The kitchen smelled like cinnamon, butter, and something sweet caramelizing in the oven.
Felix had claimed the entire center island with papers, open folders, and his laptop. A forensic file here. A zoomed photo there. Digital scans—bone density charts, blood toxicology, organ condition. All of it arranged meticulously.
"Here you are!"
A plate slid beside his elbow. Apple pie, steam curling lazily into the air.
"Thanks," Felix muttered, not looking away from the screen.
Rio laughed because he immediately grabbed the slice with his hand and shoved a bite into his mouth like a starving animal. "Fork," she teased, tapping one on the counter.
"Mmff," Felix said, chewing, still focused on the data. The fork remained untouched.
She kissed the top of his head and drifted toward the stove again. The woman moved like she was in her natural habitat; barefoot, hair tied up, an oversized T-shirt slipping off one shoulder as she diced onions with the familiarity of someone who loved feeding others.
In twenty minutes she had already cooked a full pot of arroz con pollo, a stack of quesadillas, and had dough rising under a towel. Now she chopped vegetables again, humming under her breath, every so often glancing at Felix to check if he needed… well, anything.
He hadn't moved in ten minutes except to inhale pie or to grab stuff he printed out. He needed visuals, because, well…
There was nothing wrong. The forensics report was completely, totally okay. Herbie analyzed it a million times and said while it seemed strange, the photos and analysis done afterward were lacking evidence toward a staged death.
"No way," Felix murmured to himself, tapping rapidly. "Look at it again. Heart looks normal. Lungs…clear. Liver's… fine. Everything's fine. Can there be too fine?"
He scrolled further.
The official Latverian forensics report was painfully dry. Natural cardiac event. No trauma. No toxins. No anomalies except slight fatigue markers in the blood, nothing unusual for a forty-one-year-old working long hours.
No signs of a struggle. No forced entry. No witnesses. Lucia didn't have a husband or lover. She was an introvert in every sense of the word and supposedly died in her bed, at home.
'Dull,' Felix thought. 'So dull it stinks.'
Rio glanced over her shoulder. "Good dull or bad dull?"
He only half-heard her mind-reading, absorbed in the autopsy images.
"Bad dull," he answered eventually. "Dull like… honestly, I don't know."
"Oh," Rio nodded sympathetically. Then she turned back to the stove and cracked six eggs into a pan. Because apparently dinner number three was now happening.
Another scan came up; a neurological one.
"Brain inflammation minimal," Felix whispered, zooming in. "Barely noticeable. But, hrn, Herbie, compare it to her last routine medical."
A soft ping echoed from the laptop and Herbie responded, "INFLAMMATION IS NEW. NOTHING SUSPECT, HOWEVER."
Felix licked apple pie filling off his thumb and narrowed his eyes.
"Hm."
"ADDITIONAL NOTE: CORTISOL LEVELS ELEVATED. COULD INDICATE ACUTE STRESS."
"This would be so much easier if I could actually get a sample of her and not looking at data that may or may not be tampered with. Ugh, but visiting the body myself to check is far too risky. The news just broke out. The body is constantly on the moon. Hell, do we know where it is right now?"
"CALCULATING…LOADING…TIME REQUIRED TO FIND LUCIA'S CORPSE."
Knew it. It was on the move. "Can't even send Spider-Bots…"
Rio set a plate beside him, rice and chicken still steaming. "Here you are~!"
He ate automatically. Shoveled three spoonfuls in rapid succession before Herbie chimed again.
"FELIX. UPDATE REGARDING LATVERIA. THERE IS CONFLICT BETWEEN POLITICAL LEADERS CONCERNING HANDLING OF THE LATE MONARCH'S BODY."
Felix paused halfway through a bite.
"Go on."
On the laptop, Herbie displayed two faces side-by-side with their titles.
"MONARCH LUCIA VON BARDAS—DECEASED. PRIME MINISTER: KRISTOFF VERNARD. TEMPORARY MONARCH IS NOW OCTAVIO VON BARDAS. OCTAVIO AND KRISTOFF HAVE BEEN ARGUING."
"Octavio is the temporary Monarch, huh?" Felix frowned and read phone call transcripts. "Huh…Octavio wants the body kept in Latveria?"
The calls were supposed to be highly secure. Luckily, owning a couple satellites and narrowing the search to specific locations and times made it easy to find the necessary calls. Half of it was deleted but in the hour Herbie had been investigated, the supercomputer AI managed to piece together the audio.
"CORRECT. OCTAVIO INSISTS ON LOCAL INVESTIGATION UNDER LATVERIAN JUDICIAL AUTHORITY."
"And Kristoff wants it sent to New York?"
"CORRECT AGAIN. HIS ARGUMENT REFERENCES THE MEDICAL BREAKTHROUGH DEVELOPED BY ANTHONY STARK."
Felix blinked. "Stark? What breakthrough?"
Herbie pulled up a classified Stark Industries overview. "THE PRIME MINISTER REFERS TO STARK'S DEVELOPMENT OF A NEW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. CODENAME: FRIDAY. CONSTRUCTED AS A NEXT-GENERATION MEDICAL DIAGNOSTICS AND TISSUE-REGENERATION INTERFACE. TECHNICALLY ADJACENT TO THE JARVIS PROGRAM."
The Jarvis Program that Gwen Stacy destroyed had an adjacent program? Felix's head snapped up. "Why wasn't I notified? And when was this started?"
"SHORTLY AFTER GWEN STACY'S ATTACK. AS FOR WHY I DID NOT NOTIFY YOU, PROJECT FRIDAY FALLS UNDER MEDICAL CLASSIFICATION. YOU INSTRUCTED ME TO PRIORITIZE MILITARY BREAKTHROUGHS AND PROJECTS POSING IMMEDIATE THREAT TO HUMAN LIFE."
He shut his eyes briefly. "Right… right. Makes sense. That's on me."
Herbie continued: "PRIME MINISTER VERNARD BELIEVES FRIDAY COULD CONCLUSIVELY DETERMINE WHETHER THE MONARCH'S DEATH WAS NATURAL OR NOT. HE ALSO SUGGESTS IT MAY PRESERVE CERTAIN BIOLOGICAL DATA FOR FUTURE GOVERNANCE MATTERS."
"Hm…wait, is he also using this for Ambassador Yvan?"
"NO MENTION OF AMBASSADOR YVAN."
Even though he also died? That was his man, his pawn that he used during the Wakanda incident.
"Could the Auction Master be behind this…?" Felix wiped his mouth absently with the back of his hand. Then he set the plate aside, leaned forward, and cracked his knuckles. "Open the FRIDAY files."
Herbie complied.
Layers of encryption burned away, one after the other. Behind it lay a folder marked STARK INDUSTRIES – LEVEL SEVEN CLEARANCE ONLY.
Felix clicked it. The first document began to load and his laptop screen flooded with blueprints, neural patterns, and the face of an AI born for medicine and diagnostics.
First thing was first: "How does this Friday compare to you, Herbie?"
"IT IS FAR INFERIOR. REED RICHARDS WAS A CENTURY AHEAD, THIS IS MERELY THE BEST OF THIS ERA. OBJECTIVELY, HOWEVER, I AM SIMPLY A SERVER. A COMPUTER. MY ORIGINAL PURPOSE WAS FOR SIMULATIONS. FRIDAY IS A COMPUTER CONNECTED TO TOOLS AND TRAINED TO PRACTICE MEDICINE. I BELIEVE FRIDAY IS LIKELY SUPERIOR TO THE MEDICAL ABILITY I CAN CONDUCT WITH MY ROBOTIC SELVES."
"So can't you improve it?"
"DO YOU WISH FOR IT?"
He glanced at Rio who was innocently humming to herself and busy making something involving cilantro now. "Yeah, if you can. I have the money to buy the tools. But, hm, guess it will take some time, huh? Put it on the backburner then." He put a fist to his cheek, deep in thought. He needed to make a checklist for himself at this point. But frankly, there was underlying suspicion he had.
"The Auction Master, the Devil…he's behind this. It stinks of his work."
A man he had encountered during the Emporium Auction. A man that he had been chasing after the attack on New York. He had risen up and he was acting.
"He was able to get W'Kabi and Okoye on his side. A world of equalism. A world where there are no superpowers and the elite can't do what they want. Frankly, I can't disagree with that. I'm biased since I have powers and have been using them for good but…" He exhaled through his nose. "How was Lucia as Monarch of Latveria?"
"A BENEVOLENT DICTATOR.
"Clarify," Felix said. "Benevolent dictator? In what way?"
Herbie's processors hummed, gathering decades of archived political, economic, and biographical information. Then systematically and efficiently he laid it all out.
"LUCIA VON BARDAS WAS BORN IN THE 1980S IN THE CITY OF HASSENSTADT. HER BIRTH CERTIFICATES CANNOT BE DETERMINED AS AUTHENTIC DUE TO THE CITY'S IMPOVERISHED STATE IN THAT ERA. HER FAMILY BELONGED TO THE MINISTERIAL CLASS—NOT WEALTHY, BUT POLITICALLY CONNECTED. SHE DISPLAYED EARLY APTITUDE FOR MATHEMATICS, CYBERNETICS, AND LAW. AT AGE FIFTEEN, SHE WAS ENROLLED IN THE LATVERIAN NATIONAL ACADEMY FOR CIVIC INNOVATION."
Felix raised an eyebrow. "Continue."
"THIS WAS A PROGRAM DEVELOPED BY VICTOR VON DOOM TO TRAIN FUTURE ADMINISTRATORS," Herbie clarified. "ITS CURRICULUM FOCUSED ON GOVERNANCE, NATIONAL STABILITY, AND TECHNOLOGICAL OVERSIGHT."
"Government boot camp for brainy kids," Felix summarized.
"CORRECT."
Rio continued chopping cilantro. Chop. Chop. Chop. The rhythmic sound oddly softened the severity of the conversation.
"TEN YEARS AGO, UNDER DOOM'S ADMINISTRATION, SHE BECAME MINISTER OF TECHNOLOGIC INFRASTRUCTURE AFTER UNCOVERING AND DISMANTLING FIVE INTERNAL CORRUPTION NETWORKS. HER POLICIES—STRICT, EFFICIENT, SOMETIMES AUTHORITARIAN—RESULTED IN RAPID MODERNIZATION. SHE INCREASED NATIONAL GDP BY 600% IN A DECADE. ERADICATED SEVERAL ROOTS OF ORGANIZED CRIME. IMPLEMENTED ADVANCED CYBERNETIC PROSTHETIC SYSTEMS FOR VETERANS. INCREASED ACCESS TO EDUCATION."
"Well, her and Doom.." Felix drummed his fingers against the counter. "But continue. Give the downsides."
"NATIONAL SURVEILLANCE PROGRAMS INCREASED TWENTYFOLD UNDER HER. FREEDOMS WERE RESTRICTED. DISSENT WAS HIGHLY DISCOURAGED. MULTIPLE POLITICAL OPPONENTS VANISHED WITHOUT ACCOUNTING. SHE WAS EFFECTIVE UNDER DOOM'S RULE."
"But not good. And what about after Doom's death? And when becoming Monarch?"
"SHE WAS PROUDLY RESPONSIBLE FOR ECONOMIC SIMULATION MODELS THAT REPAIRED LATVERIA'S POST-DOOM FINANCIAL COLLAPSE SIX YEARS AGO. THERE WERE NO FLAWS IN HER METHODOLOGY."
Felix exhaled, a long slow breath. "And someone decided it was time. She did good work, but enough was enough."
"POSSIBLE."
He leaned back, rubbing tired eyes. The shadows under them had grown deeper since Wakanda. Since the auction. Since Harry and Pepper. Since everything. The world kept tightening its grip.
The Auction Master. W'Kabi. Okoye. Lucia. Yvan.
Pieces. A pattern. Someone pulling strings.
Before he could follow that thought, his phone buzzed violently on the counter.
Felix frowned. "Who the hell—"
NORMAN OSBORN flashed on the screen.
Felix tensed. He answered.
"Felix." Norman's voice was tight and controlled, but strained. Not his usual rehearsed calm. "Good. You picked up."
"Norman, what is—"
"Listen carefully." A breath. "We've been compromised."
Felix stopped breathing. "Huh?"
"Luke Cage," Norman continued. "He was shot in his home tonight."
"Shot?" Felix shot upright and his heart sank. "Is he alive?"
"He's alive. And fighting. But whoever went after him knew exactly where to strike." Paper rustled on Norman's end, files or reports being shoved aside. "After Harry's murder, I had him relocated—"
"What? You did? Why didn't you tell me?"
"He is my asset," Norman stressed. "And I know how organizations like SHIELD would act if they learned we successfully recreated Captain America and nearly got the new specimen killed. And seeing as my own son was killed because of what I do, I had no choice but to relocate him."
He didn't know that Harry died out of coincidence; out of a red button that the Auction Master pressed during an auction. It probably had nothing to do with the attack on Luke....right?
No. No, Norman was right. There could be a connection, even if he didn't realize what that connection was exactly. "Fine, fine. Where is he now?"
"Felix. I need you here. Now. No delays. No excuses. I'll tell you then. Not on call. I prefer not to risk it."
With Herbie, there was no risk of tampering on Felix's end. The same couldn't be said for Norman. Ha, what an irritating twist; both men believed the other could be tampered with while believing themselves to be untouchable. "Fine. I'll be there in two hours."
"Good. Because if whoever's behind this gets to Cage again—or to the others—then we are standing on the edge of something catastrophic."
The call ended. Felix set the phone down quietly.
Rio paused her cooking, watching him with soft concern. "…Felix?"
The young man had stood up, grimacing. It was just problem after problem. He wasn't getting a moment's time to breathe. It was like the Auction Master was aware he was being hunted down and was attacking, attacking, attacking. Playing offensively so that his spider-shaped opponent had to stay on his toes.
He looked to his lovely looking chef and forced a smile. "Sorry, Rio, looks like I'm heading out."