Chapter Text
Nora finished leafing through the morning paper and returned it to the front page. She read the headline again; every day there was a new story about some superhero or vigilante, punishing the evil and saving the innocent. She turned around and poured herself a cup of coffee from the jug on the side. She still hadn’t gotten used to making coffee for one.
She threw the paper into the trash and tied her hair into a messy bun on top of her head, grabbed her bag and walked out of her apartment. She had been under no illusion that she’d moved to a safe neighbourhood, she couldn’t afford that kind of luxury, but she thought she could be smart and stay safe. She’d hoped she’d be able to keep herself and her sister safe. How wrong she had been.
‘Nora, you’re late again.’ Steve, her boss, pointed at the clock behind the counter before picking up a tray of dirty glasses and shoving them into Nora’s hands.
‘Sorry, it won’t happen again.’ She started to walk back into the kitchen.
‘That’s what you said last time.’
She held her tongue and walked through the kitchen doors and put the glasses next to the sink. She hated this job, but it was the only thing getting her out of bed in the morning. If she didn’t work she couldn’t make rent, and if she couldn’t make rent she would be out on the streets. She was stronger than that; she was too strong to give up on life all together.
As she put tray after tray of glasses and plates through the dish washer and followed the mundane cycle of drying and stacking she wondered whether she had been the one that had died. She imagined that her own personal hell wouldn’t look to different to this.
Her mind wandered, as it often did these days, to the moment she opened her apartment door to see two detectives waiting to give her the worst news of her life. Her sister, who’d been missing for a week, had been found. She knew that it wasn’t happy news just by the looks on their faces and the tone of their voices. They’d asked to come in and told her that she might want to sit down; she knew what was coming and she couldn’t sit down.
She thought about the last conversation she’d had with her sister, it was before she went on a date with this new guy she’d been seeing. Nora had been worried at first, she didn’t know the guy, how could she be sure she’d be safe? But she’d let her go anyway; how dangerous could it be to go on a date with the son of one of the richest families in the state? Well, it could be deadly apparently.
Before she knew what time it was her shift had ended and Nora was headed home to her empty apartment. She unlocked the door, switched on the lights and did her nightly sweep of the place. Nothing was out of place, as usual. She took a seat at the breakfast bar and switched the TV on as she heated up a meal in the microwave. By the time she had sat down to eat the news had started.
More news about deaths in the city, global warming, political scandals, and vigilantes. She turned the TV off and poked at the unappetising meal in front of her. Where had the vigilantes and superheroes been when Elle had been in trouble? But she knew that Elle’s story wasn’t one that got noticed or reported on. Her story had been pretty far back in the paper the day after her body had been found, three column inches stating where and when she’d been found along with her name and her age. No one cared; it hadn’t even been on TV. As far as she was aware the police hadn’t even spoken to Elle’s date from the night she went missing, his family was far too powerful for the police to bother them with such an unimportant event. After all, what’s the life of an orphan really worth?
She had been told by the police that it looked as if Elle had fallen into the river on her walk home. Nora had tried to tell them that that wasn’t like her sister at all. She wouldn’t have walked home by the river, she was terrified of water. They hadn’t listened. Nora had seen the marks on her sister’s wrists when she went to identify her body, why hadn’t the police looked into that? Nora slid her half eaten meal into the bin and got her laptop out.
She had been researching, some might call it stalking, Augustus (Gus for short) Belmont for weeks now. She knew everything about him by now: where he lived, where he liked to eat, where he liked to drink, the hotels he took his dates to, and the number of girls that had gone missing after they’d last been seen with him. Best of all, she knew where he was going to be two nights from now.
Nora slipped out of her black slacks and white shirt and put on her black jeans, hoodie and boots. She kept her hair tied back and stuffed a wad of cash from the coffee can under the sink into her pocket before leaving the house again.
It wasn’t only Gus Belmont she had been doing her research on these past weeks. She had also looked at how to get her hands on an unlicensed gun. All of the care she had put into keeping herself safe in this neighbourhood had gone out of the window the moment she realised there would be no justice for her sister. Before all of this she rarely went out at night, she definitely wouldn’t have walked the streets alone and she absolutely would not have strayed down dark alleys to find illegal businesses.
She found the door she was looking for pretty quickly and entered the illegal gun shop. As she was walking over to the proprietor (what else should she call him?) she watched as the previous customer left. He was a big guy, kept his head down and only gave her a sideways glance on the way out. She hadn’t been looking to get a good look at him, she was goal orientated at this point and had no interest in falling on some criminal’s radar.
‘Hi.’ She tried her best not to sound nervous.
‘What can I do for you?’ He was a greasy looking guy in his fifties, she guessed, and she fleetingly wondered whether he’d ever taken a shower.
‘I need a gun…’
‘Yeah?’ He held his hands up, gesturing to his stock. ‘What kind?’
‘Something small.’ She looked around. ‘It’s just for… protection.’
‘Of course it is, sweetheart.’ He smiled at her and walked over to one of his many shelving units before producing a hand gun.
Nora looked at it and had a moment of fleeting doubt. Did she really want to do this? Of course she did, if she couldn’t get justice for Elle she would get revenge. ‘Will this cover it?’ She slid a handful of the notes over to the man.
‘It’s a little short, but maybe there’s another way you can pay the rest.’ He grinned at her and she knew exactly what he meant.
‘How about now?’ She slid a few notes over to him.
‘Yeah, that’ll do it.’ Norah took the gun, stuffed it into the front pocket of her hoodie and turned away.
‘You call me any time you get lonely or scared, sweetheart. I’ll keep you safe.’
Nora quickly ducked out of the shop and started to make her way back to her apartment. She had been running on adrenaline the entire way there, but now she had done the deed and bought the gun she didn’t feel quite as brave. She turned out of the alley and almost bumped straight into a man. She mumbled a quick sorry before trying to walk around him, but he stepped to the side and blocked her.
‘Excuse me.’ She stepped back and tried to get around him.
‘You sure you know how to use that thing?’ He looked at the bulge in her pocket.
‘I don’t know what you mean…’ Nora’s voice was shaky and she wished she had the gun in hand.
‘The gun you just bought.’ His voice was low and gravelly and she was sure she recognised it from somewhere. She just couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
‘I know how to use it,’ she half-lied. She had been going to the firing range for weeks now, and she could hit a target well enough. She just wasn’t sure whether she could hit a moving target with the new gun she had just purchased.
‘Did you even check that it worked before handing the money over?’ There was some humour to his tone now, even if it did remain low and severe.
Nora sighed, she had no idea what he wanted. ‘Are you going to mug me, or what?’ She figured that was the most likely reason for stopping her on the street. She didn’t want to think of any other reason he might stop her, and certainly didn’t want to give him any ideas.
‘I ain’t gonna mug you.’ He laughed and stroked his hand through his short, black hair.
Nora opened her mouth to respond and then it hit her, she did know this guy. Well, not personally, but she’d seen him on the news and in the papers. Frank Castle, The Punisher. She thought about announcing that she knew who he was, but quickly thought better of it. ‘Well, it was nice to meet you, but I need to get going.’
He stepped aside and let her walk by. She checked behind her when she was a few feet away and noticed that he was still watching her. He watched until she turned the next corner. Elle didn’t have much further to go before she reached her apartment. She checked that she hadn’t been followed before she entered the building. She locked her apartment door behind her, put the chain across and carried out her nightly sweep of her living space for the second time that night before she went to bed.