The basement under the abandoned brewery on 52nd Street smelled of damp concrete and rotting malt.
Jack sat on an overturned wooden crate, a battery-powered lantern resting between his boots. The white light cast sharp shadows across his face, accentuating the hollows under his cheekbones. His skin was the color of curdled milk.
His right hand worked with slow, mechanical precision. He dipped a brass casing into a small glass jar of black gunpowder, weighed it on a rusted scale, and pressed a lead slug into the top using a hand-cranked reloader.
Click-thrust.
The slug set into the brass. He dropped the finished round into an empty cigar box.
The bullet hole beneath his left collarbone wasn't bleeding anymore, but it pulsated with a wet, heavy throb that vibrated all the way down to his stomach. The black nylon stitches he'd pulled through his skin earlier were stretched tight, inflamed red against his grey flesh.
His vision twitched. The blue numbers sat fixed in the lower corner of his sight: [7.1%... INFECTION PROGRESSING... SYNCHRONIZATION INCREASING].
Jack didn't care about the fever. He picked up another brass casing.
Outside, the sirens were constant. They didn't stop for rain. They crisscrossed Hell’s Kitchen like a network of hungry dogs, responding to every broken window, every triggered alarm, every false report of a man in a bloody coat. The magistrate’s court was locked down, but the federal warrants had cleared by noon. He was a ghost with a price on his head, branded as a bio-terrorist by the afternoon papers.
He set the finished cartridge into the cigar box.
Clink.
The heavy wooden cellar door above the stairs gave a faint, metallic groan.
It wasn't the wind. The rain was hitting the sidewalk above, but the pressure on the hinges was deliberate—a slow, controlled weight that knew how to open an iron latch without letting the springs squeak.
Jack didn't reach for a gun. He didn't jump.
He just kept his right hand over the hand-cranked reloader, his thumb flicking a grain of spilled gunpowder off the wooden workbench.
A shadow broke the white light at the top of the concrete stairs.
She didn't wear a bright tactical suit or loud combat boots. She stepped down the stairs in a dark, salt-crusted trench coat, her footsteps making almost no sound on the wet stone steps. Her dark auburn hair was pulled back, wet from the rain, clinging to the high curve of her cheekbones. Her eyes—cold, slate-grey, and calculating—scanned the cellar in less than half a second.
She stopped five paces away, her right hand resting casually inside her coat pocket. The line of her posture was perfectly balanced, ready to drop or strike in a fraction of a heartbeat.
"You smell like sulfur and unwashed bandages," Natasha Romanoff said. Her voice was flat, smooth, and completely devoid of inflection.
Jack didn't look up from his scale. He poured another pinch of black powder into the brass cup.
"And you're standing in my draft, sweetheart," Jack rasped. His throat sounded like gravel scraping across tin. "Close the door. You're letting the humidity in. Bad for the primer."
Natasha’s eyes flicked down to the cigar box full of hand-reloaded .38 rounds, then back to the dark blood stain soaking through his left shoulder.
"The District Attorney’s office is claiming a chemical strike," she said, taking one measured step closer. "Fisk’s legal team is calling you a unstable fanatic. The Kremlin... well, the Kremlin doesn't know what to call you yet."
Jack stopped the crank halfway through its arc. He slowly raised his head, his wide, bloodshot eyes locking onto hers.
The corners of his mouth twitched. A low, dry wheeze leaked out of his throat, bubbling up into a short, raspy chuckle.
"Ha... haha..." Jack’s right shoulder shook. "The Kremlin? Damn, I didn't know I was international news already. Did I get a headline in Moscow, or am I just a footnote under the tractor production quotas?"
Natasha didn't smile. Her left hand came out of her pocket, holding a small silver recorder. "I was sent to evaluate whether you were a threat to national infrastructure, or just an nuisance Fisk couldn't bury."
"And?" Jack leaned forward, his right elbow resting on his knee, his posture completely broken and unstudied. "What's the verdict, Red? Am I a threat, or do I just need a bath?"
Natasha observed the twitch in his jaw, the subtle tremor in his right thumb, and the manic, unblinking intensity in his bloodshot eyes. "You're bleeding to death. You've got high-grade blood poisoning, two broken ribs, and a federal warrant signed by a Supreme Court magistrate."
Jack burst into a full, breathless laugh—a sharp, cackling sound that echoed off the damp brick walls until he choked, coughing a speck of dark phlegm onto the concrete between his boots.
"Ha! Haha! Hoo boy..." He wiped his chin with his dirty forearm, looking up at her with a crooked, bloody grin. "You really know how to talk to a guy on a first date, don't you? What's next? You gonna tell me my cholesterol is too high?"
Natasha took another step forward. Her hand slid inside her coat, the faint click of a safety disengaging echoing clearly in the small room. "Get up. You're coming with me before Fisk's tactical team tracks the aerosol signature to this block."
Jack didn't move. He just tilted his head, his smile widening until his dry lips cracked at the edges.
"...dare..." he whispered softly, his voice dropping into that flat, rhythmic hum. "...dare to try, Russian..."
Natasha’s brow narrowed by a millimeter. "What?"
Jack’s right hand flew beneath the workbench, his fingers locking around the pull-cord of an old industrial gas valve he'd rigged to the main building pipe twenty minutes before she arrived.
"I said," Jack grinned, his eyes burning with wild, unhinged fever, "dare to dance, lady... 'cause the floor's about to get real warm!"
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