The Kravinoff Estate was an absolute logistical nightmare for Spider-Man.
According to the heavily redacted property records Amadeus had pulled, the entire manor was situated in the center of a densely wooded, private natural park in upstate New York. There wasn't another man-made structure for miles. Worse, the surrounding trees were old-growth pines and oaks, topping out at roughly twenty to thirty feet. For a guy whose entire combat style relied on swinging from seventy-story skyscrapers, a thirty-foot canopy was practically a basement ceiling. It completely neutralized his aerial mobility.
If things went south, Peter wouldn't be able to swing away. He'd just be running through the woods like a guy in a very expensive Halloween costume.
Fortunately, he had a parasite that doubled as a tactical camouflage system.
Peter crouched on a thick pine branch just inside the property line, the black symbiote rippling over his skin to perfectly mimic the bark and shadowed pine needles behind him.
"An abandoned, century-old mansion hiding a massive, violent secret," Peter muttered to himself, his breath pluming in the crisp October air. "This place is practically screaming at the county, 'Hey, look at the giant Russian murder-house!' Honestly, it's so obvious that it almost feels like a decoy. What do you think, Venom?"
[I think we should tear the structure down to its foundations,] the alien's deep, vibrating voice echoed against the inside of Peter's skull. [Crush the stones. Eat whoever scurries out of the rubble.]
Peter let out a long, exhausted sigh. "Why do I even bother asking you for tactical advice?"
He tapped the side of his mask. The white lenses whirred, cycling through thermal and night-vision modes. Instantly, a bright crimson heat signature flared to life on his Heads-Up Display, darting through the freezing woods with terrifying speed.
Peter narrowed his eyes, zooming the lenses in on the figure. He expected a Spetsnaz kill squad. He expected a pack of trained hunting dogs. What he saw was surprising, yet entirely on-brand for his life.
It was the Black Cat.
Felicia Hardy moved like liquid shadow. She vaulted over the rusted iron perimeter fence without making a single sound, landing lightly on the overgrown grass of the front lawn. The manor loomed ahead of her, dark and imposing, its gothic architecture casting jagged shadows across the courtyard.
She didn't bother checking the perimeter outbuildings or the rusted greenhouse. She marched straight up the cracked stone steps to the massive, heavy oak front doors.
From his perch, Peter watched her pull a set of titanium lock picks from her belt. She slipped them into the heavy brass keyhole, her ear pressed to the wood. A second later, she pulled them out with a frustrated huff. The internal tumblers had shifted, but the door hadn't budged an inch. It wasn't a mechanical lock keeping it shut.
Felicia reached into a pouch, pulling out a small, blinking electronic decrypter, and slapped it against the brass handle.
"You don't seriously believe Sergei is the mastermind behind the Kingpin's exotic animal smuggling ring, do you?"
Felicia didn't jump. She didn't scream. She simply stopped what she was doing, a slow, knowing smile spreading across her lips. She casually slipped her hands behind her back and turned around.
Hanging upside down from a thick web-line attached to the stone portico, Spider-Man dangled exactly at her eye level.
"And why not?" Felicia teased, her green eyes glittering in the moonlight. "Maybe a high school boy can enlighten a professional with some of his brilliant insights."
"If you really want my insight," Peter said, disengaging from the web and dropping lightly to the stone porch beside her, "it's that you shouldn't be casually breaking into this specific house. Also... why are your hands behind your back?"
"To keep you from webbing my wrists to the doorframe," Felicia replied smoothly. She shifted her weight, pressing the decrypter firmly against the lock mechanism behind her. "But since the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man swung all the way to upstate New York to babysit me, it means there's actual danger here. What is it?"
Peter rubbed the back of his neck, the symbiote shifting restlessly over his shoulders. "This place isn't just a rich guy's vacation home, Felicia. It's highly probable that this was a former Soviet black site. Two generations of the Kravinoff family were deep-cover KGB agents."
Felicia nodded thoughtfully, though she didn't look particularly deterred. "Is that all? A few old Soviet ghosts? That shouldn't be a big deal for a guy who fights the Avengers' leftovers. If there's illegal tech inside, you can just call your S.H.I.E.L.D. friends to bag it."
"It's not just tech," Peter warned, stepping closer. "Sergei Kravinoff isn't a normal guy. He was injected with a Soviet variant of the Super-Soldier Serum."
The air on the porch seemed to instantly freeze.
The playful, teasing light completely vanished from Felicia's eyes. Peter realized his mistake a fraction of a second too late. He had forgotten the core tragedy of Felicia's life. Her father, the original Cat, hadn't just died in a random prison riot. He had been killed because he was tangled up in Hydra's Super-Soldier experiments. He had been sent by the CIA to steal the exact same Soviet serum Peter was talking about.
Mentioning the KGB and the Super-Soldier Serum in the same breath didn't scare Felicia off. It ignited a powder keg of unresolved grief and vengeance.
Peter lunged forward, reaching out to grab her shoulder and pull her away from the door. "Felicia, wait—!"
She was faster. The decrypter sparked, short-circuiting the heavy magnetic locks. Felicia ripped the heavy oak door open, slipped her lithe body through the narrow gap, and slammed it shut right in Peter's face.
CLACK.
The heavy deadbolts slammed back into place. Peter grabbed the brass handle and yanked, but the reinforced door didn't budge. He looked down. Felicia had dropped the fried electronic decrypter on the stone steps to buy herself time.
Peter snatched the device off the ground. He ripped the plastic casing off with his fingertips, his brain instantly analyzing the scorched circuitry. It was a momentary short-circuit tool. He could fix it, but he needed a minute to re-route the copper wiring.
[Tear the door off its hinges!] Venom roared.
"What is the point of a stealth infiltration if I rip the front of the house off?" Peter hissed back, twisting two microscopic wires together. "Just give me a second."
Inside the pitch-black mansion, Felicia tapped the side of her mask. The lenses of her tactical goggles whined, shifting into high-contrast night vision.
She stood in a cavernous, dust-choked atrium. Twin sweeping staircases circled upward toward a grand second-floor balcony. The air smelled of rot, old wood, and cold stone. She moved silently across the marble floor, stopping just short of a massive, faded Persian rug in the center of the room.
Moonlight poured through a massive, dirty glass dome directly above the front doors. The light hit three enormous bronze statues positioned on the balcony—Slavic warriors riding armored horses, their swords raised high. The moonlight projected their three massive shadows directly onto the Persian rug at Felicia's feet.
She took a slow, steady breath, and stepped onto the rug.
Click.
The floorboard beneath the thick wool depressed by a fraction of a millimeter.
Felicia didn't look. She didn't hesitate. She threw her arm up, firing her grappling hook blindly into the plaster ceiling above. The cable ripped her off the ground just as the walls on either side of the atrium erupted.
There was no high-tech laser grid. No automated machine gun turrets.
Instead, three massive, rusted iron crossbow bolts—each the thickness of a baseball bat—slammed through the empty air where her torso had just been. They embedded themselves waist-deep into the opposing oak paneling with a deafening THUD.
Dangling from the ceiling, Felicia let out a breath. "What century are we in? Who still uses mechanical tripwires?"
She released the winch, dropping silently onto the first landing of the sweeping staircase. She swept her scanner over the floor. The entire mansion was practically a minefield of retro-fitted death traps. But the fact that such a massive kinetic trap hadn't brought a swarm of armed guards running meant Peter was right about one thing: the estate had been abandoned for a long time.
The heavy mechanical locks on the doors and the lethal traps inside easily explained why no urban explorers or homeless squatters had ever survived a break-in.
Peter definitely overestimated this guy, Felicia thought, stepping carefully over a suspiciously loose floorboard.
Still, a house was meant to be lived in. No one armed their own living room without leaving a safe path for themselves. If Kraven had set these traps before fleeing to Russia, there had to be a bypass. If he had set them recently, it meant he was hiding something incredibly valuable upstairs.
Her high-precision scanner painted the floor in a grid of green and red. The red zones were pressure plates. The green zones were safe. Finding the safe route, Felicia crept silently up the circular stairs toward the second floor.
She reached the balcony, stepping back into the beam of moonlight cutting through the glass dome.
She looked down at the Persian rug in the courtyard. The moonlight cast the shadows of the three bronze statues onto the floor.
But there were four shadows.
For a split second, Felicia assumed it was Peter, finally breaking through the front door. But the silhouette was completely wrong. It was massive. Broad-shouldered. Wild.
Felicia threw herself into a violent, sideways roll just as the massive figure dropped from the rafters above, landing exactly where she had been standing. The heavy oak floorboards splintered under the impact of his boots.
"It seems my home has attracted a guest with ill intentions."
The voice was deep, theatrical, and carried absolutely no trace of a Slavic accent.
Felicia sprang to her feet, drawing a pair of collapsible batons from her belt. She stared at the man blocking the hallway.
He was a mountain of corded muscle, completely bare-chested despite the freezing draft in the manor. Draped over his massive shoulders was a heavy coat made entirely from the pelt of an adult male lion, the beast's hollow eyes resting near his collarbone. He wore reinforced leather combat trousers and boots trimmed in animal fur.
The man reached over his shoulder, casually drawing a wicked, serrated hunting spear from a leather scabbard on his back. He offered Felicia a wide, terrifyingly polite smile, his teeth gleaming in the moonlight.
"Hello, little cat," the man purred, resting the heavy spear against his shoulder. "You may call me Kraven the Hunter."
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