Chapter 3: A Scar for a Scar
The needle bit into his skin again, a sharp, precise sting. Frank gritted his teeth, the thread pulling taut through the gash on his bicep. The knife had been cheap, serrated, and the wound was ugly. He’d sterilized the needle with a lighter, but his left hand was clumsy, his angle wrong. The suture puckered the skin.
“You’ll get an infection.”
Her voice came from the kitchen doorway, a flat statement in the dim air. He hadn’t heard her move. One moment the apartment was silent save for his own breathing, the next she was there, leaning against the frame, a silhouette backlit by the sickly glow of the hallway fluorescent.
“I’ve had worse,” he grunted, not looking up.
“Evidently.” She pushed off the frame and walked into the living room. Her steps made no sound on the worn floorboards. She stopped beside the threadbare sofa where he sat, her shadow falling over his hands. “You’re pulling it too tight. The tissue will necrose. It needs to approximate, not strangle.”
Frank paused, the needle hovering. He finally looked up at her. She was wearing one of Matt’s old Columbia sweatshirts, the sleeves rolled up. It should have looked soft. On her, it looked like a discarded skin. Her eyes were on his work, analytical, detached.
“You a medic now?”
“I was a Corpsman. Before the Teams.” She held out her hand, palm up. It was steady, unblinking. “Give it.”
A tense silence stretched. The radiator kicked on with a violent clang, making him flinch. She didn’t. Frank exhaled, a short, frustrated puff of air, and passed her the needle and the curved forceps.
She took them, her fingers brushing his. They were cool, dry. Not the cold of the apartment, but the cold of something that held no internal furnace. She pulled the low standing lamp closer, the bulb casting a harsh circle of light on his arm.
She worked without speaking. Her movements were economical, flawless. The needle entered and exited the torn flesh with a gentle, rhythmic push and pull. Each stitch was perfectly spaced, the tension ideal. There was no hesitation, no second-guessing. It was like watching a machine repair itself.
Frank watched her face. In the stark light, he could see the fine scars—old, almost invisible—that networked her temples and jawline. Battlefield souvenirs from a life he understood. Her expression was one of intense, empty focus. She could have been assembling a rifle or disarming an IED. The intimacy of the act was completely absent from her.
“You do this for your unit?” he asked, just to break the quiet.
“When needed. Mostly for myself.” She tied off a knot, clipped the thread with a small pair of scissors from the first-aid kit. “The transformations… the early ones… are not gentle. There is a lot of damage to manage.”
He thought of the grotesque regeneration on the rooftop, the sound of her flesh knitting. This was different. This was a craft.
She finished the last stitch, her thumb smoothing the tape holding the sterile pad in place. But instead of pulling away, her hand remained. Her thumb, cold and precise, traced the edge of the bandage, then drifted lower. It grazed over the ridge of an older, thicker scar—the one on his wrist.
It was a faint, pink line now. A souvenir of the rooftop. Of her.
Her touch was neither tender nor threatening. It was exploratory. A forensic examination of her own impact on the world.
Frank’s breathing shallowed. His whole arm was aware of that cold point of contact. He could feel the ghost-sensation of her mouth there, the deep, silent pull that had connected them in the most visceral way imaginable. The memory brought a flush of heat to his neck, immediately fought down, locked away. He didn’t move.
“This one is healing adequately,” she murmured, almost to herself. Her gray eyes lifted from his wrist to meet his. They held no emotion, but they held knowledge. A vast, dark library of it. “The vascular repair is complete. You should have no lasting deficit.”
He said nothing. The air in the apartment felt thick, charged with unspoken things. The incense Matt burned to cover the smell of the city couldn’t mask the coppery tang of his blood or the faint, ozone-like scent that clung to her.
Her thumb stopped tracing. It rested, a slight weight on his pulse point.
“Now you have a piece of me,” she whispered.
The words hung in the space between them. They weren’t possessive. They weren’t romantic. They were a cold, hard statement of fact. His blood, her sustenance. Her essence, now a permanent thread woven into his flesh. A biological receipt.
Frank’s jaw tightened. He could feel his own heartbeat against her still thumb—a frantic, living drum against absolute stillness. The contradiction was maddening.
“Yeah,” he finally rasped, his voice rough. “Lucky me.”
A ghost of something flickered at the corner of her mouth. Not a smile. A memory of a smile’s musculature. “It is a tactical liability. A permanent record. If anyone ever sequences your DNA in depth, they will find anomalies. Markers that are not human.”
“You worried about my dental records?”
“I am stating parameters.” She finally removed her hand, turning to clean the instruments with a methodical, clinical efficiency. “The connection is now biochemical. It may have… unforeseen effects.”
“Like what? A craving for rare steak and night vision?”
She placed the needle back in the kit. “Like a residual awareness. A faint pull on the blood that is now, in part, mine. Do not be surprised if you find yourself… oriented… in my direction when your guard is down.”
Frank stood up abruptly, the movement causing a throb in his freshly stitched arm. He needed space from her, from the chill she brought into the room. He walked to the window, looking down at the neon-washed street. “Great. So I’m a fucking compass for a vampire.”
“You are a repository. And a witness.” She closed the first-aid kit with a soft click. “The blood-memory is weak in your kind. It will fade. But for a time, the thread exists.”
He heard her move behind him, not toward him, but toward the small bookcase. He glanced over his shoulder. She was standing before the framed photograph of herself—the one from before, her face younger, softer, half-hidden by a scarf but her eyes alive with a humor that had been utterly extinguished. She didn’t touch it. She just stared.
“He looks at this every day,” she said, her back to him. “He touches the frame to align it. He remembers the woman here. He needs her to be me.”
Frank turned around, leaning against the windowsill. “She’s not.”
“I know.” A long pause. The radiator clanged again. “I access the memory files. I simulate the behaviors. The laughter patterns. The anecdote about our grandfather’s fishing boat. The appropriate concern for his sleep schedule. The script is… extensive.”
“He knows something’s off,” Frank said, though he wasn’t sure he believed it. “He’s choosing not to see it.”
“That is his vulnerability.” She turned from the photo. Her expression was blank, but her voice carried a strange, hollow resonance. “It is also my primary directive. To preserve that illusion for as long as operationally possible. It is the core of the mission.”
Frank snorted. “The mission. Right.”
“It is all I have.” The words were stripped bare. “When the last memory of her is gone from the world, when he finally sees what I am… then the anchor has nothing to hold. Then I am just hunger and silence. Then you can put me down, Frank Castle. As you promised.”
The starkness of it, the sheer tactical despair, hit him in the chest. He’d seen men with the thousand-yard stare, men who’d lost their souls in the sand. This was worse. This was a soul that knew exactly where it was, locked in a vault it could never open.
Before he could form a response—and what response was there to that?—the distinctive rhythm of a familiar heartbeat approached in the hallway outside, quick and light. Keys jingled.
Daria’s entire demeanor shifted in an instant. The hollow gravity vanished. Her posture relaxed by a fraction. She picked up a discarded coffee mug from the table and carried it toward the kitchen sink, her movements assuming a casual, human weight. “You should keep that arm elevated for a few hours,” she said, her voice lifting, adopting a warmer, conversational tone that was eerily convincing. “And for God’s sake, change the dressing tomorrow. I left extra gauze on the counter.”
The door unlocked and swung open.
Matt stepped in, the chill of the night clinging to his leather jacket. He smiled, a genuine, easy thing that lit up the gloomy apartment. “Hey. I could hear you two lecturing about first aid from the stairwell. Everything okay?”
“Frank was practicing his sewing on his own arm,” Daria said, turning on the tap. “With the finesse of a drunk taxidermist. I intervened.”
Matt laughed, hanging his jacket and cane by the door. “Sounds about right. You okay, Frank?”
“Peachy,” Frank grunted, folding his arms, then wincing as the stitches pulled.
“He’ll live,” Daria said, the simulacrum of a fond exasperation in her voice. It was flawless. Frank watched the performance, a cold knot in his stomach. “How was Mrs. Mahoney?”
“Persuaded,” Matt said, heading to the fridge. “The landlord’s fixing the leak tomorrow. Want a beer, Frank? Dar, I have that chamomile you like.”
“Please,” she said.
Frank watched as Daria accepted the tea bag from Matt, their fingers brushing. He saw the meticulous care she took to move at human speed, to let her breath fog the rim of the mug slightly before sipping. He saw Matt’s untroubled face, radiant with the simple joy of having family in the room.
The thread on his wrist itched. A biochemical record. A pull.
He took the beer Matt offered, the bottle cold in his hand. “Thanks.”
“So,” Matt said, leaning against the counter. “You two. Stuck here together. I hope he wasn’t too much of a pain, Dar.”
“We managed,” she said, her pale eyes sliding toward Frank for a millisecond. In them, he saw the truth, buried under the perfect act. The vault, the hunger, the silence.The mission. “We had a very enlightening conversation about wound care.”
Frank took a long swig of beer, the bitterness a welcome anchor. “Yeah,” he said, his voice low. “Enlightening.”
The beer tasted like aluminum and regret. Frank finished it in three long pulls, the glass clinking hard on the table as he stood. “Gonna hit the rack. Got things to do tomorrow.”
Matt nodded, his head tilted towards the sound. “Take it easy on that arm. And thanks, Dar. For patching him up.”
“Anytime,” she said, her voice a warm lie wrapped in steam from her mug.
Frank didn’t look at her as he left. The hallway was colder. He could still feel the ghost of her thumb on his wrist, a brand.
The next night smelled of diesel and imminent rain. Frank watched from a rooftop as a deal went down in the concrete canyon below—a flash of briefcases, low voices swallowed by the city’s groan. It was a new crew, ambitious and messy, trying to fill the vacuum Viktor’s disappearance had left. Ambitious men made mistakes. Messy men left witnesses.
He was calculating his drop when the first mistake happened. A kid, maybe sixteen, holding an oversized pistol, peered up from behind a dumpster directly beneath Frank’s perch. Their eyes met. The kid’s widened in panic.
The gun went off, a wild, echoing crack.
Frank didn’t hear the shot that hit him. He felt it—a hot, tearing punch high on his left side, just above the armor plate. It spun him, the rooftop gravel skittering under his boots. The second shot rang out as he was falling, but the impact never came.
He looked up, blinking through a haze of pain.
Daria stood between him and the edge, a statue carved from shadow. She had come from nowhere, silent as always. Her right arm was outstretched, the fabric of her dark sleeve ripped open. Beneath it, her pale skin was puckered, three distinct, wet craters in a tight grouping across her deltoid and chest.
Black, viscous fluid seeped from them, not red. It smelled of ozone and wet soil.
Down below, the kid with the gun was staring, confused, his weapon aimed at the space where Frank had been. Then his head snapped to the side. There was no gunshot, just a wet, crunching pop. He crumpled.
“You’re hit,” Frank growled, clambering to his feet. His own side screamed in protest.
“I am fine.” Her voice was utterly level. She didn’t look at the wounds. Her eyes scanned the other rooftops, the alleys. “The transaction is compromised. Police sirens are 1.2 miles out. We need to extract.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“It is not blood.” She finally glanced at the wounds, a clinical assessment. “It will seal. We need to move.”
She turned and was at the roof access door before he could argue. Frank followed, one hand pressed to the hot, sticky leak in his own side. The descent down the fire escape was a blur of iron and pain. She moved ahead of him, a guiding shadow, her damaged arm hanging loose but functional.
He lost track of the turns, the alleys. She led him to a rusted door he didn’t recognize, through a basement that stank of mold and rat poison, and up into the sterile, fluorescent harshness of his current safehouse. The door clicked shut behind them, sealing out the city’s wail.
Frank shrugged off his vest, hissing as the fabric pulled at the bullet graze. It was messy, but shallow. He’d live. He grabbed a roll of gauze from a metal shelf.
Then he saw her.
She stood by the concrete sink, her back to him, head bowed. Her shoulders were stiff. She was peeling the torn sleeve away from the wounds with deliberate, slow movements. The black fluid had slowed, but the holes remained—deep, puckered indentations that looked wrong, like voids in her flesh.
“Daria.”
“I said it’s fine.” Her tone was final, a command. But she didn’t turn.
He walked over. The fluorescent light hummed, buzzing on the edges of his hearing. He could see the details now. The edges of the wounds were gray, necrotic. The bullets hadn’t passed through; they were lodged in that impossible tissue, refusing to heal. The UV damage from the Sun Hammer had been instant, violent. This was a slow, stubborn poison.
“They’re not sealing.”
“They will.” She tried to turn, to block his view. A minute tremor ran through her arm.
Frank didn’t think. The memory of the rooftop, of the biochemical thread, of her cold thumb on his scar, was just a flash in his hindbrain. Action preceded analysis.
He held out his arm, wrist up, between her and the sink.
The room went very still. The hum of the light was deafening. She stared at his offered wrist, then at his face. Her pale eyes were wide, the predator stillness broken by something that looked almost like panic.
“You don’t know what that does,” she whispered. “The connection. It deepens.”
“I don’t care.” His voice was rough. The truth of it was a stone in his throat. He didn’t care about the magnetism, the pull, the thread. He cared about the three holes in her that were there because of a panicked kid’s wild shot aimed at him. He cared about operational integrity. That’s what he told himself. “You’re compromised. I need you functional. Drink.”
Her gaze locked on the pulse point in his wrist. He saw her throat convulse. It wasn’t hunger. It was reluctance, a war against a need that was both biological and, now, strangely indebted.
Slowly, so slowly, her cold fingers encircled his forearm. Her touch was feather-light at first, then firm. Her other hand came up, bracing against his bicep for balance. Or for connection.
She bent her head.
Her mouth was cold on his skin. The initial sensation was the same—the soft press, the gentle suction. Then the pull came, deeper than before. It wasn’t just a draw on his blood; it was an anchor line thrown into a dark ocean, a vital link snapping taut.
A jolt went through him, white-hot and startling. It wasn’t pain. It was a surge of acute, hyper-awareness. He could feel the path of his own blood through his veins, a river of heat rushing toward the cold absence of her. He could feel the faint, resonant echo of her damage—a dull, throbbing void where the bullets sat.
He swayed on his feet. His free hand shot out, gripping the edge of the steel sink. The cold metal grounded him.
She drank.
The minutes stretched, thin and transparent. The rational part of his mind, the tactician, counted. This was beyond the minimum. Far beyond. This was replenishment. This was a claiming.
Her fingers tightened on his arm. A low, almost imperceptible sound vibrated against his skin—not a moan, but a resonance of relief, of terrible, necessary satisfaction. The pull began to slow, becoming languid, lingering. She was drawing out the process, savoring the current of life she could no longer create for herself.
Finally, with what seemed like a profound effort of will, she released him. She straightened up, her lips stained dark. She didn’t wipe them clean. Her eyes were closed.
He watched, dizzy, as the change occurred. The gray, necrotic flesh around the bullet wounds flushed with a pale, pearlescent pink. The puckered holes began to close from the inside out, the foreign lead pushed to the surface and expelled with soft, wet clicks onto the concrete floor. The skin smoothed over, leaving only faint, silvery scars behind, like old cracks in porcelain.
She opened her eyes. They were the same pale gray, but the stillness was different. Sated. Heavy.
She looked from her healed arm to his face, then to his wrist, where twin beads of blood welled from the precise punctures. Without a word, she took the gauze from his other hand. She tore a strip, her movements once again efficient, and wrapped it neatly around his wrist, tying it off.
Her fingers lingered on the bandage.
“The thread is now a cable,” she said, her voice hushed. She finally met his gaze. “You will feel the pull in your sleep. In your breath. It does not fade.”
Frank just nodded. He could feel it already—a deep, subcutaneous tug toward the cold space she occupied. A compass needle magnetized to true north.
“Yeah,” he breathed, the word tasting of iron and inevitability. “I know.”
“I know.”
The words hung between them, a confession he hadn’t meant to make. The pull was a live wire in his chest, humming toward the cold static of her. He left the safehouse without another word, the door shutting on her silent, watchful form.
His own bed, in a different concrete cell across town, offered no peace. He lay in the dark, arm behind his head, staring at a crack in the ceiling. The graze on his side itched. The bandage on his wrist felt like a brand. He could smell her—ozone and cold stone—on his own skin.
Sleep, when it finally came, was not an escape.
He was back in the warehouse by the Hudson, but the corrugated walls were breathing. The scent of mildew was overpowered by the coppery tang of his own blood, fresh and bright in the air. He stood in the center, armored, but his weapons were gone.
She emerged from the shadows not with her human face, but with the grinding, layered maw fully exposed. The rows of teeth glistened in the non-light. She didn’t speak. She simply walked toward him, each step silent, her gray eyes fixed on his.
He tried to move, to raise his fists. His body was stone.
She stopped an inch from him. The terrible mouth was so close he could feel the dry, cold air whispering from it. Instead of biting, she leaned in and pressed her forehead against his. The contact was electric, a shock of absolute zero that seared into his skull.
This is the anchor, a voice said in the dream, and it was her voice and his own, tangled together. This is the weight.
He woke with a gasp, bolt upright in the sweat-damp sheets. The room was pitch black, silent. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drum solo. He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, seeing phantom afterimages of those teeth.
“Fuck,” he whispered to the empty dark.
It was just a dream. Stress. Adrenaline drop. He’d had nightmares for years, vivid reels of sand and fire and a family picnic that always ended in red. This was new, but it was just biology. The cable, as she called it. His mind trying to process the biochemical invasion.
He lay back down, forcing his breathing to slow. He counted the types of munitions in his primary weapon cache. He planned the next three moves against the new crew. He did not think of cold foreheads or silent pulls.
It didn’t work.
The dreams returned the next night, and the night after. They were never the same, but they were always her.
In one, they were on the rooftop again, but the UV beam was fixed on him. He was burning, his skin cracking, and she stood watching with her head tilted, clinically assessing the damage. In another, they were in Matt’s apartment, and she was making tea, her movements perfectly normal, but when she handed him the mug it was full of swirling, dark blood.
The most unsettling one was quiet. They were just standing in an empty subway station, the tiles echoing with distant, phantom trains. She looked like she did in Matt’s old photo, younger, the scarf around her neck. She smiled, and it reached her eyes. Then she said, “You’re dying, Frank. It’s taking longer for you than it did for me.” He woke up with an ache in his chest that had nothing to do with wounds.
Days bled into a strained new routine. The pull was a constant, low-grade nuisance. He’d be scoping a location, and his attention would snag on a shadow that felt emptier than the others. He’d know she was there, watching the same target from a different angle. He once turned a corner in a gunparts warehouse and came face-to-face with her. She was inspecting a crate of imported Slovakian steel barrels. They stared at each other for three full seconds in the green glow of a safety light.
“The metallurgy is inferior,” she stated, as if they’d been in mid-conversation. “They’ll warp after four hundred rounds. A waste of money.”
“Noted,” he grunted, and moved past her, the air between them crackling.
He started drinking more coffee. The caffeine did nothing for the fatigue clinging to his bones, a fatigue no amount of sleep could fix. He caught himself staring at his reflection in the van’s window, looking for a change in his own eyes.
Matt noticed. Of course he did.
They were walking back from a dead-end lead on a missing witness, the chill wind cutting through the alleys. Matt tapped his cane along a chain-link fence, its rhythmic scrape-tap a counterpoint to their footsteps.
“You sleeping okay?” Matt asked, casual.
“I sleep when I need to.”
“That’s not what I asked. Your heartbeat’s been… jagged. Since that night at my place. The gunshot deal.” Matt’s head was tilted, his expression hidden behind red lenses and a slight frown. “And there’s a smell on you sometimes. Faint. Like a storm front.”
Frank’s stride hitched for a half-step. “Old buildings. Wet concrete.”
“It’s not.” Matt stopped walking. He turned his head, not quite facing Frank. “It’s her. Isn’t it?”
Frank’s blood went cold. He saw the whole house of cards collapsing—Matt’s faith, his fragile happiness, shattered by the truth. He prepared for the blow.
“She’s worried about you,” Matt continued, his voice softening. “She doesn’t say it, but I can hear it in the way she holds her breath when your name comes up. She thinks you’re pushing too hard. That you’re not recovering from your injuries.”
The relief that washed through Frank was immediately followed by a corrosive wave of guilt. Matt was interpreting every sign through the lens of his hope. He was weaving a narrative of concerned family, not of blood bonds and nocturnal predators.
“I’m fine,” Frank said, the lie ash in his mouth.
“You’re not. And you’re drinking terrible coffee. The stuff from the bodega on 48th is hydrochloric acid in a cup.” Matt started walking again. “Come by tomorrow. She’s making lasagna. The kind with the spicy sausage. You’ll eat. You’ll sleep on a real couch. End of discussion.”
Frank didn’t have the energy to refuse.
The lasagna was a precise construction. The cheese was perfectly browned, the layers even, the seasoning robust. It tasted like memory. Daria served it quietly, playing her part, asking Matt about his day, smiling at the right moments. Frank ate mechanically, the food like sawdust. He was hyper-aware of her every movement, the cable in his chest tugging with every pass she made between the stove and the table.
After dinner, Matt excused himself to take a work call in his bedroom. The apartment kitchen shrank.
Daria stood at the sink, washing the glass dish. Her back was to him. Frank stayed at the table, tracing a chip in the wood.
“He thinks you’re worried about me,” he said.
“I am monitoring your physical degradation. The sleep deprivation is affecting your reaction time. Your vigilance cycles are down fourteen percent.” She rinsed the soap off, her movements efficient. “It is a liability.”
“It’s the dreams,” he said, and immediately regretted it. It was too naked, too revealing.
She went very still. The water ran over her motionless hands. She shut it off. The silence was a physical thing.
“What do you dream?” she asked, still facing away.
“You. The warehouse. The teeth.” He kept his voice low, flat. “Various locations. You’re always there.”
She turned slowly, drying her hands on a towel. Her expression was unreadable, but her focus was absolute. “The blood-memory is seeking pattern recognition. Your subconscious is attempting to map the foreign element. To categorize the threat.”
“Is that what it is?”
“It is a side effect of a deepened biochemical exchange. My cellular information is in your bloodstream. Your mind is attempting to process it as it would a pathogen or a trauma.” She stated it like a field manual entry. “The content is irrelevant. It is neural static.”
“It doesn’t feel irrelevant.” He stood up, the chair legs scraping loudly. “It feels like you’re in my head.”
“I am,” she said, without malice. “Approximately 0.03% of my repaired tissue is built from your platelets and plasma. The reverse is also true. It is a factual reciprocity.”
Frank took a step closer. The kitchen was too warm. “Can you feel it? This pull?”
She didn’t retreat. “I am aware of your proximity. As I would be aware of a landmark or a radio beacon. The ‘pull’ is your living physiology reacting to an anomalous presence. You are the one feeling it, because you are the one still capable of feeling.”
Her clinical dissection was more infuriating than any evasion. She was a locked vault, and he was shouting at the metal.
“So what’s the fix?” he demanded, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. “How do I make it stop?”
For a long moment, she just looked at him. Her gaze traveled over his face, tracing the fatigue, the tension, the anger. Something in her own stillness shifted, a minute recalibration.
“There are two ways,” she said, her voice barely audible. “The first is severance. You would need to be beyond my perceptual range for an extended period.Months. Perhaps years. The cellular degradation in your body would eventually purge the markers. The dreams would fade.”
“And the second?”
“Completion.” The word fell between them, heavy and final. “The bond is a circuit seeking equilibrium. It is currently… unbalanced. It may settle if the exchange is mutual.”
Frank’s breath caught. “Mutual.”
“You have my blood in your wounds,” she said, her eyes glacial and clear. “I have yours in my sustenance. The circuit is open. It is screaming. These dreams… they are the scream.”
He understood then, with a clarity that chilled him deeper than her touch. She wasn’t suggesting he drink her blood. She was stating a logical endpoint. A closed loop. A perfect, horrific symmetry.
From the hallway, the sound of Matt’s bedroom door opening. His light, humming footsteps approached.
Daria’s posture softened instantly, the lethal precision melting into a woman drying a dish. She gave Frank a look that was both a warning and an acknowledgment. The conversation was over. The truth hovered in the air between them, charged and unspeakable.
Matt appeared in the doorway, smiling. “All good? You two aren’t arguing about wound care again, are you?”
“No arguments,” Daria said, hanging the towel. “Frank was just telling me he needs to get going. Early start tomorrow.”
Frank nodded, unable to speak. The cable in his chest thrummed, a vibration tuned to her frequency. He moved toward the door, the pull now a physical ache, a hook lodged behind his sternum.
“Get some sleep, Frank,” Matt said, clapping him on the good shoulder. “Real sleep. On a bed.”
“Yeah,” Frank managed. He didn’t look back at her.
The night air was a slap. He walked, directionless, for blocks. The city’s noise was a blur. His mind replayed her words. Severance. Completion.
He thought of driving west and not stopping until the ocean forced him to. He thought of the hollow, silent years that would follow, the gnawing unknown of whether she was still out there, whether Matt was safe.
Then he thought of the other option. The closed circuit. The end of the screaming.
He found himself on a rooftop not far from her usual patrol routes, the wind whipping at his jacket. He didn’t have to wait long. A shadow detached itself from a gargoyle on the adjacent building, resolving into her lean form. She stood on the parapet, ten yards away, watching him. She’d known he would come. She’d felt it too.
He didn’t speak. He just looked at her, the question hanging in the frozen air between them.
She took a single, silent step forward, off the parapet, landing without a sound on the gravel. Her pale eyes held his, waiting.
The pull tightened, a magnetic vice.
Frank took a breath, the decision coalescing in the chill dark.