Fool, thought Ivan Vanko. He was working and watching Tony Stark's appearance on television.

Ivan's eyes watered and his neck ached from the fine soldering work required to build a functioning miniature Arc Reactor. Until that moment, only two had existed in the world. Now there was a third, tiny and perfect, glowing on his worktable. His father would have loved it. Ivan wanted to share the moment with someone, so he reached out toward Irina's perch and waited for her to climb onto his knuckles.

"Isn't it beautiful, Irina? "

She chirped her name back at him.

Ivan Vanko had made an Arc Reactor. He was the second man in history to do so. It would forever gall him that Stark was the first, that Stark had suppressed Anton Vanko's pioneering work and then taken sole credit for further developments. Ivan would have to console himself with being there when Tony Stark was destroyed.

Irina cackled. Outside, the sun was setting, and snow was beginning to fall. Ivan began to piece together the next part of his plan.

Ivan could have chosen any of a thousand different ways to destroy Stark, but in the end he chose the whip. His creation was five feet long, made of articulated tungsten carbide vertebrae. He had machined each vertebra himself and linked them together onto a woven cable. A handle, insulated and wired to the power supply, extended another six inches.

Ivan wound copper wire around the vertebrae, weaving it along the cable and through holes like the nerve openings in a spinal column. When the weapon was done and activated, Ivan would possess a whip of white-hot molten metal. Not even Stark's armor would survive it for long. Nothing could. Ivan finished wiring the whip. He shrugged into a harness he had built of leather-wrapped tungsten and placed the miniature Arc Reactor in a housing set over his sternum, mimicking the Iron Man chest plate.

He ran the cable from the glowing chest repulsor transmitter down his arm to the handle of the whip, attaching it at the shoulder, the bicep, and the radius. Before he plugged in the RT, Ivan put on a glove; even with the insulation, he wouldn't be able to hold the whip bare-handed. The glove extended well up his forearm and would protect him from accidental grazes of the whip.

When he plugged the power cable into the whip, it sparked to life with a hum that vibrated in Ivan's bones. He flicked it out to its full length, and bits of plasma jumped from the tip, searing holes where they landed. Irina squawked and fluttered her wings, scooting to the far end of her perch.

Now he needed to test it. The picture of Tony Stark on his television gave him the perfect target. Ivan flicked the whip away from his body and then pivoted to bring it down in a sweeping arc. The sight and sound of it connecting with the television was like a lightning strike with thunder. His ears rang, and his eyes watered from the flash. An involuntary grin spread across his face as he blinked away the tears and looked at what he had done.

The television lay split in two; the ancient screen and tube had exploded into sprays of glittering fragments. Ivan had not felt a thing, no sense of resistance or even impact. His grin broadened. He flipped the whip in a tight loop as if spinning a lasso, enjoying the sparks, then touched a stud on the inside of his wrist to turn it off.

One whip was good. Two would be even better.

Since Rhodey was stationed at Edwards Air Force Base, northeast of Los Angeles, and since he and Tony had been friends for years, and since their friendship was currently strained, Pepper had reasoned that there were several good reasons for inviting Rhodey to ride with them back from Washington. It wasn't working out. She sat in a seat between her boss and her boss's best friend. Neither one of them would talk to the other; both were feeling betrayed. Both wanted an apology.

"This is ridiculous," she finally said. "Are you for real? Are you not going to talk for the entire flight? "

Looking at her, Tony pointed at Rhodey. "Why isn't he on Hammer's plane? "

"I was invited," Rhodey said.

"Not by the owner of the plane," Tony said. "And that's bad jetiquette. Guests are not allowed to invite other guests."

Rhodey tried again. "Tony—"

"I'm not a guest," Pepper interrupted. A warning tone crept into her voice.

"Can you tell him I'm not talking to him? " Tony said.

"Then listen," Rhodey said. "What's wrong with you? Do you know that showing classified footage on national television is—? "

"No worse than stabbing your best friend in the back at a Senate hearing? " Tony broke in. "How about a heads-up next time? "

"I gave you the report! I asked you to fact-check it!" Rhodey protested.

"Did not," said Tony.

"He did," asserted Pepper.

Tony glared at both of them. "Like I would even remember," he said with a wave of his hand. "You still owe me an apology."

"I wouldn't count on it," retorted Rhodey.

Pepper interrupted before the argument could get any worse. "Tony, let's go over your schedule. Can we schedule the call with the secretary-general of the United Nations? It's embarrassing that we missed—"

"Let's talk about my birthday party," Tony said.

Pepper took a deep breath. She wondered how long it would take her to hit the ground if she jumped out of the plane. "I recommend something small, elegant," she began.

"Nope," Tony said. "We're gonna have a huge party."

Pepper let it go and forged ahead. "Monaco," she said. "I think we should cancel." The Monaco Historic Grand Prix car race was one of Tony's favorite rituals.

"Absolutely not," Tony said, exactly as Pepper had anticipated. "I've entered a car in the race." Which Pepper knew, of course. She had seen the financials on the car. Stark Industries had spent a mint on it.

There was silence as the jet began its descent. Rhodey wanted what was best for the United States, and to him the Iron Man suit was the culmination of a long tradition of US military superiority driven by technological innovation. Tony thought Rhodey was just jealous. He wanted a suit. It was that simple.

"Next time," Tony said, "you're flying commercial."

Once he got home, Tony went to work with Jarvis testing new power sources for his chest Arc Reactor, since the palladium fuel cell was proving toxic. Jarvis was trying all sorts of chemical combinations in an effort to improve the formula. But the tests kept failing.

"Rise in palladium levels," Jarvis said. "Toxicity now at twenty-four percent."

Bad news. The purple lines of palladium poisoning spreading from the RT were thicker and longer. Some of them had sprouted smaller lines that wandered off to meet each other, creating a webbed effect.

"You're running out of both time and options," Jarvis said. He had run a number of simulations of potential new fuel cell compounds, and none of them could power the miniaturized Arc Reactor consistently enough to keep the shrapnel in Tony's chest from killing him. "Unfortunately the device that's keeping you alive is also killing you."

While Tony was looking at the ugly lines on his skin, Jarvis warned him that Pepper was approaching. He got his shirt pulled back down just as she tapped her code into the lab door access panel. Tony quickly buttoned up his shirt and picked up one of his new inventions, a Tech-Ball, tossing it around nonchalantly as he turned to meet her.

"Hey," he said before she had a chance to yell at him about something.

But that didn't stop her. "What were you thinking? "

"I'm thinking that I'm busy," he said.

"Did you actually donate our entire modern art collection to the—"

"Boy Scouts of America," he finished for her. "It's a fine organization. And it's not our art collection. It's mine."

"I spent ten years curating that collection," Pepper said. "I'm entitled to—" She cut herself off and reset. "Anyway, there're only about eight thousand and eleven things I need to talk to you about."

"Let's start with the Stark Expo."

"It's a huge waste of money," she said.

"It's the only thing that matters," Tony said. He noticed she had a cold and hoped she wouldn't get germs all over his lab . . . especially if a cold might weaken him while he was fighting the palladium toxicity.

"The Stark Expo is your ego run mad," she said.

That set him off, like it always did, and right away they were arguing about how much Stark Industries money to devote to this or that enterprise or this or that cause. "I don't care anymore," Tony said. "I don't care about the liberal agenda anymore."

"Well, I care—" Pepper started to say, and Tony would never know what she was going to add, because he said, "Fine. You do it."

She either didn't hear him or didn't believe him, because she kept talking. So he kept repeating himself.

"You do it. You run the company."

"I do run it," she said indignantly.

"You're not listening to me. I'm trying to make you CEO! Why won't you listen to me? "That got her attention.

"I hereby irrevocably appoint you chairman and CEO of Stark Industries, effective immediately," Tony said.

She was stunned. She hadn't looked this stunned the first time she'd seen him in the Iron Man armor, all chipped and scarred with bullet and shrapnel holes.

"I've actually given this a lot of thought, considering who a worthy successor would be," Tony said, as he walked over to Dummy, who had just rolled up with a bottle of champagne and two glasses. He popped the cork on the champagne and added, "But then I realized . . . it's you. It's always been you."

Pepper's face ran through six different expressions.

"Are you serious? " she asked. Tony just blinked at her. "You . . . you are serious," she said.

"Congratulations, Ms. Potts," Tony said, shaking her hand and handing her a glass of champagne that Dummy brought over—miraculously without spilling it.

"I don't know what to think," she said.

"Don't think. Drink," he said. They toasted.

After hours of more failed tests, Tony decided to vent some of his frustration by taking a boxing lesson from Happy. He'd had a boxing ring put into his home gym just for this purpose.

"Cover," Happy said after sticking a jab into Tony's nose. "Don't drop. Hands up. Jab-jab-hook-uppercut-jab."

Eyes watering from the jab, Tony threw the combination. Happy flicked the punches aside and said, "You're dropping your hook. Again."

Tony heard the doorbell ring and a moment later looked up to see Pepper walking into the gym. "The notary's here. Can you please come sign the transfer paperwork? " she called out.

"Great," Tony said.

A young woman he had never seen followed Pepper into the room. "What's your name, young lady? "

"Rushman," she said. "Natalie Rushman."

"Front and center," he said, beckoning her into the ring. He looked at her for a long time. "Give her a lesson, Happy."

Then he hopped out of the ring and went over to sit with Pepper. While she looked on with irritation, he fired up the touchscreen tabletop and pulled up Natalie's résumé from the Stark Industries personnel files. What he saw impressed him.

"Ever box before? " he heard Happy ask Natalie.

"I have," she said.

"What, like Tae Bo" he said, mocking her a little. Hap was a nice guy, but his ego was pretty fragile, especially in the ring.

Tony made no effort to keep the admiration out of his voice as he looked through her resume—and her modeling photos. This young woman did it all. "Did you see her résumé? Fluent in French, Italian, Russian . . . Latin? Who speaks Latin? "

Pepper, meanwhile, was not so impressed. "No one. It's a dead language. I think you need to meet some new candidates for your assistant," she said.

"I don't have time to meet," Tony said. "I have a feeling about her."

"Mm-hm," she said.

In the ring, Natalie looked back over at them. Happy, pushing his joke a little too far, said, "Lesson number one: Never turn your back on an opponent."

Whenever he said this to Tony, he gave him a little tap on the back of the head. He tried this with Natalie and like she had a sixth sense, she spun, caught his glove, twisted his forearm back, and used his weight to brace her in a leaping martial-arts move. She scissored her legs around his neck and took him down before he even knew what was happening.

"Happy!" Pepper cried out.

Tony got up and ran to the ring. Natalie let go of Happy, who got to his feet and shrugged.

"Slipped," he said.

Natalie got out of the ring and flipped open a tablet. "Mr. Stark, I need your impression," she said.

"Quiet reserve," he said, firing up the flirt engine.

"I mean your fingerprint," she said, showing him the fields on the table screen.

"Will that be all, Mr. Stark? "

"Yes," Pepper said. "That will be all, Miss Rushman."

As Natalie walked away with the forms that would make the transfer of Stark Industries to Pepper Potts official, Tony said, "I want her."

"No," Pepper said. o5+c7rhl5MOwBSITKKORc0ONOHuJIKSbmCPMrIaakDOM6vOTvjU7/bDY63nzmJcD