vanished.
Luke lunged through the smoke, dodging trees before he reached the quiet road.
She sped off into the night on the back of Harley Quinn’s motorcycle. Too fast for him to follow, even with the wings.
He should have grabbed her. Should have handcuffed her to Tigris and waited until the cops came. Should have…He had no idea.
A League assassin with a conscience.
Here to sell something that the League would kill for and Gotham City’s underworld would line up to buy.
His stomach turned. But even as it did, Luke recalled the way she’d fought. That low laugh. That frank, cool openness with which she spoke to him.
And the heat that rose through him, stretching his skin tight over his bones. An aftereffect of battle, of adrenaline. Even though he hadn’t thrown a single punch. Even if he’d stood there, gawking, while she fought. Beautiful, graceful, and utterly off-limits.
Trouble. He was in big, big trouble.
Selina had been on the run for a month and a half.
She’d taken money from Nyssa. Broken into the safe in her office and swiped her bank card out of her wallet, minutes before Selina had headed off on a mission for the League. She’d walked out of the compound right through the front doors.
She didn’t know how long it had taken them to figure out who had done it. Probably Talia herself had pieced it together. But by now it would be clear that Selina had taken a train not to Greece like she’d been ordered, but to Switzerland, where she withdrew all of the account’s cash, set up a fancy new Swiss bank account, and became Holly Vanderhees.
The hair, the nails, the clothes. The shoes, the bags, the jewels. The cars, the residences, the private plane. The last one was leased, of course, but all of it—the identity she’d built—purchased with Nyssa’s blood money. She only wished she’d had time to grab Talia’s, too.
And what Selina had brought along with her, the payoff from that…Worth it. Utterly worth it.
“So all of this trouble tonight,” Harley said over the motorcycle’s roar as they sped off into the night, “was over a fake?”
Selina had known it was a trap. Whether Luke Fox and his stupid apologies knew his family had been used, she had no idea. Didn’t care.
But it was interesting that Batwing cared about the Fox family. She stored that information away to puzzle over later.
Batwing himself was a problem. Mostly because she liked him. He definitely filled out that suit, but she…she just liked him. That relentless drive to protect the innocents in this city, no matter the cost. To fight past his own demons to do so. Which meant he was absolutely lethal for everything she was working toward.
And though she could tell he was equally intrigued by her, and could certainly use that to her advantage…
“He threw down a challenge,” Selina said. “We couldn’t let it go unanswered.” Hence why she’d had Ivy and Harley remain behind. Going in for a fake necklace hadn’t been worth the risk. So they’d waited here, on the outskirts, to retrieve her.
Tigris showing up had been unexpected.
Oh, Nyssa and Talia must be mad. Furious. And with Shrike and Tigris now dead…
“Get up, you pathetic worm.” Tigris’s burning dark eyes were barely visible beneath her hood. “Do you think our enemies give us breaks to catch our breath?”
Always words like our and us were used here at the compound. Despite the brutality, the competition, there was an us vs. them mentality to the very way the instructors spoke; all designed to include. Indoctrinate.
We. Us. Ours.
Lying on the mats of the training center, barely able to breathe around the stitch in her side, Selina focused. Tried to calm her raging heart and get up.
“Too slow,” Tigris hissed, and launched herself upon Selina.
She had enough time to raise her arms, to bring up her knees. Enough time to roll up and out of Tigris’s path, but not enough to avoid the sweeping kick that knocked her down again. The blow to the throat that truly ripped the air out of her lungs, then the blow to her stomach that knocked her down for good, curling around herself.
“Pathetic.” Tigris had laughed at her then. Laughed and walked away.
Selina had hated her ever since. Hated her more when she’d seen some of the other acolytes not be able to walk away. Or breathe. Permanently.
Nyssa and Talia had never punished Tigris for it—for killing acolytes during training. Nyssa had only declared it