The darkness and lights of the Toronto night blurred past as she cut through streets, alleys, and side roads.

Ethan had been the priority. He always had to be. But he was not the only reason she had tagged Leo with a tracker. Recent rumors claimed Ruso traffickers had made a major pickup on psycho-reactive chemicals, the exact kind of haul that made Coraline’s stomach tighten. It was the first lead she had seen tied even remotely to Psychedelic in nearly four months, and she was desperate enough now to follow even the faintest thread.

Worse, Psychedelic was still free.

Gone to ground so completely that the silence itself felt deliberate. Coraline could still hear her voice when she let herself think too long, that playful, sing-song taunt that somehow made everything about her more unnerving.

Come dance with me, foxy lady.

Lyra Sinclair was not just a mad genius. She was a mad genius with a fixation, and Coraline had become the center of it. The Vulpes was no longer merely a vigilante who had crossed her path. She was the object of Psychedelic’s attention, fascination, and whatever passed in Lyra’s shattered mind for affection. The fact that she had not surfaced in months did not feel like safety.

It felt like patience.

And Lyra had not been the only ghost riding with her tonight.

The last five months had stopped feeling like separate cases and started feeling like a chain reaction. Bloodletter had shaken her more than she liked to admit. Callum Campbell was what he was—a killer, naked in his monstrosity. But Montreal had wounded something different in her. Jean Bellerose, Monsieur Minuit, had hidden behind a mask and the rhetoric of justice, and that was somehow harder to stomach. He had been living proof that a costume, a codename, and a vigilante’s reputation meant nothing if the soul beneath them was compromised. Not everything Montreal had given her was poison. Meeting Laura, and helping her escape Jean’s grasp, had been one of the few good things to come out of the whole sordid mess.

Then there was Alice.

She turned sharply down one side street and then another, as though quick movement might outrun the ache of memory. It never did. The case before Montreal still lingered like an open wound. Alice had not been just another victim, suspect, or enemy to confront. She had been one of Coraline’s best friends, someone woven through happier memories, through trust, through the softer and more human parts of her life that the mask was never meant to touch. Now the world called her Wonderland, and every time Coraline thought of that name it felt less like an alias and more like an epitaph for someone she had not entirely lost, and yet could not seem to get back.

Her life had become a cruel series of tests, each one asking more of her than felt fair. Living a double life was hard enough. Choosing to fight injustice in the shadows was hard enough. Nothing had prepared her for how often it had begun to turn personal.

She was still a vigilante, and if the police meant to chase her down, this fox was not going to make it easy for the hounds.

She did, however, have one possible saving grace in law enforcement—or so she hoped.

Detective Liv Benoit.

The two of them had come to an understanding during the Bloodletter killings, as the media had dubbed Callum Campbell’s murders. Liv had been one of the few people in the system Coraline had looked at and thought might actually deserve the badge. Sharp, relentless, and clean as far as Coraline could tell, Benoit had earned something rare: respect.

The Vixen snarled beneath her, all muscle, heat, and chrome, as Vulpes rolled the throttle and let the engine answer with a deep, savage growl. Around her, Toronto glittered in the dark like a city that never truly slept, all neon haze, rain-slick streets, and secrets tucked behind a thousand glowing windows.

The night was long. There was no rest for the wicked.

And certainly none for the foxes who hunted them.

Then she was gone, the Vixen lunging forward in a streak of motion and red light, devouring asphalt as she plunged into the veins of the city. Past alleys, towers, and shadow-drenched intersections, she raced deeper into the Toronto night, still hunting, still burning, still chasing the thin and fragile line between vengeance and justice.

Vulpes slowed, turned into a dimly lit side alley, and parked the Vixen in the shelter of shadow and brick. For a moment she just sat there, listening to the engine tick softly as it cooled beneath her. Then she took a breath and tapped the side of her helmet, bringing her HUD into clearer focus.

Leo’s tracker had not gone far.

Good.

There was no point moving on him too soon. Men like Leo Ruso did not bolt cleanly after a scare like that. They regrouped. They checked for tails. They barked orders, steadied their nerves, and convinced themselves they were still in control. If she pushed too fast, she risked forcing him to ground—or worse, spooking him into abandoning whatever trail he might lead her to. Better to give him room to recover. Room to move. Room to make a mistake. 

Her stomach chose that moment to remind her she was still human.

It did so with quiet but undeniable irritation.

Coraline grimaced behind the cowl and considered the emergency rations clipped to her belt, then the nutrient bars stashed in the Vixen’s saddlebags. Both would do the job. Technically. They were efficient little monstrosities engineered to keep the body running—dense with vitamins, electrolytes, protein, and every other bodily necessity some lab had deemed essential. Unfortunately, they tasted like damp cardboard that had lost a fight with mud.

That was not, she decided, what morale needed tonight.

She looked toward the street beyond the mouth of the alley, one she knew well.

One nearly everyone in Toronto knew well.

There was hardly a child in the city who had not been taken there at least once, usually wide-eyed and overexcited, clutching a toy, a paper crown, or whatever gimmick Ultra-Burger was pushing that season. The road led straight toward the old, famous first Ultra-Burger location, the one people treated with an odd mix of civic pride, nostalgia, and greasy devotion.

For all the strangeness of her life, for all the gadgets, rooftop chases, and mobsters with guns, Coraline had to admit that real food sounded very good right now.

And she had time to kill.

Ultra-Burger was quiet at this hour. The late shift was only just coming on, and the parking lot sat mostly empty under its bright lights, with only a few lonely cars scattered across the asphalt. Inside, the restaurant looked nearly as still. The only visible customers were a pair of EMTs on graveyard shift, slumped in a booth with the weary, hollow-eyed look of people fueling up between other people’s emergencies.

At the drive-thru window, a young man in uniform sat near the microphone. He looked fresh out of school, still carrying that uncertain blend of earnestness and nerves that came with a first real job. When the sensor chimed to indicate someone had pulled up, he straightened, picked up the mic, and slipped into the cheerful script with only the faintest crack in his voice.

“Ultra-Burger, how can we make your meal heroic?”

Vulpes answered curtly.

“Bluebird Meal. Power-Up Punch.”

A few moments later, a warm box of food was set into the hands of the young woman working the pickup window. She glanced out automatically, expecting headlights, an idling car, something—but the night beyond the glass was oddly still. She blinked, frowned, and then jumped slightly at a loud tap against the window.

Looking down, she saw money resting neatly on the ledge below.

Exact change.

She hesitated and glanced back toward her manager, unsure what to do, when her eyes caught the old sign bolted near the window. It was one of those pieces of Ultra-Burger history the company treated almost like scripture, a relic from the chain’s long, strange tradition of feeding superheroes, sidekicks, vigilantes, and assorted weirdos at all hours of the night.

The first rule was simple:

Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Accept the weird.

The girl furrowed her brow, thought about it for all of two seconds, then decided she was not paid enough to challenge sacred corporate doctrine. She slid the window open, set the food out carefully, and took the money.

A moment later, the box was gone.

She stared into the darkness a beat longer, half-expecting a cape, a motorcycle, or at least some explanation. There was nothing. Just the quiet street, the glow of the sign, and the faint feeling that something very odd had just happened.

A few minutes later, Vulpes was back beside the Vixen, leaning against the bike as she popped open the drink holder—something she had to admit was one of the more useful little additions John had made to the machine. She settled the drink into place, opened the box, and let the scent roll up into the night air.

Real food. Hot food.

And not just any food.

One of Coraline’s favorites, ever since she had first come here as a child.

She took her first sip before opening the box properly, the Power-Up Punch cold and sharply sweet against her tongue, all citrus bite and sugared artificial bravado. It was ridiculous, a drink with the name of something a cartoon strongman would advertise to children, and yet at two in the morning, after a rescue, a fight, and a high-speed chase, it tasted unreasonably good.

Then she opened the box.

The smell hit first—hot fried batter, toasted buttered bun, salt, vinegar, and something bright and creamy from the tartar sauce. Inside sat the Bluebird Meal in all its strange, regional-themed glory: a Cod Melt nestled in its wrapper, fries spilling heat and malt-vinegar seasoning into the cardboard, and a little dessert tucked into the corner like an afterthought someone had wisely decided not to omit.

Coraline picked up the cod melt and took a bite.

The fillet gave way with a satisfying crackle, the fish inside tender and flaky. Sharp white cheddar melted into the heat of it, while the cabbage slaw and pickle chips cut through the richness with crunch and tang. The lemon-herb tartar pulled it all together into something far better than fast food had any right to be.

She closed her eyes for half a second as she chewed.

Yes.

That was worth not eating the ration bars.

She chased it with a few fries, thick-cut and properly hot, the sea salt and malt-vinegar seasoning clinging to them in a way that made them taste both greasy and oddly nostalgic. Ultra-Burger had always known how to engineer comfort into a paper carton. It was probably one of their superpowers.

The meal was not just one she liked because it was good, though that certainly helped. It was the name.

The Bluebird Meal.

Even now it stirred something warm and quietly reverent in her chest.

While she often cited her grandfather as her greatest teacher and inspiration, Bluebird held a special place among Coraline’s heroes. Maria Murphy had been one of the first women to take up the mask and make it mean something on her own terms back in the Golden Age—a policewoman, a detective, and a vigilante all at once, forcing a city and an era to reckon with the fact that courage and competence had never belonged only to men.

Coraline had met her once, early in her own career, when she had sought out the retired legend while tracking a killer who had fled from Toronto. She had gone in carrying that old warning everyone repeated about heroes—that you should never meet them in person for fear reality would tarnish the myth. But Maria Murphy had not disappointed her. If anything, she had deepened the legend. Tough, sharp, warm in a dry-edged sort of way, and possessed of exactly the kind of hard-earned steel Coraline admired, Bluebird had been everything she hoped and a little more.

Their meeting had stayed with her ever since.

So yes, the meal tasted good.

But that was not really why she had ordered it.

Not entirely.

Some small part of her, the girl who had grown up on stories of masked women who broke rules for the right reasons, still liked the simple comfort of ordering something named after one of her heroes. It was silly, perhaps. Sentimental, certainly.

She took another bite anyway.

She finished the last of her meal and tossed the remains into a nearby dumpster, making a quiet mental note that whoever had been on fries tonight had known exactly what they were doing.

A small mercy.

She picked up her helmet and tapped her HUD awake again. Leo’s little blip had moved.

Good.

Odds were he was angry, rattled, humiliated, and more than ready to see the Vulpes’ head served up on a platter. Nothing new there. Coraline had long since reasoned that if a mobster did not want to kill her, she probably was not doing her job properly.

She slid the helmet back on and studied the tracker feed, letting the data settle in her mind as she calculated the gap. Time enough for Leo to call for a pickup. Time enough to pace and swear and seethe over the indignity of being outplayed. Time enough, perhaps, to call Carmine Ruso and explain why a witness who should have been wearing concrete at the bottom of Lake Ontario was instead sitting safe in RCMP custody.

That conversation alone was almost worth the trouble.

Almost.

Carmine Ruso was not a man Leo would enjoy disappointing. The head of the family had built a reputation on old-school discipline, cold patience, and the kind of violence that did not need to be frequent to be memorable. Men like Leo could posture all they liked in warehouses and back rooms, but when it came time to explain failure to Carmine, even made men learned how small they really were.

Coraline’s mouth curled faintly beneath the cowl.

Then the expression faded.

Because humor aside, this was the real work. Leo moving again meant the trail was alive, and trails had a habit of going cold if you let them breathe too long. She had given him enough space. Enough time to feel safe. Enough time to lead her somewhere useful.

Now it was her turn to move.

She swung one leg over the Vixen, settled into the seat, and rolled the throttle. The engine answered with a low, eager snarl as the bike came alive beneath her once more.

Then she pulled out of the alley and slipped back into the Toronto night, following the little blinking trail toward whatever waited at the other end.

According to the map overlay, Leo was holed up in a smoke shop in Little Italy called Little Italy Leaf & Lounge.

Vulpes rolled through the sleeping city with the tracker pulsing softly in the corner of her HUD, then tapped the comms control built into her helmet.

“Call Wolf.”

The system answered with an obedient chime, and a second later John’s voice came through the line, low, steady, and faintly distracted in the way it always was when he was half-buried in tools or schematics.

“This is Wolf. You need something, Fox?”

“Yeah,” she said, eyes still on the road as the Vixen hummed beneath her. “Little Italy Leaf & Lounge. What can you pull up for me?”

There was a short pause, then the faint scrape of a chair, the sound of John moving from his workbench to one of the Fox Den’s terminals. A keyboard started chattering in the background.

“Hang on.”

She let the bike eat up another stretch of midnight street while he worked. Toronto at this hour had a different face than it wore in daylight. The financial towers were dark mirrors. Streetcars groaned in the distance. Neon reflected in rain-slick pavement, and the city seemed to breathe through alleys, bodegas, shops, and the dim back rooms where people with too much money and bad intentions conducted business they did not want seen.

John came back on the line.

“Place is old. Family-owned on paper. Goes back to late Prohibition. Started as a tobacco import storefront, then shifted into cigars, pipes, specialty leaf, that kind of thing. Public face reads respectable enough if you don’t look too hard.” Another beat of typing. “Underneath that, it reads omertà so loudly I’m surprised the walls don’t say it out loud. Financial patterns are dirty, property records are weird, and the place has been loosely tied to the Ruso syndicate for damn near a century.”

Vulpes’ mouth curled faintly beneath the mask.

“So basically a legacy hideout that sells tobacco and provides private smoking rooms for discerning gentlemen in nice suits concealing guns.”

John snorted softly.

“Yeah. That’s the polished version. Less polished version? It’s an old mob social den with a legal business wrapped around it like wallpaper.”

“Any known exits?”

More keys. More quiet computation.

“Front entrance onto the main street. Rear service door into an alley. Basement access, maybe, but I’m not getting clean plans. The building’s old enough that half the useful paperwork was probably handwritten by dead men.” He paused, then added, “And Fox? If Leo’s there, he’s not hiding alone.”

“He won’t be,” she said.

The Vixen slipped around a corner, engine low and eager beneath her, its red-and-black bodywork catching the fractured glow of passing signs.

John continued, “You want my guess? Leo ran somewhere familiar. Somewhere the family has used for years. Somewhere he can get patched in, soothed, rearmed, and reminded he still matters after tonight’s humiliation.”

“Meaning he’s likely angry, embarrassed, and trying to recover what’s left of his dignity.”

“Meaning,” John said dryly, “he’s probably talking too much.”

That got the ghost of a smile from her.

“Good. Maybe I’ll let him.”

“You planning to go in?”

“Planning to look first,” she answered.

John shifted gears, practical as ever. “I can bring up nearby cameras, traffic feeds, and whatever private security I can worm into once you get closer. You want overwatch on approach?”

“Already assumed I had it.”

“You did.”

For a moment, neither of them said anything. They rarely needed to fill silence. That was one of the things Coraline appreciated most about John. He was not a man who wasted words, and when he spoke it was usually to say something useful, honest, or unexpectedly funny when she needed it most.

Then his voice came back, quieter.

“Fox. Be careful. An old place like that? It’s the kind of den men built for surviving raids, not just serving cigars.”

“I know.”

“You want me spinning up contingencies?”

“I always want you spinning up contingencies.”

That earned her another quiet huff of amusement through the comms.

“Already on it.”

She leaned a little lower over the Vixen as Little Italy drew nearer. The city changed block by block, the glass and steel giving way to older brick, shuttered shopfronts, church silhouettes, narrow streets, and the lingering bones of old Toronto. This part of the city still carried family names in its mortar. Some of them were honest. Some had never been. The Ruso name was the sort that left fingerprints everywhere, if you knew how to read the pressure.

Up ahead, her HUD adjusted route guidance in cool lines of light.

Leo’s blip sat there, waiting.

Not moving much now.

Settling.

Coraline’s eyes narrowed behind the cowl.

That was fine.

He had run somewhere he believed was safe. Somewhere old. Somewhere protected by habit, money, and men who thought history made them untouchable.

She had always enjoyed proving men like that wrong.

The Vixen purred beneath her as she throttled down slightly, no longer racing now, but hunting. Fast was useful. Quiet was better. By the time she reached the edge of Little Italy, she was no longer a blur tearing through Toronto traffic. She was a shadow on two wheels, slipping between pools of yellow streetlight and blackened storefront glass, closing the distance one block at a time.

Behind her visor, the little tracker pulsed on.

Ahead of her, Little Italy Leaf & Lounge waited like a relic from another era—respectable on the surface, rotten underneath, and full of the kind of men who mistook age for invincibility.

Vulpes rolled deeper into the neighborhood, toward Leo, toward what she hoped was a lead, and toward whatever the Rusos thought they were hiding in the smoke.