behind Viper — nothing touching except fingertips tracing the line of her spine, slow and precise. Just to keep things focused.
"Who sent you to kill me?"
Viper couldn't see her expression. She was doing her own calculations — which name to throw out there, which scapegoat to load the blame onto. She'd survived at the top of HYDRA by knowing how to play people. She wasn't going to burn Pierce or the others.
She had a name in mind. She let her body sag, performing exhaustion, and spoke in a voice carefully calibrated to defeat: "Maria Hill. She put out the contract."
Daisy nearly asked her to repeat it. For a split second she was genuinely thrown — and then it clicked. Misdirection. A good one, she'd give her that. Viper had constructed a believable rival motive on the fly. But this was Maria Hill. The same Maria Hill who, when they were alone, regularly wailed things like "I can't take this anymore" and similar dramatics — not exactly the profile of someone with S.H.I.E.L.D. Director ambitions and HYDRA contacts.
Besides: Hill had a line to HYDRA's senior leadership? That was like saying Nick Fury and Baron von Strucker were old friends — one blind in the left eye, one blind in the right, a perfectly matched pair. Poetic, but absurd.
She really commits to the story. Daisy filed a fresh data point on Viper's character.
She let a thoughtful silence stretch out. "Maria Hill and I are on decent terms. Why would she want me dead?"
Viper took that as uncertainty — perfect. She pressed the advantage quickly. "Because you took her deputy position. She resents it. Rather than wait, she moved first and hired an outside hand."
"I took her position?" Daisy kept her voice level. "That's news to me."
"Nick Fury has a classified priority file. Your name is at the top of it. You're his top-rated asset." Viper seemed to anticipate disbelief. She delivered her next move cleanly: corroborating details, everything confirmed from her own intelligence. Everything except Pierce's name, which she quietly swallowed.
When pressed on how she'd obtained the information, Viper smoothly produced a story — a high-ranking S.H.I.E.L.D. official she'd charmed into talking. Delivered with just enough specificity to be convincing.
If Daisy hadn't known the actual situation, she might have believed it.
She turned the whole thing over. The Hill story was false — she was certain of that. But the part about Fury's classified priority file, and her own name sitting at the top of it? That, she couldn't dismiss.
She'd always assumed she was just along for the ride.
Apparently not.
S.H.I.E.L.D. was a house full of cracks — but it was still a house. If she held a high clearance there, everything she needed to do would become significantly easier.
Viper couldn't see Daisy's face, but she could feel that something had landed. A reaction was a foothold. She worked it carefully, assembling her pitch.
"Let me go. My contacts can move you up the ranks inside S.H.I.E.L.D. quickly. And I do have considerable... influence." She trailed off at the end with just enough suggestion.
Daisy paused. That sounds familiar. A beat, and then she placed it — almost word for word what she'd said to Sitwell once, back when she'd been working him. Flattery and leverage dressed up as an offer.
Honestly, HYDRA running her up the S.H.I.E.L.D. ladder would be fast. But there was no trust between them, not a scrap, and that made the whole thing decorative.
Still — there was something else she needed. Something personal. Nothing in Fury's briefing covered it.
She came around to face Viper. "I don't believe you."
"I'll swear on my parents' names. Whatever happened tonight — I won't hold it against you." Viper's eyes were steady. This one wasn't a lie.
Daisy still didn't buy it. I won't hold it against you — beautiful words. A verbal trap. They'd still be enemies the moment the chains came off. Nothing about the underlying dynamic changed.
"I'll release you," Daisy said. "But there's one condition."
"Name it." Viper went very still. She knew this was the hinge point.
"You find someone for me. Then you come with me to a specific location. That's what it costs."
Silence held for half a minute before Viper spoke. "Who are we looking for?"
Daisy pulled out her tablet, tapped quickly, and turned the screen around. "Erik Killmonger."
Viper's posture shifted slightly — the face on the screen clearly wasn't HYDRA. The organization had inherited its Aryan supremacy framework down to the bone; the upper ranks were almost uniformly white, and this man wasn't one of them. Whoever he was, he posed no threat to her people.
She studied the photo. She definitely didn't know him.
Daisy continued. "He graduated from the University of Annapolis at nineteen, then took a master's degree from MIT. He served with the Navy SEALs — deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. His unit carries a high classification level. I can't pin down his exact location through normal channels. I need you to pull him out."
A full name, a face, a living person — theoretically simple enough. But this man was buried in military classified operations, and S.H.I.E.L.D. kept its distance from the armed forces. Tracking him through legitimate means would be grinding, slow work. HYDRA, though, had fingers deep in high command. Given real effort, they'd find him.
Viper chose honesty here. No point lying about small details and poisoning the negotiation.
"That's manageable. If he's on this planet, I can find him." She let a beat pass. "And after that — where are we going?"
Wakanda. But Daisy wasn't saying that yet. She had two reasons for bringing Viper along: one, a capable backup; two, a convenient scapegoat when the dust settled. Her rough outline was already in shape — Viper goes in and makes noise; Daisy arrives at just the right moment looking like the reasonable party; they walk out with vibranium and goodwill. Back to New York. Ideally, anyway. The specifics needed more planning.
As for the aftermath — whether Killmonger and the HYDRA Japan branch ended up at each other's throats in a bloody standoff — that was entirely their problem.