The girls at the venue had varying builds; some were clearly not quite in their right state—obviously having overexcited themselves past the point of no return.
"What are you looking at?" Pepper had just finished dealing with another round of questions from the assembled wealthy daughters. She noticed Daisy's gaze had stayed fixed on the room and asked out of curiosity.
"Nothing." Daisy wasn't going to explain that she'd just used her well-above-average vision to take stock of everyone present—more enhanced than natural, on balance. Please don't ask how she could tell; it was a matter of theory meeting practice. Her peripheral vision kept straying back to catalog the genuinely endowed; the other half of her attention stayed on the social circle in front of her.
Daisy was witty, wealthy, and quick, and she'd established herself at the top of any configuration she entered within the first twenty minutes.
"Have you ever killed anyone?" one of the girls asked quietly, in the tone of someone issuing a dare.
"I hold the rank of Lieutenant Colonel," Daisy said, which answered the question without answering it.
The mayor's daughter had been watching her throughout—her gaze kept returning to Daisy's shoulder. At some point, with the casual reach of someone raised with money, she laid her fingers against Daisy's neckline and traced along it. When Daisy looked, the girl's brow furrowed: "Your shoulder—?"
"Ah." Daisy understood immediately and pulled the fabric aside.
A pale brownish scar, straight through from front to back. Skadi's ice lance—the cold had been so concentrated that even Phoenix fire had struggled to clear it, and with most of her energy routed into the Eternal gene evolution, the scar had simply stayed.
She didn't feel strongly about it either way. It wasn't a badge of honor, but it wasn't worth urgent energy to remove. Once her body finished stabilizing, a couple of vibration pulses would dissolve it. Not a pressing concern.
The room, however, was less blasé. The wound's geometry made it instantly clear: this had been designed to go through a person.
In their imagination, this was the price of admission to the arms trade. Daisy was pleased—finally something she could actually talk about with civilians. She told them a story: an ambush in Northern Europe, her entire security detail down, a spear through her shoulder, and a path carved out through sheer bloody-mindedness alone.
"Can I touch it?" A young girl who'd been quiet throughout—short skirt, camisole, fashion choices that had committed fully to the concept—spoke up softly. She was generously built; the sides and back of the camisole were fully open, nothing underneath, seemingly relying on pasties. A faint white light flickered at the edges of her eyes. Daisy clocked the anomaly instantly and used a light shockwave to send her stumbling back two steps.
"Why won't you let her touch you? With that look you were giving her earlier..." A voice from across the lobby, unhurried and amused. "You like women, don't you?"
A woman was seated on one of the central sofas, legs crossed, eyes bright as stars and fixed entirely on Daisy.
She had blonde hair falling to the shoulder. A white corset that sculpted an exceptional figure—two-thirds décolletage, the architecture completely unapologetic. Below: a white skirt with gold trim, one smooth thigh visible with the crossed legs. At her feet: diamond-studded crystal heels.
Strong mental power. Recognizable presentation. She would have to be dense not to know who this was. Daisy exhaled. She'd come out to relax—why did this kind of thing keep finding her?
A sweep around the room confirmed it: every girl, including Pepper, had stopped—brains paused, not time-stopped. People stood and sat and held their drinks, but none of them were thinking. The maid wasn't in evidence.
Thirty meters between them, a staircase in the way. Poor range for what she did best.
She walked toward the stairs.
"You've interrupted an enjoyable evening, Miss Frost." Her voice stayed easy, conversational. "Or do you prefer White Queen? Any business?"
She came down the stairs. Stopped at ten meters—working range, launchable if needed.
"Miss Johnson." The smile was warm in the way a well-designed room was warm—deliberate, ambient, not quite directed at anyone. "I've come in good faith. Some old friends have been following your work with genuine admiration. We'd love to extend you an invitation—"
"Hellfire Club?" Daisy asked.
Emma's nod confirmed it.
"Not interested."
She kept going. "No real objectives. No coherent doctrine—they don't even have the ambition to set 'world domination' as a goal, which would at least be something. No core, no substance, just collecting capable people to have conversations with. They call each other by titles—White Queen, Black King, never their actual names—convinced the mystique accomplishes something. Maybe it did once, for a century. In practice, it's just capable people with nowhere to go, keeping each other company. On organization, purpose, and forward momentum, HYDRA runs streets ahead of you."
And the Club had some genuinely dangerous members. The Black Queen, for instance—fourteen thousand years old—was comfortably outside Daisy's current power ceiling.
"Not interested," she said again. "You can go."
The White Queen studied her for a moment—genuinely, mildly disappointed, the way someone looks when a promising evening produces one flawed note.
"What a shame. I'd love to be friends with you." She rose from the sofa. "Next time—let's have a proper talk next time."
She walked toward the exit. At the threshold, she paused.
"There's a little mouse in the west-side guest room." Emma's voice was light, still aimed at the door. "She seems to have snuck in. She may have overheard us. I imagine you can handle it."
She left.
The freeze dissolved. The band resumed mid-bar. Voices picked up mid-sentence. Pepper and the girls continued their conversations with no apparent awareness that the last few minutes had happened at all.
Daisy stood at the foot of the stairs for two seconds.
Emma had left a cleanup task on purpose. Classic retreat maneuver—detonate something behind you so they chase the fire instead of chasing you. She wasn't interested in chasing Emma tonight. But having someone walk around with the content of her conversations was another matter.
She pushed through the crowd toward the west side of the villa.
First door: she opened it, processed what she was seeing in under a second, and closed it quietly. Two women engaged in what appeared to be some kind of endurance contest. Not her business.
Second door: four or five girls were involved in a game that apparently required shared laundry detergent. Also not her business.
Third door: window open. A pink shape already moving fast across the dark lawn outside.