It was seven o'clock in the borough of Manhattan. Nearly two hours overdue, Antoinette Stark traded her lab coat from the comfy black parka on the coat rack and started her journey home. That would have been more troublesome for her if 'home' had been the house where she grew up - the Stark Mansion in Malibu - but it luckily wasn't. Here and now, 'home' meant an apartment on the twelfth floor in the same building in which she worked every day. She punched the codes on the security panels before she left, waiting just long enough for the screens to scan her features, and then she was walking down the hallway. Beside her, a view of a city gleaming in shades of copper, silver and gold was framed in the floor-to-ceiling windows. She didn't stop to gawk.
The extra time at work didn't really bother her much. The young engineer had been pouring over some of her dad's old designs for the Mark 6 Prototype of his suit and she'd been using his blueprints on a project of her own. It was the C60 Arc Generator that still captured her attention. She was sure that she was close to a break-through on how to improve its design even more: how to prevent the excess overheating that her father often complained about after his missions. If she could figure out why it was overheating or, better yet, think of a solution to stop it, she'd win daughter of the year. And perhaps a Nobel Prize.
That's what led to the lie.
To make sure that her dad was properly surprised (read: not interfering), Toni had to make sure that he didn't know what she was working on in the engineering labs. She'd bribed the workers to move to her lab temporarily, which was located directly opposite her father and his nosiness, and she'd been moving around carefully for weeks to make sure that he didn't wise up and realise that his daughter was up to something. Working late like this without talking about what she was working on was also a cause for suspicion, so she'd had to do the only thing she knew how: use the narrow, cramped elevator in the service hall to sneak up to her room without him finding out. Total cake-walk.
Toni felt the impact of her footsteps in the reverberation on the linoleum floor. She gritted her teeth. It must've been the heaviness of the heel of her boots or the way that she was striding, longer and faster than usual, to reach the elevator. She had about thirty minutes to sneak up to her room, get changed and not be missed at dinner. Hissing a breath of embarrassment, she tried to distract herself from the racket she was making by thinking about the vibranium core arc reactor in her father's suit. It didn't really work.
Panelled lights illuminated the empty corridor when she reached the elevator. No sounds came from either of the other hallways - which didn't surprise her an awful lot as she knew that most of the other scientists, engineers and operatives had already left hours ago - but she did hear the shrill beeping of the elevator as it was recalled. She waited there patiently, hands in the pockets of her parka, and she spent her time staring suspiciously at the potted fern. The thin, reedy pot plant was a strange green colour but she couldn't decide if it hadn't been watered for a while or if it was a plastic plant.
"Hmm. That's weird," Antoinette hummed to herself.
She wasn't talking about the pot plant. Apart from the churning sound of the elevator as it rose level-by-level, she started to notice another sound. Ears pricking, she realised that she could actually hear the sound of footsteps coming towards her. When it finally reached her level, the elevator made an impatient noise and demanded her security code. Once the sound of feet reached near to her, she turned her head and called out to the other person who'd come.
"By the way, the elevator next to the executive boardroom works way better," Antonia started, focusing on pressing the buttons on the lift, "Normally, I wouldn't even bother with this one but desperate times calls for desperate -"
The words died on her lips.
It was him. While her first glance had brought back only the brief flashes of male and tall, the second brought a jolt to her heart so violent that the force alone could've kick-started a military assault vehicle. It was impossible to look away from him as he continued his purposeful, loping stride towards her. The stride of a predator that cared not about the prey that skittered at its feet.
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