Her finger had landed on the leftmost chest. Men go left, women go right—she was taking the left. It had its own logic.
"That one," she said, certain.
The ravens gave nothing away.
Each raven picked up a chest in its beak, beat its wings, and disappeared into the night sky. The skylight swallowed them.
She didn't know why Odin would send gifts at all. Compensation for the roof? A reward for Thor surviving? Some entirely different line item? She couldn't work it out.
She circled the remaining chest. No lock—the casing was designed to block detection, not keep her out.
She lifted the lid a crack.
Gold light punched her in the eyes.
She'd mentally prepared herself for something significant. It didn't help. When she yanked the lid fully open and took in what was inside, she stopped cold anyway.
A golden gauntlet, gleaming with an almost audible radiance. Half a meter—roughly twenty inches—tall, its diameter larger than her waist. Five recesses at the finger joints, and one more on the back of the hand: six hollow spaces that had clearly been made to hold something.
Awe was involuntary. Even a single glance felt like standing at the base of an unclimbable peak.
An Infinity Gauntlet.
Odin, have you lost your mind?
She kept looking.
After a moment, she walked around to the other side of the chest and examined the gauntlet's orientation carefully. Then she held both her own hands up and studied them.
...The thumb sat on the right side of the palm. This was a right-hand gauntlet.
Thanos wore it on his left.
She reached in and lifted it. The moment it left the chest, it began to contract, resizing itself to fit her right hand.
She flexed her fingers experimentally. Swung left, swung right. The gauntlet moved without issue—fitted, articulated like a second skin. But nothing changed. No surge. No buff of any kind. The same strength she'd had before, exactly the same.
That settled it: this was the piece from Odin's vault. The one Hela had looked at and dismissed with contempt, calling it a fake. Whether that assessment was accurate was another question entirely.
"Zero integrity stats on this thing," she muttered. No soul-binding, no restriction on who could use it—it had changed hands more times than a borrowed umbrella. Whoever held it, could use it. The gauntlet appeared to have zero standards.
She struck a scissors pose at the mirror. Very golden. Very visible.
That was the problem. Blinding. Luminous. Visible from half a mile away. Wearing it anywhere outside the house would be the functional equivalent of a flare signal: STEAL FROM ME, ALL POWER-SEEKERS WELCOME.
Where to keep it?
Return it to Odin: not a chance. This was the compensation. She was keeping it, fake or real.
Hand it over to the state: she wasn't short on money—that wasn't the point, but the state had no claim on this.
Leave it with S.H.I.E.L.D.: she'd need to post personal surveillance to make sure Baldy didn't find creative ways to reclassify it.
HYDRA: same problem, different letterhead.
Leave it here in the villa: if another Thor-level incident happened—and her current track record suggested that was not an unreasonable concern—it would be right in the line of fire. But no other location was safe either. Maybe she could find somewhere unnoticed and bury it? She kept glancing at the floor, deeply pessimistic about what the villa's future had in store.
She was still pacing circles around the room when her foot caught the chest.
There it was.
The chest blocked every form of detection. And—like the Fensalir armor and the Godslayer—it was an Asgardian artifact, which meant it could be filed away into subspace.
She tried it twice. Both times, the chest and the gauntlet tucked away cleanly and returned on command. The knot in her chest dissolved.
The clothes had been single-wear pieces anyway. The house had insurance. Once she thought about it like that, the situation was almost fine.
The household drifted back from wherever they'd been hiding.
"Maki—contact the insurance company and the construction firm. Have them come out together and draft a joint repair assessment."
She looked at Lorna and the lion cub, both radiating mild sheepishness. "You two cleared out fast. Lorna—go make me something to eat." She looked down at the lion cub for a moment, trying to think of something productive to assign him.
"Go play on your own. And exercise—you're getting fat." A light kick sent him rolling. He found his feet and wandered off with great dignity.
She picked a spare room and slept until noon.
When she emerged, contractors had already moved in. The master bedroom was crowded with workers and insurance adjusters, currently mid-argument.
The lead adjuster had a private theory—which he would never say aloud—that this villa's owner must be cursed. Devil-touched, maybe. Ordinary people didn't attract lightning. He couldn't prove it and it wouldn't help his case, so he focused on minimizing the payout and argued construction specs with the contractor.
Daisy walked out in a T-shirt and shorts, hair loose, and gave the maid a look. Keep it down, or they'll regret not keeping it down.
She settled in with breakfast and a stack of paperwork.
The maid had sorted it into categories. Most of it needed only a signature. Some required real reading—certain staff had a gift for burying a simple request inside three paragraphs of preamble, and signing without reading meant you might as well have signed a blank check. Then there were the outliers: someone insisting the Earth was about to explode, that they alone had detected it, and that she needed to fund their research with all urgency.
She set that one aside without comment.
Last came the invitations.
As her social profile had risen, so had the number of people who wanted her at their events. Galas, panels, charity dinners—most of them were performances she had no interest in watching. Unless the host was someone whose relationship actually mattered, she didn't go.
She was flipping through the stack when one stopped her. White border. Heavier paper than the others.
Frost International. A global luxury conglomerate with nearly a dozen household brand names under its roof. Its Chairwoman and majority shareholder appeared in business school case studies as a model of female achievement—written about extensively, cited constantly, held up as proof of what was possible.
Daisy didn't believe a word of it.
Because the Chairwoman in question was Emma Frost.