Catwoman: Soulstealer (DC Icons #3)(43)

He had to move, had to get up, had to get air into his lungs—

“You’re not hurt.” A quiet observation.

He reached for the overpass railing to pull himself up. Tried and failed, his hands shaking so hard that even his suit couldn’t stabilize them.

He hadn’t had a reaction like this in months, and the last time, Bruce had been there to help get him away, but now—

A different matte-black helmet filled his vision. Lifted his head for him.

It wasn’t a real face. Wasn’t human. As inhuman as the people who’d set that roadside bomb—

The lenses slid upward into her helmet, revealing a pair of shadowed emerald eyes. Bright. Steady. Human.

“A car exploded,” she explained calmly. “A device set off by Harley Quinn.”

He knew that name. In his other life, new life, beyond the desert, he knew that name.

“It was a message—to me. The car was empty; the cops aren’t hurt.”

Cops. Harley.

She scanned his face, the helmet he himself wore. Cunning and calm. “PTSD,” she murmured.

He refused to acknowledge it. She’d tell the others. This sort of information would be worth a ton of money.

Grab her. He had to grab her now and bring her in before she sold him out.

She let go of his face and backed away to the opposite railing, limping slightly. A horn wailed through the night.

Move. He had to move, had to apprehend her.

His body refused to obey. Refused to uncurl, refused to stand.

She climbed onto the railing, graceful despite the injury on her thigh. As if she had been born balancing on a few inches of steel. And while she stood on the rail, flicking her broken lenses back down over her eyes, she said, “It does me no good if you’re dead. Your secret is safe.”

Before Luke could find a way to get his body to cooperate, to get a full breath into his lungs, she leapt.

His heart stopped. Until the train swept past, barreling toward the tunnel beyond.

He spotted her atop it, a lone, dark figure. Looking back, as if to watch him, the light from the burning police car dancing on the silver train.

As the train neared the tunnel, she smoothly slid onto her back and vanished into the underground.

A queen returning to her underworld.



* * *



—

Shadow and light flashed and eddied overhead, the train car beneath her a rumbling, thunderous rocket shooting beneath the earth.

Selina lay on her back, hands tucked behind her head, watching the tunnel pass by.

She’d meant what she said to Batwing. His secret was safe with her.

If League assassins were converging on Gotham City, he was perhaps the only other person who might stand a chance against them. Keep them occupied until she’d finished her mission.

She knew precisely what they were after—why they thought they could come to claim what was hers.

Nyssa and Talia often set their assassins against each other, gave them the same, competing missions. To keep them on their toes. To see who might survive. This was no different.

Selina wondered who Shrike had pissed off to warrant being dispatched here. If Talia and Nyssa had bet on who would walk away from their fight. They often did.

But Batwing’s PTSD was interesting. Terrible for him, but an interesting piece of the puzzle.

Taking on Gotham City’s underworld would no doubt inflict some serious internal scars, but to have his reaction be so debilitating…

Whatever he’d witnessed, it must have been…Selina tried not to imagine it. Even if he was her opponent.

Harley had no clue—Selina was certain—that her little pyrotechnics would trigger that reaction in him.

No, the explosion had been a giant middle finger to Selina. She’d probably tracked Selina here, seen the cops, and blown up the car as a warning to Selina not to double-cross her and Ivy. A little indication of what Harley was capable of if provoked.

A loose cannon. But one Selina would manage. Somehow.

Yet seeing Batwing on the ground like that, shaking…For a moment, she hadn’t been on that footbridge. For a moment, she’d been in a marble-and-gold bathroom, hurling her guts up, a waltz trickling up through the shining floor below. Because what she’d done minutes earlier…

“It is a simple movement,” Talia had purred in her ear, resting her head on Selina’s shoulder as they peered at the aging, overweight man paralyzed on the plush bed.

His eyes, however, were wide with terror as he watched the young woman he’d led up here, to his bedroom, while his masquerade party went on below.

“You know what he likes to do,” Talia said, her ice-cold hand wrapping around Selina’s wrist. The dagger held there. “Make him pay for it.”

Selina had given him a choice. At least, in her head she had. A secret, silent choice: to be a better man than his file suggested and not invite her up here. To avoid this moment, to let her find some way to get out of it, to spare his life and convince Talia that it was too risky to kill him. She’d piled up a list of plausible excuses, had been prepared to sneak into a bathroom and trigger the sprinklers, but then he’d invited her here.

And when he’d shut the bedroom door, when she’d pretended to study the art on the walls and had used the mounted antique mirror to watch him dump the contents of a tiny vial into the glass of champagne before he handed it to her, he’d chosen his fate.