Cat Hardy

Cat Hardy is a nightclub songstress in Depression Era New York, a once-famous name now holding court at a smoky establishment called The Alcove, where she stops a room cold with a slow, aching rendition of an old standard. Mr. Carmedy, the man claiming to be her husband, tells Ben that he believes she is unfaithful and pays him to have her followed. This is how the down-and-out private investigator first finds himself in her orbit, camera in hand, trailing her to a high-rise penthouse where she meets in secret with the city's mayor.

She is no helpless quarry. When the photographs taken of her threaten to become leverage, she answers with muscle of her own, sending a dangerous associate named Flint Marko to retrieve them and put the fear into the man who took them. There seems to be more to her situation than meets the eye, and when Marko vanishes the next day, it is Cat herself who walks into Ben's office and hires him to find the missing man.

Cat Hardy brings her case to Ben Reilly, hiring the private investigator to find her missing bodyguard Flint Marko. She offers little to go on beyond his address, telling him only that the strange affliction turning Flint to sand began roughly six months earlier and has been steadily worsening, and she deflects his questions with cool composure, insisting the investigating is his job to do.

When Ben confronts her at The Alcove for hiding that Flint once worked as an enforcer for the crime lord Silvermane, she concedes she feared he would not take the case had he known. She admits that Silvermane owns the club where she performs, yet maintains that her reasons for wanting Flint found are personal and have nothing to do with the man who signs her paychecks.

Cat Hardy stays at the center of Ben Reilly's investigation, visiting her at her apartment, he probes whether her secret meeting with Mayor Morris had any hand in the dock raid. She gives little away, keeping her answers vague even as the detective circles closer to the truth.

A different truth surfaces when Flint Marko later comes to her. The two embrace, revealing that singer and bodyguard are bound by more than employment, that they love each other. Cat speculates that a cure for the sickness turning him to sand must exist somewhere and begs him to run away with her. Sadly, it is not to be and his condition takes him before they can, his body shifting to sand as he tears himself away. By night's end she tries to leave the city on her own, only for Ben to catch her at Pennsylvania Station and confront her with what he knows: She was the one that hired Addison and tipped off the mayor. Unfortunately, Winston's men close in and take them both before she can get away.

Cat Hardy moves through a dangerous night under Silvermane's thumb, performing at The Alcove while the crime lord celebrates at her expense, then breaking down alone in her room once the mask of composure can come off. When Silvermane comes to question her about the train station, she explains away her flight as terror at his unhinged behavior and insists Ben was only watching her on his behalf, covering for them both.

Growing closer to Ben, she takes him to the rundown theatre where Silvermane first discovered her singing and lays bare how the crime lord controls her every move, recounting how a kind dentist named Thomas once proposed to her, only for Silvermane to have him killed so she could never leave. She and Ben bond over their losses, and she opens up about a dream of running away to Santorini. The tenderness shatters when a news alert names a monster loose in the Diamond District. Certain it is Flint, she rushes to help him and brands Ben a coward when he nonchalantly refuses to come. Later, returning to his apartment, she tests her growing suspicion by throwing herself from his window, forcing the truth into the open when he saves her, and the two share a passionate kiss.

Cat Hardy listens as Ben Reilly finally tells her how his powers began, the war and the bite that made him the Spider, drawing the pair closer. Later, at The Alcove, she keeps her composure when Flint Marko and Lonnie arrive to take their places at Silvermane's side, though the sight of Flint among the crime lord's muscle clearly shakes her. Silvermane sends her away to let the men talk business and tells her to start looking for a new band and a younger singer, a sign that her place in his world is slipping.

The weight of it all breaks when Ben brings the worst news yet, that Flint is dying, brought closer to death every time he uses his powers. Believing her future with Flint gone, she accepts Ben's offer to leave New York and run away with him to start over. When she goes to say her goodbyes to Flint, she learns from Lonnie that Dr. Faber needs access to the Spider to make a cure that might save Flint. With little hesitation, Cat goes to the doctor and gives up Ben's secret, exposing the identity of the man she had just agreed to flee the city with in order to buy Flint a chance to live.

Cat Hardy is consumed by guilt over betraying Ben Reilly, agonizing over what she has done as Silvermane and his men return to The Alcove. She is taken aback to learn the raid on Faber's lab turned up nothing, the cost of her betrayal seeming to have bought no result at all.

Searching for the man she gave up, she goes to Ben's office and tells Janet that he stood her up, only for Janet to recognize at once that something is wrong rather than that Ben simply failed to appear. Cat asks Janet to send word if he turns up and takes her leave. Later, Flint Marko comes to her with a long, aching confession of how he fell in love with her, and though she tells him she is right there in front of him and pleads that she loves him, he cannot move past how quickly she turned to Ben in his absence.

Cat carries the full weight of her betrayal and spends everything she has trying to set it right. She slips away from Silvermane to reach Janet, absorbs the slaps she knows she has earned, and offers the only amends she can imagine: get hold of the cure, and she will press it into Flint and Leyden herself. It is a plan built of guilt and love in equal part. She throws herself into it with little regard for her own safety.

When the night turns to open violence, Cat moves with determination. She takes up a gun and goes after the man who has owned her life for too long. She runs Silvermane to ground in a maze of mirrors and finally ends him, closing the book on the protector who shaped and brutalized her. Antagonizing Dirk, causing him to electrocute her, the fight turns personal for Flint. He squares off with his previous teammate only to find that he is sorely outmatched. When all is said and done, Cat is there beside him as he receives the Antidote. In the quiet afterward she leaves at Flint's side, the two of them bound by everything they have survived.