WHAT DOESN'T KILL YOU // accepting // @2econdlead sent (for Matt) — i ask, you answer. that's how this works.
Everything is where it should be. No alarms going off, no overturned chairs, no plaster broken by gunfire. Even the guards are still at their posts. They're just not alive.
Two at the entrance, two at the back, three on patrols, and one on the roof. There's been no hesitation in these attacks, no wasted motion, no anger behind the precise strikes. This place has been solved like a puzzle, and solved in just the same way Elektra would have done, had it been her task.
She walks each room expecting and meeting no one until she sees the body. A small part of her considered he might simply have been extracted for questioning, but no. Marco Derveni, the protected witness, the latest in a chain of killings that look exactly like this. Like her.
The air shifts behind her before the thought fully forms, enough to know that the safehouse is no longer empty.
She turns and dodges Matt’s strike before it lands, but in the breath of surprise at his presence, she doesn’t escape the tackling grapple that follows, nor the binding of his billyclub cable as it locks around her and anchors her to a metal support beam at the ceiling.
His breath is hot with familiar, heart-racing anger, and Elektra bares her teeth right back at him. "Matthew—"
"I ask, you answer. That's how this works."
Interrogation. She'd laugh if the lives of four people, including a journalist from a staged overdose, hadn't led her to this location to discover the fifth.
The cable bites into her skin as she tests its strength. "Then ask."
