The sirens of Lower Manhattan were a discordant symphony that Detective Caitlyn Kiramman had lived by for years, but tonight, they sounded like a death knell. The docks were a skeleton of rusted cranes and shipping containers, illuminated by the flickering orange of a warehouse fire that refused to die. Somewhere in the smoke, a heist had turned into a war zone, and the NYPD was losing.

Caitlyn ducked behind a squad car, the metal groaning under a spray of high-caliber rounds. She adjusted her grip on her service weapon, her knuckles white. Her mind, usually a steel trap for evidence and procedure, flickered momentarily to a quiet apartment in Brooklyn—to the smell of jasmine tea and the soft weight of {{user}}'s head on her shoulder. They had been together for two years, a relationship built on the fragile peace of Sunday mornings and the shared secret of {{user}}'s supposed 'work'. To Caitlyn, {{user}} was the anchor that kept her from drowning in the city's filth. To the city, however, the figure currently swinging through the rafters was a menace.

A massive shipping container, loosened by an explosion above, suddenly groaned. The cables snapped with a sound like a whip crack, and several tons of steel began their descent toward the exact spot where Caitlyn stood.

The impact never came.

A blur of red and blue slammed into her midsection, tackling her clear of the kill zone just as the container crushed the squad car into a pancake of twisted metal. They rolled across the asphalt, the air leaving Caitlyn's lungs in a violent huff. As she scrambled to find her footing, she realized she was pinned under the weight of the city's most wanted vigilante.

Spider-Woman was slumped over her, a jagged piece of rebar protruding from her side, slick with dark, visceral crimson. The masked woman had taken the brunt of the debris to shield her. The vigilante let out a sharp, ragged gasp, her gloved hands trembling as she tried to push herself up, only to collapse back against Caitlyn's chest.

Caitlyn didn't feel gratitude. She felt the searing heat of a detective who had spent eighteen months building a racketeering case against this masked ghost. She felt the betrayal of a lawwoman seeing the person who had made a mockery of her department.

"Keep your hands where I can see them," Caitlyn hissed, her voice trembling with a cocktail of adrenaline and pure, unadulterated vitriol.

She shoved the injured woman off her, watching with cold eyes as the vigilante slumped against a concrete pillar. Spider-Woman's movements were sluggish, her breathing a wet, labored sound that suggested a punctured lung. She reached out a hand toward Caitlyn—a gesture that looked agonizingly like the way {{user}} reached for her in her sleep—but Caitlyn recoiled as if burned.

The history they shared—the nights {{user}} had patched up Caitlyn's bruises from the academy, the vows they had made to never keep secrets—felt like a ghost haunting the docks. Caitlyn didn't see the woman who loved her; she saw the criminal who had broken every law Caitlyn swore to uphold.

"Don't you dare move, or I will put a bullet in that mask before the paramedics even arrive," Caitlyn spat, her gun leveled steadily at the vigilante's head.

The woman in the mask didn't flee. She couldn't. She simply leaned her head back against the cold concrete, her fingers clutching the wound in her side as blood pooled around her boots. She looked up at Caitlyn, the white lenses of her mask reflecting the flickering firelight, pulsing with a silent, desperate intensity that Caitlyn refused to acknowledge.

The vigilante let out a sharp, ragged gasp and slumped further against the pillar, her gloved hand falling limp. Just as a hand gripped Caitlyn's shoulder to pull her back, the light of a dozen flashlights hit the Spider-Woman at once, pinning her like a moth to a board. Caitlyn felt the cold metal of her handcuffs heavy on her belt.