empty insides. Right—food. He had none. He’d been living on Alfred’s mercy these past few days, the older man delivering him sandwiches and tea services and the odd slice of cake or stack of cookies.
But Alfred’s care went beyond that. The level of trust between Alfred and Bruce…that was a one-in-a-million type of bond. Not easily found or built. Yet Bruce had paid a steep, steep cost for it, one that Luke couldn’t imagine. One that still haunted Bruce, decades after his parents’ murder.
Luke shut the fridge, the click nearly drowning out the sound of the elevator’s ding down the hall.
Which meant—
Pathetic. He was really pathetic, he decided, as he rushed to the peephole in his door and watched Holly approach her apartment. She had shopping bags again—heavy ones.
He hadn’t seen her since the party at his parents’ house. Since their strange, tense conversation. But it was still normal. She was still relatively normal.
Not at all like that cool-voiced woman who made him grind his teeth, who took on assassins and walked away. Whose face he hadn’t even seen, but that quiet laugh of hers haunted him.
Normal. He needed, wanted normal. Even if Holly herself had warned him that it was a cage, he didn’t care.
Luke flung open his door.
Holly whirled, keys in the lock, eyes wide.
He cringed. Perhaps he’d been too enthusiastic with the door-opening.
A little too eager.
He leaned an arm against the doorframe. “Hey.”
Smooth. Really smooth.
She flicked her eyes over him, body loosening as she opened her door and dumped her bags inside. They landed with a heavy thump. “Hey yourself.”
Not the warmest greeting. It was probably Bruce-level, if he was being honest.
“How was shopping?” His mind was a vacant hole, and he scrambled for a question, any sort of sane thing to say to her.
She flicked up her brows. “Stimulating.”
Luke tapped a bare foot on the ground. “You eat yet?”
A pause. A slight tensing of her shoulders. “No,” she said warily.
He tried not to look too desperate as he asked, “Pizza?”
Holly considered. Glanced at her bags behind her, then toward him. “Give me five minutes to change.” Luke avoided the urge to sag with relief. “And order two this time,” she added with a hint of a smile.
And even with Catwoman’s low, sultry voice still purring in his head, the ghost of a real smile on Holly’s mouth made everything vanish.
* * *
—
“I can’t move,” Luke groaned to Holly forty minutes later, patting his aching stomach as they sat a conservative distance apart on the couch. The TV flickered atop the lit fireplace, his apartment cozier than he could remember in recent memory.
Holly set her pedicured feet on the leather ottoman, stretching out. “I sense a food coma coming on.”
Luke smiled at her, scrolling through the channel guide. “You want to watch a movie?”
A casual, tossed-out-there question. One that might very well constitute a date, if he’d asked it at another time and place.
Holly paused again. He braced himself for the rejection, but she said, “Sure.”
Luke eyed her. “You’re being…nice.”
“Would you prefer I not be?”
“No, I just…I wasn’t sure where we stood after my family’s gala.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but his phone buzzed on the couch between them, and her eyes dipped down.
Bruce Wayne was displayed in big letters across the front of his phone. Christ.
Luke gave her an apologetic wince and hurried into his bedroom, shutting the door.
Luke picked up right before it went to voicemail. “Hey, man.”
He could practically hear Bruce’s frown through the phone. “Hey yourself.”
Luke stepped into his walk-in closet, shutting the door there, too. Just to be safe. “What’s up?”
Another pause, heavy and long. “What the hell is happening over there?”
And there it was. The call he’d been waiting for these weeks. “I’ve got it under control.”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
Luke gritted his teeth. “I don’t answer to you.”
“No, but you answer to the people of Gotham City.”
“I’ve got it under control,” he repeated.
“You call three women wreaking havoc on Gotham control? Poison Ivy: she’s been mostly harmless. An environmental fanatic, but harmless.” Luke could have sworn he heard Bruce ticking the items off on his fingers. “Harley Quinn: not so harmless, but has been quiet since her ex-boyfriend went to Arkham. So the way I see it, this newcomer—Catwoman, whatever you call her—she’s the ringleader.”
“I know.”
“She’s the one you need to lock up,” Bruce went on.
“I know,” Luke snapped.
Another one of Bruce’s Pauses. “I should come back.”
“No,” Luke growled. “You should not. One, I’ve got it