Monster

Three

It was already afternoon by the time I found my way back home. I entered the quiet, empty house and dumped my bag on the floor by the front door. Even though the silence was deafening, I marched across the living room with fire in my blood. I fished my phone out of my back pocket at the same time.

My sister, Clara, moved to New York just after high school. Even though I wanted us to be closer, we weren't. Not anymore anyway. Clara and I had been marginally different growing up. She'd always been bright and organized. She planned her goals down to the day and knew how to get them. She'd somehow managed to stay on the straight and narrow path for most of her life. I, on the other hand, had been the rebel. It wasn't that I was a bad kid, exactly. It's just that I never knew what I wanted, and I frequently did things like sneak out at night and skip classes.

Clara now lived in Manhattan. She shared an apartment with a journalist who managed to be even less organized than me. I knew this would drive Clara up the wall. But she was never home to notice it because she spent most of her time in Tony Stark's penthouse.

Our parents couldn't have been happier about the arrangement. The Starks were influential figures in our household growing up. Practically royalty. My grandparents had actually met Howard Stark once by accident when they first moved to the US. The encounter left them with new jobs and a hell of a story, which we heard so often I practically knew it by heart. Despite his bad reputation and dangerous hobbies, Tony Stark might as well have been a prince for all my parents cared.

My sister had just gone to work for Stark when a wormhole opened up above New York and sent an army of aliens raining down on his tower. I remembered hearing about the attack from the office in DC. A whole group of us stood in the breakroom, watching everything unfold on TV. I had this horrible feeling in my stomach that I was witnessing my sister's death. Which was, believe it or not, harder to accept than my own death.

What I didn't know is that while Tony was in the middle of a one-on-one battle with a Chitauri grunt, my sister had gone after it armed with nothing but a staple remover and her own stubbornness. She'd somehow yanked out its breathing apparatus in the scuffle, and it promptly suffocated.

And that was the day Tony Stark found his way into our lives. It was also the day I stopped underestimating my sister and her ability to wield office supplies as weapons.

After the attack, when flights were no longer grounded, I flew right into the city to ensure she was okay. Her apartment had been decimated, but she didn't seem all that broken up about it. Since I was picked up from the airport by Tony's personal driver and taken right to his penthouse, where I found my sister sitting comfortably with no bra on under her wrinkled shirt and hickeys under her collar.

Since then, Stark was doing everything he could to buy her continued affection. Clara never outright admitted they were dating. At least not in so many words. But they were always together, even when they weren't working. The media always spotted them on dates. And during the holidays, my family received ridiculous gifts from Iron Man himself. Quickly followed by an apology from Clara, who found his purchases obnoxious and insulting. Despite the gifts, she really did seem to love him.

My phone was actually a gift from Tony, and I refused to give it back because it hadn't even been released to the public yet. It was the most high-tech thing I'd ever owned. I commanded the phone to call Clara, and before I knew it, someone was answering. Just not my sister.

"Hello, you've reached the desk of Miss Clara Hayes," Tony answered, in what I assumed was a weak impression of Marilyn Monroe. "I'm afraid Miss Hayes is disinclined at the moment. Would you be so kind as to leave a message?"

"Tony," I groaned, kicking off my shoes. "You know it's me, and you know why I'm calling. So can you either put my sister on my phone or explain to me why you agreed to help Hill and Romanoff bug my house?"