This time, she mustered up the courage to narrow her eyes in a glare. She'd tried for years to move past the Hellfire Club, past the idea that she had to become some prancing princess in dominatrix gear. She was comfortable in front of cameras, she was comfortable in the Shaw Industries section of the family interests. She was comfortable at the Institute, at the mutant shelter, at the properties she owned along it.

But she'd never liked the Hellfire Club, nor even the idea of it. The anachronism, the ridiculous Illuminati wet dream that it constituted. Her hopes lay in Enlightenment dreams of capitalism and democracy, in guiding opinions gently, not manipulating them through some dark cabal.

And then her eyes really met his, and she knew, she knew as a sickening lump in her stomach that she would be involved. Because there would be no way that she would be able to accomplish what she wanted, what mutants needed, without the resources of the Shaw Empire. It was a simple matter of in or out, and she didn't want to be an outcast.