Matthew had changed into street clothes and was walking at an easy pace down a Manhattan sidewalk, hands in his pockets. Eleanor walked beside him, arms wrapped around a large brown cardboard box. The wind coming off the avenue was sharp enough that the people passing them pulled their coats tighter without thinking about it.
Eleanor could already smell what was in the box. The tobacco scent was leaking through the gaps in the cardboard.
"Sir," she said, "I don't believe you smoke."
"You're right," Matthew said, not breaking stride. "I don't."
"Then why..."
"Public welfare."
Eleanor paused half a step. "Public welfare. With cigarettes."
"Why not?" He glanced at her. "Happiness means different things to different people. For you it might be a good shopping day or a raise. For some people, a pack of cigarettes is the best thing that happens to them all week."
He nodded toward the street ahead of them.
Eleanor looked.
Scattered along the block were the usual figures: a few men hunched on a bench near the corner, another leaning against the wall of a building, surrounded by bundled-up bags and old clothing. Flies circling. Nobody paying attention to much of anything. Just sitting in the cold, getting through the afternoon.
Even from here, Eleanor could imagine the smell.
"You don't think this counts?" Matthew asked.
She didn't answer. He reached over, took the box from her arms, and walked toward the nearest group.
Eleanor hesitated for a moment, then followed.
He was right, as it turned out. The math was simple: the less someone had, the smaller the gesture needed to clear the bar. A cigarette for a man who hadn't had one all day landed differently than a bonus check for someone who already had direct deposit. The system notifications ticked up steadily, a point here, two points there, and by the afternoon the counter had climbed from thirty all the way to two hundred.
He also unlocked five Alpha Hunters, three Lickers, and one Gravedigger from the Season Pass rewards in the process. The next milestone had been set at three hundred points.
He found himself thinking that this approach, small gestures targeted at people with nothing, got more mileage than simply throwing cash around. It was more efficient. More personal, in a way.
Eleanor, for her part, spent most of the afternoon quietly baffled. She watched her employer work his way down the block, handing out cigarettes and appearing to enjoy himself more with each one. Somewhere between the third and fourth group of strangers, he'd started smiling in a way she couldn't entirely interpret.
He likes charity? she thought. This much?
She had a nagging feeling that distributing tobacco to homeless people was probably not making the neighborhood better in any measurable way. If anything, she suspected it was going to make things slightly more chaotic. But she didn't say so. She just kept pace and helped when he needed it.
Across the street, in front of Stark Tower, Tony Stark stopped walking.
He had a woman on his arm and nowhere urgent to be, but something across the street had caught his eye. He pushed his sunglasses down and squinted.
A young man was standing in the middle of a cluster of homeless people, handing things out of a cardboard box one by one, grinning like he'd just won something.
"Happy." Tony turned around. "Isn't that the new head of Umbrella's security division?"
Happy looked. "Looks like it."
"He's handing out cigarettes to homeless people."
"Looks like it."
The woman on Tony's arm tilted her head. "Maybe it's a PR stunt. Either way, it's a pretty strange hobby."
Tony let go of her arm.
"Actually," he said pleasantly, "I think you should get going. I'm sorry to say the mood's been killed."
Happy was already flagging down a cab. Before she could fully process what was happening, the door was open and Happy had guided her in with the smooth efficiency of a man who had done this before. The cab pulled away.
Tony watched it go.
"That's a shame," he said. "I was in the middle of a perfectly good evening and then someone said something irritating."
"Better now than after," Happy offered. "Finding something wrong before it ruins the whole experience is generally preferable to finding it out later."
Tony considered this. "Fair point."
He glanced back across the street, where Matthew was still working his way through the box, apparently delighted with himself.
"Strange hobby," he said again, to no one in particular.
It was right around then that Matthew's afternoon took a turn.
The crowd around him scattered suddenly, people stepping back, and a voice cut through the noise with the particular edge of someone who had been rehearsing this encounter for a while.
"Matthew Lawrence. Do you know how long I've been looking for you?"
Matthew turned.
He recognized the man immediately. Pete, a mid-level enforcer for the Margia crew, the guy who handled their street-level loan operation. He was the one who had extended the twenty-thousand-dollar loan to the body Matthew had inherited.
The original debt should have been manageable. It wasn't, because that was never how gang loans worked. The principal was the starting point. By the time you added the fees and the rolling interest and the penalties for anything they could think of, the total owed had grown to more than double what was borrowed. And if you couldn't pay, they had methods. The polite version was putting you to work. The less polite versions were worse.
This was actually a large part of why Matthew had signed the inheritance agreement on the spot. He'd done the math on what happened if he didn't.
Pete, clearly, hadn't gotten the update on Matthew's current circumstances. He was walking with the confidence of someone who still thought he had all the leverage.
"Look at you," Pete said, pushing through the last of the scattered crowd until he was close enough that Matthew could smell him, unwashed clothes and something chemical underneath. "Haven't seen you in a while, and here you are handing out freebies to strangers. All that generosity and you still owe us money. How about we talk about that first?"
He shoved a homeless man out of his way without looking at him.
Behind Pete, the rest of his crew spread out in a loose semicircle. The message was clear. This block, right now, was not somewhere Matthew was walking away from without settling up.