Matt preferred to don the mask after dark; the darkness always worked in his favor. Thankfully, it was winter, so he didn't have to wait too long for the sun to set so he could get ready for his evening activities. As he changed into the suit, he listened to Claire in the living room. She was sitting on the couch, her fingers making a soft tapping sound as they drummed against the armrest, her heartbeat fluttering nervously. She'd gotten antsy the closer it had come to the time for Matt to leave. He wasn't sure what specifically was bothering her; the idea of being alone again, knowing that Matt was going out to do something dangerous, or something else entirely? She hadn't said. As the day had gone on, she'd only gotten quieter, and her discomfort served to make Matt uneasy as well.

She looked up when he opened the bedroom door. "I'm not sure how long I'll be out," Matt said. His night would depend largely on what he found out from the men tailing Heather. "Don't worry about staying up." She needed to get rest after what had happened to her.

Claire nodded slowly. Matt waited a moment to see if she was going to bring up whatever it was that was bothering her, and when it seemed like she wasn't, he moved towards the stairs that lead up to the roof.

"Matt, wait."

He paused, turning back in her direction.

"What are you going to do?" she asked. "To those men."

Why is she asking me that?

What did Claire think he was going to do? He was going to be asking them about Fisk and Vladimir, and they weren't going to want to give him answers. She'd already seen the kind of things he had to do to get information from criminals, though he hoped he wouldn't have to go to the lengths that he'd done that night on the roof of Claire's building.

But she'd asked, and she was waiting for an answer. The answer was that Matt was going to hurt them. He just didn't know how much yet. "Whatever it takes."

He didn't need to hear the soft intake of breath or the skip of her heartbeat to know she didn't like his answer. "You know how that sounds, right?"

Matt did know how it sounded, but he also knew that he wouldn't cross that line. He wouldn't. He wouldn't let himself go too far. The questions Claire was asking though…it was starting to seem like she wasn't so sure that Matt could toe the line he'd set for himself.

"When we were on that roof," Claire said, "you told that Russian that you hurt people because you enjoy it."

"And you said you didn't believe that," Matt reminded her. He didn't tell her how much he had needed to hear that, how her certainty had acted as a balm to his very soul.

He didn't dare even think about the part of himself that did take satisfaction from hurting those criminals, that part that sometimes relished their fear of him, that part that wanted them to feel every ounce of suffering that they had inflicted upon innocent people.

"I can't believe it," Claire said. She curled her arms around her torso and stood from the couch. "Because if I do, that means you're not the man I believe you to be."

Matt took a steadying breath, tried not to show how deep her words had hit. "I need to be the man this city needs."

Claire moved towards him, her arms dropping to her side as she shook her head. "Okay, that's not a reason, it's an excuse."

"What do you want me to do, Claire?" Matt snapped. "Let them tear Hell's Kitchen apart?" He'd thought – he'd thought she understood. That she got why he had to do this. The she could handle the compromises he sometimes had to make so he could save people. "Just let them win?"

She didn't say anything for a moment, and when she did, her voice was gentler. "What you do is important to so many people, I get that." He could feel the 'but' coming in the pause before she said it. "I just…I don't think I can let myself fall in love with someone who is so close to becoming what he hates."

A sort of quiet filled him once she said the words. He should have known this was coming. Wasn't this always how things went for him? He got attached and the other person walked away. It never really seemed to be a matter of if, but merely when. Maybe it was better to happen sooner rather than later.

"You're right," Matt said. "You shouldn't." He turned and walked up the stairs that led to the roof access. Claire took one step to follow before she stopped. Matt didn't acknowledge the movement; it wouldn't do either of them any good to do so.

There was a chilly breeze on the roof that evening, but it wasn't enough to cover the sound of Claire's quiet sob. Matt's shoulders slumped. He couldn't be mad at Claire about her decision to cut off what had been growing between them. She was protecting herself; she was realizing that her lines and his lines, they weren't in the same place. That was her right, and Matt's feelings weren't her problem.

Matt straightened up and moved away from the door. He had a job to do.

It didn't take long to get to Heather's apartment building utilizing rooftops and back alleys to get there. When he made it to the roof of her building, Matt paused. He needed to make sure Heather was actually home before he started trying to find the two men that had been tailing her. He focused in on her apartment and frowned.

She wasn't there, but the state she'd left her apartment in struck him as odd. He could hear the electric hum that meant she'd left lights on, and her TV was playing, tuned into some sitcom. There was an insistent beeping coming from her kitchen, sounded like…a microwave. Like the timer had run down, and it was reminding her that her food was done.

Who puts food in a microwave and then leaves?

Something wasn't right, but Matt needed a closer look to figure out what exactly had happened. A fire escape let him down to Heather's window. He paused before moving into the line of sight the window would provide, double checking one last time that the apartment really was empty. It was. Matt moved to the window.

It's not quite closed all the way.

Another piece that didn't make sense. Who left windows open in January, with the weather they were having? Matt slipped inside the apartment and took a moment to get his bearing. To the immediate left of the window, there were two bookshelves both packed with books. The TV was on the wall to his far left, and beyond that was her bedroom. A rug, coffee table, couch, and chair had all been arranged facing the TV. To his right was the kitchen, an L-shaped counter separating it from the rest of the apartment. The counters were cluttered with various kitchen gadgets, a box of blueberry bagels, and a single spilled cup of coffee. The spill had happened long enough ago that the drink was cold.

Matt moved towards the kitchen. The smell of the coffee was strong enough to overpower most of the smells in Heather's apartment; she must make the stuff near constantly. Even so, Matt still managed to pick out the smell of cheap men's cologne.

He opened the microwave, and the incessant beeping finally stopped. She'd been reheating pasta, but it had been sitting long enough that it was now a cold, congealed mess. He closed the microwave door again.

Someone took her. Unbidden, the memory of his meeting with Heather the day before flickered through his mind; how easy she'd been to fluster, how quick she'd been to offer to replace the drink she thought she'd spilled. An earlier memory floated up too – the pounding of her terrified heartbeat from the first time he'd met her, when he'd saved her from that mugger. Matt's hands clenched into fists.

Where are her bodyguards?

Not in the apartment, and there wasn't enough blood or other mess to indicate that they'd ever made it inside to defend her. Matt went back out the window onto the fire escape, closing the window behind him. Now that he was looking for it, he noticed the coppery smell of blood in the alley below the fire escape, noticed the two bodies behind the dumpster, one still and rapidly cooling, the other with the slow heartbeat and breathing of the unconscious.

Matt rapidly made his way to the alley. Once down, he knelt over the unconscious man and grimaced at the smell of stale cigarettes that floated around him under the scent of blood and grime. He was laying face down, so Matt rolled him over, noting the man's fractured ribs as he did so. Whoever had taken Heather had worked him over good. The man groaned when Matt moved him, consciousness beginning to return. Matt got a good grip to keep him pinned down.

The man opened his eyes and immediately jerked. It didn't take much effort to hold him. "I have questions," Matt said.

"I'll tell you!" the man babbled. "Please, I'll tell you anything you want to know, just don't cut my head off!"

"…What?"

Matt had fully expected the man to be afraid after the attack he'd already gone through, but that was an incredibly specific request, and Matt couldn't even begin to guess where it had come from.

The man was panting, probably from a mix of pain and fear. "Everyone on the street knows – knows what you did to the Russian, Anatoly."

Everyone except Matt himself, apparently. He wasn't even sure who Anatoly was, much less what had actually happened to him. Didn't matter right now though; he needed to know what had happened here, and if this rumor made the guy talk, Matt would use it.

"What happened tonight?" he snapped.

"It was the Russians, they – " he cut himself off in a string of curses. "Christ, they took her, Fisk is gonna kill me!"

Matt shook him to regain his attention. "I'm the one you need to worry about right now. Why would the Russians take her?"

"I don't – I don't know! They might as well declare war on him!"

Matt's scowl deepened. If the Russians were planning a war against Fisk for whatever reason, then taking Heather was probably a good way to kick it off. It was impossible to guess if they'd plan to keep her alive as a hostage, or if they'd kill her to send a message to Fisk.

"Where would they take her?" Matt demanded. Because maybe he didn't know where Heather stood in all this exactly, whether she was involved in Fisk's criminal activities or an unfortunate bystander, but Matt did know the kind of things mobsters would do to women they were allowed to torture. He wasn't going to stand back and let that happen to her.

"Probably…one of their bases." He rattled off a couple addresses; Matt recognized one of them as the restaurant where he'd found the boy the Russians had previously kidnapped. He mentally crossed that off the list; they weren't likely to have taken Heather there after Matt had cleaned the place out once already. That left three others to check, and precious little time.

He shoved the man away and stood. "Never let me catch you in my city again." Matt didn't wait for his response before dashing off.

Heather felt like someone had scraped her out and then overstuffed her with cotton. Her body was stiff. She couldn't move beyond some sporadic twitching of her fingers. Couldn't even get her eyelids to open. It felt like someone had glued them shut. Her brain was as stiff and sluggish as the rest of her, enough so that she couldn't quite put together why she felt like this. Some fuzzy part of her mind said she should know the answer, but it was hard to even think.

An unfamiliar male voice filtered through. " – higher dose of tranquilizer than we thought." The voice had an accent, though Heather's fuzzy brain couldn't place where it was from.

"We'll have to wait for her to wake up," another voice said. It sounded annoyed. "I want Fisk to know we have her."

The words set off alarms in Heather's mind. Slowly, the events from earlier came back to her. Putting up her groceries. Making coffee. Putting dinner in the microwave. Hearing a strange noise. A figure on her, covering her mouth before she had a chance to scream, a sharp pain when they injected her with something.

Heather's heart rate picked up as her brain finally put the pieces together. Someone had kidnapped her.

She managed to pry her eyes open, blinking a couple time to clear her vision. Her head had been slumped forward, chin resting on her chest, which allowed Heather's hair to obscure her face and gave her a moment to assess her current position. She was sitting in a wooden chair, her wrists tied to the armrests with zip ties. Her muscles were all stiff and her neck ached from the position she was in, meaning she'd probably been sitting in that chair for a while. She couldn't begin to guess how much time had gone by though, thanks to whatever they had drugged her with.

A hand balled up in her hair, tight enough to make her eyes sting with tears, and yanked her head up. "So, you're awake now."

Heather blinked the tears out of her eyes, trying to focus in on the man's face. He was all lean angles, hash and unforgiving, and the scar that curled down his face from under his right eye added a layer of menace. "Do you know who I am?" he asked.

She finally recognized the accent as Russian, and it sent a chill through her. Hadn't it been Russian mobsters that had kidnapped Jason? Weren't they known for trafficking people?

Fear sang through her veins, and between the fear and her dry mouth, her took her a moment to form words. "No, I – I don't."

He stared down at her, his grip on her hair still painfully tight. "I believe you." Abruptly he let go of her and walked away, pacing back and forth. Heather glanced around the room. There was another man, but he was just standing near the wall watching. The furniture was sparse; a couple of chairs, a table at the opposite end of the room with something on it –

Heather went rigid. That was a body. There was a headless body just laying there. She looked away and squeezed her eyes shut. Bile rose in her throat, and she had to fight it down.

The man let out a short laugh, though nothing about it sounded amused. "Your brother definitely kept you away from his work. He should have been smarter about it though. If you weren't to be part of it, he should have moved you to a different city. You'd have been safer."

What?

"I don't know what you're talking about." Heather heard his footsteps moving back her way. She didn't dare open her eyes.

"Now that, I don't believe." He caught her jaw in his hand, fingers digging in painfully as her forced her to look up at him. "Just what did you think Wilson Fisk's business was?"

Words failed her.

"What does your brother do, anyway?"

How many times had Heather skirted around that innocent question? How many times had she left it with a vague, "Oh, he's in business, it's all pretty much boring paperwork stuff." How many times had she deftly changed the subject, avoiding truths she couldn't stand to voice?

The man backhanded her, setting the right side of her face alight with pain. Heather jerked, the zip ties biting into her wrists as she did. He grabbed her jaw again, forcing her to look at him. "When I ask you a question, I expect you to answer!"

Tears slid down her cheeks. "I don't know! I don't know what he does, I don't ask!"

He let go of her, his face twisting in a sneer of contempt. "You don't ask? Let me tell you."

Her heart raced as he moved behind her, out of her line of sight. One hand pressed down on her shoulder, the other grabbed her hair again and turned her head to stare at the body on the table. "That over there," he said in her ear, "that is what is left of my brother Anatoly after your brother sent one of his dogs after him."

The blood drained from Heather's face, making her so lightheaded she might have fallen if she hadn't already been tied to a chair. It wasn't true, it wasn't true, Wilson wasn't capable of –

Traitorous memories sprang up, her mother's drunken words on a rainy night, "Your father was cruel, Heather, so cruel. It's best you don't remember. Poor Willy, he didn't have a choice. He had to do it, he was protecting us."

"And now," the man continued, "now Fisk will know my pain."

Seconds slipped by before Heather understood what he meant. A whimper slipped out once she did. "Please, I don't have anything to do with this."

"It doesn't matter." He let go of her, moved back into her line of sight. "Sergei, a phone." He held out a hand towards the other man, who up till now had been silent and unmoving in his place by the wall. The man stepped forward, pulling a phone out of his jacket and handing it over.

He tapped the screen, and ringing filled the room. He'd put the phone on speaker. It rang four times before someone answered.

"Vladimir, I wasn't expecting to hear from you."

Heather started, recognizing James's voice.

"I have a special message for your employer," Vladimir said, a sarcastic twist to the words as he spoke. He held the phone out towards Heather expectantly.

A small part of her wanted to stay silent to spite him; he was going to kill her anyway, why do what he wanted? But he only had to glare at her, and Heather's flicker of resistance crumbled. "James," she said, hating the way her voice cracked. "It's me. Heather."

Vladimir pulled the phone away. "You will pass the message on, like a good dog?"

"If any harm comes to her," James started, his voice colder than Heather had ever heard it before.

"The question isn't if harm will come to her," Vladimir interrupted. "The question is how much will she suffer before I kill her, and how much of her will you manage to find." He hit the button to end the call.

Heather closed her eyes, bowed her head as more tears fell down her face. Please, please…

Please what? Let someone find her, save her? Let her death come swiftly, so she didn't have to suffer? Heather didn't know which she was praying for.

"Sergei, make sure we have extra guards," Vladimir said. Heather reluctantly opened her eyes to see him rolling up his sleeves. "Fisk doesn't know where we're at, but he'll surely be sending people to look for her."

"Yes, sir," Sergei said, moving to the door.

Vladimir turned to face Heather. "How should we start? Any suggestions?"

Her mouth went dry with fear. She couldn't even summon the words to beg. She was so focused on Vladimir, she barely registered Sergei beginning to open the door.

Then the world exploded.

For a second after Vladimir hung up on him, Wesley just stared at his phone, frozen with horror at this unexpected turn. No one was supposed to know about Heather, and she was never supposed to know about her brother's illicit activities. Those two worlds were never supposed to meet. Now they had, in the worst way, at the worst time.

Desperate, Wesley hit a number on his phone, frantic to reach someone so he could call off the attack he had spent the past few days so carefully arranging. Vladimir had to be keeping her in one of the buildings the Russians controlled, and if it was one of the ones that Mr. Fisk had decided to target then –

Fire bloomed across the night sky. And again, and again, as their holdings went up in flames. Wesley hit the button to end the call. Stared. Had he just watched Heather die?

Sirens wailed in the distance, snapping Wesley out of his stupor. He dialed a different number. There was a chance that Heather was still alive, and if so, they had to act fast. "Detective Blake, I have a priority assignment for you."

AN: The conversation between Claire and Matt comes mostly from episode 1-5, World on Fire. Thank you to everyone who has followed, faved, or reviewed! It means a lot to know others are enjoying this story too!