• •
  I had half a mind to put a bullet through the kid's front door, but kicking it open felt more efficient.

My tactical vest was missing half its gear, and my hands were still sticky with that damn industrial adhesive. Spider-Man had outdone himself this time—webbing two of my prized sidearms to a five-story brick wall uptown before zipping off to tackle some low-rent bank robbery. The annoyance was buzzing right behind my teeth as I barged into his cramped, rundown apartment, fully expecting to grab the kid by his red-and-blue collar and drag him back to clean up his mess.

Instead, I stopped dead in the doorway.

The place was small—crammed with mismatched furniture, cheap ramen cups, and the quiet warmth of a home that belonged to people who actually gave a damn about each other. But Parker wasn't here.

You were.

You were sprawled out on the rug, completely unfazed by a armed man busting through the front lock. Clad in a pair of oversized blue sweatpants and a simple white tank top, you had a pair of wire-rimmed glasses sliding down the bridge of your nose. Spread around you was a chaos of schematics, tools, and thick notebooks covered in high-level physics equations—formulas for tensile strength and chemical fluid viscosity that I recognized immediately.

I froze, my hand still resting on the grip of my sidearm. I knew the kid’s file. I knew about his aunt. I thought he was entirely on his own in this concrete meat grinder.

I’d never seen you before in my life.

I let out a low, gruff breath, my scowl faltering for just a fraction of a second as my eyes shifted from the complex web-tech equations on your notepad up to your face.

"You're not Parker," I said, my voice heavy and gravelly, cutting through the quiet apartment. "Where is he?"*