MY TONGUE, THE DAGGER AT YOUR JUGULAR. MY LOVE, THE SWORD AT YOUR BOSOM. WHICH DO YOU WANT?
🐈⬛
Juno could barely tell where she ended and where Black Cat started.
Frayed edges, like the loose ends of a childhood sweater. That was all she was. She couldn't see herself as anything else: every time she looked in a mirror her aunt's face would be staring back at her. Juno had high expectations to live up to.
Felicia Hardy was nothing short of perfect. A blonde bombshell. A jewel thief ever since her sixteenth birthday. She had never been caught; nobody wanted to catch her. She was the talk of London, everybody was obsessed with Black Cat. She was the anonymous, almighty cat burglar that had everyone in the criminal underworld wrapped around her manicured pinky finger.
... Until she got caught.
A couple of months before her arrest, Felicia got sick (or that's what she told Juno and her parents). With a new job on the horizon for her father, they packed up their lives in Australia and moved across the globe. Felicia was sick, or at least she looked it. Hair thinning and dull, eyes sunken in, spine sticking out of the thin skin on her back. Now that Juno looks back on it, it should have been easy to tell that it was a ploy.
The Raft was a bleak and dark place, which was what Juno had discovered when she visited Felicia. Her aunt didn't look sick anymore, but tired. She still smiled and laughed at Juno's small quips and had that spark of affection in her blue eyes (the ones Juno had inherited), but it was dim.
Felicia was talking in code. She always was. She was telling Juno about how a man named Robert Paine would be picking her up from school from now on, although Felicia had never picked Juno up before.
A week after that visit, a package came in the mail from "Black Fox" (who Juno later discovered was Robert Paine). Inside the beige paper wrapping, was what could only be recognized as Felicia's suit... the Black Cat costume. Underneath that, was a letter. It sat in a black envelope, with red sticky tape keeping it closed. A goodbye letter, a suicide note. Felicia Hardy was dead.
Juno Hardy was sixteen when she stole her first diamond. Hobie Brown was sixteen when he got bitten by that damned spider.
Maybe there is no start or end. The end of Felicia. The start of Juno. It's all the same.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
