"Oliver," she purred. "I am not prepared to be a sensitive, reasonable, professional individual right now. I'm not feeling my normal, elegant, stylish, and ladylike self" She leaned toward him a little, making him writhe at the additional pressure, and her voice sweetened. "So I want you to believe me when I tell you this: You get one chance. If I even think you're trying to lie to me in any way whatsoever, I'm going to crush your skull and wipe your brains off my boots with your expensive jacket. Have I expressed myself clearly?"
He let out a pained sound and gave her as much of a nod as he could manage.
Felicia leaned back slightly, folding her arms and supporting herself against the alley's other wall as casually as if she'd been resting one foot on a crate instead of on a man's temple. "What did you do?"
"She's a big-money client, Felicia," he said. "She's hired the company before. There's an established relationship. She came to me complaining that you were stalling and feeding her false information."
"Yes. Because I suspected she was plotting murder. Doing the fieldwork for murderers is not good business, Oliver, and it never will be." She paused and then said, "How much did she offer you?"
"Enough," he said, grimacing.
"What did she want?"
"To keep tabs on you," he said. "And when she heard about this Dex person, she wanted him as well."
"The going rate on this kind of thing is, I believe, thirty pieces of silver. I hope she offered you that much, at least."
Oliver lifted one hand in a gesture of surrender. "It wasn't personal, Hardy."
Felicia went completely still and silent for a second. Then she whispered, "Not personal?"
"No."
"This creature you worked for has attempted to kill my friend twice. If it gets the chance, it will kill me, too—not to mention all the bystanders who might get hurt when the music starts. And you pointed them right at him." She twisted her heel, grinding it slowly into the side of Oliver's head. "In what way is that 'not personal'?"
"Wait," Oliver choked out. "Look, it doesn't have to go down like this. We can negotiate, cut you out of the deal. That was what I was trying to do from the start. Trying to look out for one of the company's assets."
"And to pick up some money on the side while you did it?"
"Don't do this," Oliver said. "You don't know these people, Hardy. They're rich, richer than rich. They've got connections, power. You can't survive being their enemy. But if you let me help you, I think I can work something out. Protect you."
Felicia snarled, bent down, lifted Oliver against the wall again, and suddenly flicked out the fingers of her right hand.
I tensed. She had the gloves on. The deadly, razor-sharp talons built into it deployed with a wicked little rasping sound. Very deliberately, Felicia reached out and ran her clawed fingertips lightly down the bricks beside Oliver's head. Sparks flew up. There was an awful, steely sound.
Oliver turned white. He glanced aside at the five long furrows Felicia had dug into the' wall. Sweat beaded his skin.
Felicia picked up his tie with the same hand, her fingers idly toying with it—and soundlessly slicing it to slivers as they did. "Oliver," she said. "I am disinclined to let you betray me and simply walk away. So there's something I want you to think about."
His eyes were all on the claws. A cut across one cheek was bleeding a little. "I'm listening."
"First, you're going to go back to the van. You're going to get Dex somewhere safe, without telling anyone anything about him. You will never speak to Mortia or her flunkies again. Resign. The money you took to betray me is forfeit. You will find a place for it to go. A good place, where it might help someone."
"I have done nothing wrong," he said. "I have broken no laws."
"Which might matter to courts and lawyers," Felicia said pleasantly. And then her eyes blazed and she struck suddenly and savagely at the wall again, this time gouging out a six-inch-long section of brick as deep as the second joint of her fingers. "But you hurt my friends."
she snarled. "Do it, Oliver. Or I'll destroy you."
"You aren't a killer," he said, eyes narrowing.
"Who said anything about killing? By the time I'm finished with you, you won't have a penny. You won't have a home. You won't have a job. What you will have is nothing. And everyone you've ever crossed is going to know exactly where to look you up."
Oliver licked his lips, and his voice trembled. "You wouldn't do that."
She released him, springing the claws on the other hand, and simply leaned the tips of her fingers against the bricks on either side of his head, creating a steady trickle of sparks, a grinding, growling chorus of scrapes and tiny shrieks of protesting brick.
Her eyes turned wide and cold and angry, and leaned in close enough that he had to have felt her breath on his face. "Try me," she purred.
Oliver shivered and looked away.
"Get out," she said, her voice quiet and full of contempt. "Get out of my sight."
She stepped back from him, and Oliver tried for a dignified retreat.
She kicked him hard in the seat of the pants as he left, sending him out onto the sidewalk in an undignified sprawl. Oliver hurried away, limping.
Felicia watched him go for a minute. Then she recovered his gun, disassembled it in a single smooth motion, and dropped the pieces into several different trash cans. She put the lids back on the cans, shook her head, sighed, and looked up to where I sat thirty feet up the building's wall in a patch of heavy shadow. "I thought you'd have come down there, at the end."
I dropped to the alley to stand with her. "You had him under control. Why would I do that?"
She did not look at me, and shrugged. "The bit with the claws. I figured you'd grab my wrist any second, all worried that I was about to kill him in cold blood."
"What?"
"If the positions had been reversed, you'd have stopped Oliver."
"Well, yes, but—"
"If it had been the Rhino, you'd have stepped in."
"Felicia," I said, a little frustrated. "Where are you going with this?"
Her eyes grew cold, and she said, "Nowhere. Never mind. You'd probably want to help Oliver if he was in trouble. Just like you're helping the Rhino. No one is too black-hearted to be worthy of the Amazing Spider-Man's protection."
Then she began walking back down the alley toward the van.
I stared after her, and in a sudden flash of insight I finally understood her recent attitude—at least a little bit.
Felicia wasn't defending the Rhino.
She was defending herself
I knew that she'd tried, she'd really tried to be one of the active good guys, but… well, she hadn't been all that good at it. Her past sins had weighed against her, and she'd had a rough path to follow. She'd given up, largely, on the whole freelance-hero gig. Now she worked in private security. Like the Rhino, like Oliver, she was a mercenary—one on the side of the law and civilization, true, but a mercenary nonetheless.
Maybe my initial contempt and antipathy toward the Rhino bothered her, because she saw too many similarities in herself? Maybe it made her wonder if I harbored some degree of the same contempt for her.
Maybe she wondered if she had just been another sad charity case on whom I'd taken pity. Maybe that was why we hadn't worked out. Maybe my opinion, which had been important enough to her to help motivate her to abandon a life of crime, was still important to her.
If so, then by causing her to question the nature of our relationship, maybe I was eroding the foundation of the new life she was building.