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Frank props his gun against the wall, drops his knife on the coffee table. He pulls a second handgun from its holster and moves to the blinds, checking the sight-line.
It looks clear for the moment, but he doesn’t know how long he can depend on that to last. He looks back at the kid bleeding on floor, circus costume ripped to shreds and mask long-gone. There are bruises blooming across his body, blood streaking over every other bit of visible skin. His face looks like the kid went through a meat grinder, cut and torn up.
He’s healing though, fucking quick like some of these suped-up so-called "heroes" manage.
His hair is so coated in blood and mud that Frank can hardly tell what the hell color it used to be. The kid is breathing though, still alive and kicking. Lucky, since he’d decided to take on the entire Italian mob on his own just to save some billionaire that was sitting pretty in a hospital now.
If Frank hadn’t already been there, following up on a lead involving the scum of the Earth selling kids on the black market, this particular kid would be dead. As it is, he’s only half-sure why he saved the kid to begin with.
Surprise, maybe.
Who would have guessed Spider-man was fifteen, sixteen at the most.
A fucking kid out there, fighting on the streets, taking on the filth and the scum like he had any goddamn chance in hell of surviving the big boy table. Fucking idiot.
Still, Frank had shot every piece of scum in that warehouse and when the cops had come to find Stark, he’d grabbed the kid—more than half-dead, mask missing and lying unconscious on the concrete floor—and gotten the damn hell out of there.