LADY BULLSEYE

Maki Matsumoto did everything right, by assassin standards. Sent to New York by the Hand lord Hirochi, she maneuvered Matt Murdock toward the one prize her teacher Master Izo had dangled in front of her since girlhood: leadership of the Hand itself. In Daredevil Vol. 1 #500 (2009), the succession finally came to a head — with Wilson Fisk standing in the Hand's chamber, Hirochi dead at his feet, demanding the clan accept him instead.

Daredevil burst in with Izo, flattened Lady Bullseye in the fight, and then did the thing nobody in the room expected: he accepted the Hand's offer to lead them. But his acceptance came with two non-negotiable conditions — the Hand would never do business with the Kingpin again, and Lady Bullseye was to be cast out of the clan entirely. The council agreed on the spot, and the Hand's own ninjas hauled their former spearhead out of her own coronation.

The exile was the cruelest possible ending to her arc. She had never wanted the Hand's traditions, only its throne, and Izo's promise had been a lie from the start — he had groomed her as a stalking horse to frighten Murdock into taking the job himself. Thrown out by the very man her scheming had crowned, she hunted Izo down afterward for one short conversation: she had been lied to, and one day she would find him and kill him.