Foggy Nelson laughed so hard his shoulders shook, thoroughly entertained by his friend's words. He clapped Matt on the back. "You have absolutely no imagination. Let me tell you, Miss Johnson is stunning—those eyes of hers especially, like they've got twin flames burning inside them. Give it up, man. When we get back I'll introduce you to a girl from Virginia..."
The two of them were still trading jokes as they left the New York Courthouse, though Matt remained faintly puzzled. Daisy had kept herself in a baseline human state, but with the Heart-Shaped Herb still in her system, she registered to his ears like something monstrous: her blood moved too fast, her heart struck too hard, her breathing sat at a cadence no ordinary person could match. Every physical metric placed her in a class of her own.
He made up an excuse and slipped away from Foggy, cutting into a side alley and taking a shortcut in an attempt to catch up with Daisy and the maid. But the two of them had already driven off, and Matt could hardly parkour across rooftops in broad daylight. He had no choice but to let it go.
Daisy had assumed the whole thing was trivial. She had no interest in getting to know Daredevil, and she certainly wasn't going to murder someone just because he'd acted as the prosecution attorney. She'd underestimated superhero curiosity, though—heroes had a compulsion to investigate everything, and their girlfriends, moved by love, would willingly walk into the lion's den on their behalf.
One of the villa's staff quit for personal reasons, and Daisy hired a replacement through a domestic agency. When she opened the door and saw the woman standing there—175 cm (5'9"), tan skin, black hair, young and striking—her expression cooled immediately.
Could you at least be professional about the spy thing? The woman had a fantastic figure, but the muscle definition along her arms and neck was impossible to miss. This was someone who had been put through brutal training.
Daisy let out a slow breath, picked up the application, and her mood soured further. The woman hadn't even changed her name.
"Miss Elektra Natchios." She looked up. "What exactly brought you to apply for a housekeeping position? According to your résumé you're still a student—you'd have far better part-time job options available to you, wouldn't you?"
Quick, athletic, with something untamed living behind her eyes. Even with every effort to suppress it, the way Elektra sat, the way she moved, carried the quality of a leopard that had never been fully tamed. She found the assignment just as absurd as Daisy did.
As an assassin trained by Stick, the leader of the Chaste—the Hand's ancient enemy—dispatched personally by her mentor Stick, Elektra hadn't been given a choice in the matter. Add to that the fact that her boyfriend Matt harbored his own doubts about Daisy's true identity and had begged her to find a way into the villa to look for clues. Two sets of orders pointing at the same target. Here she was.
She improvised an excuse on the spot—a story about planning to marry after graduation and wanting to learn housekeeping beforehand so she wouldn't be helpless as a wife—and delivered it without hesitation.
Daisy's smile didn't quite reach her eyes, but she agreed after only a moment's pause. Elektra's looks were a point in her favor, and frankly the villa held few real secrets. The areas that did were fortified against CRISIS's defenses—a few martial artists weren't getting through that. She wasn't particularly worried.
Elektra fell into the role quickly; her training showed. She played the part of an eager but inexperienced college student learning housework for the first time—present enough not to seem useless, unremarkable enough not to attract suspicion. She had clearly done her homework on what the role required.
Other than being almost distractingly beautiful, Elektra was a perfectly adequate housemaid.
Daisy and the maid both knew she was a spy. Little Lorna didn't. She noticed a new woman had appeared in the house and found it vaguely odd, but didn't think much of it.
The lion cub and Rhino, for their part, couldn't have cared less.
After three days in the villa, Elektra had reached one inescapable conclusion: there were far too many women here. Every member of the household staff was female. Even the lion was female. The occasional visitor—Black Widow, Sharon, Mockingbird—was invariably beautiful, every single one of them. The voice-activated home system even used a woman's voice. It made her wonder.
On her day off—modern domestic work came with days off—Elektra left the villa, shook any potential tail with practiced ease, and descended into an underground facility.
Inside a bare room, a scrawny blind old man—wearing a tattered short shirt, his body thin as a bamboo pole—sat cross-legged on the floor, cradling a katana, waiting for her. His name was Stick. He was Matt's teacher, and the leader of the Chaste. Eyes long since robbed of light stared at a fixed point ahead of him, as if he'd been sitting there for hours.
"I think my cover is blown. A lot of the women there seem like—" She was trying to articulate it: female operatives, every last one of them. A woman named Natasha had arrived this morning, taken one look at Elektra, and smiled—the kind of smile that said she'd spotted something amusing to hunt.
"I don't think I can make any real progress on this assignment."
Elektra's instincts were telling her there was far more going on behind that villa than met the eye. What kind of operation trained an entire network of beautiful female agents? And now she was supposed to run an intelligence operation inside a house full of intelligence operatives. Even Elektra, who liked a challenge, found that daunting.
"Continue." Stick ran a length of silk slowly along the blade.
Elektra wasn't sure she'd heard correctly. She asked again.
"Continue your mission." He said nothing more after that.
Orders were orders. She went back.
She did manage to glean a few things despite everything. Often, within five minutes, Daisy would be gone without a trace; half an hour later she would reappear from who-knew-where.
Ghost-like. That was the only word for it.
She'd also misjudged Maki's role. She'd assumed Miss Maki was a subordinate or assistant of some kind. Living in the villa quickly corrected that impression: Maki was the housekeeper. Which placed Elektra, the spy pretending to be a maid, under the direct authority of the person running the household.
She got along well enough with everyone else. But she and the maid had, for reasons that defied rational explanation, grated on each other from day one.
Dishes not clean enough. Footsteps too heavy. An endless list of arbitrary rules, recited with evident relish.
Having a genuine spy delivered right to her door—and a compliant one at that, who absorbed every reprimand without protest—had triggered something in the maid's personality. She ordered a package online, handed it to Elektra, and told her to put it on.
Elektra looked down at what she was holding: a maid uniform, black and white, thin as gossamer. The skirt—was this thing even legal? The entire back was open. White stockings. Heels. Who could actually work in this?
Maki's expression said, plainly, you're welcome to leave.
Elektra thought of Stick's orders. She gritted her teeth and changed.
She'd trained in Japan. She could handle even the most embarrassing outfits. And with only women in the house, there wasn't much to worry about on that front. Still—she was fairly sure Matsumoto Maki had seen through her cover and was simply making the most of it.
Let her see how far my patience goes, Elektra told herself, and set her jaw.