brought them in.” She spat on the ground. “Your little boyfriend didn’t get to them fast enough. They had hours. And since my boyfriend knows who I am, he made sure those bastards went to my mama’s house first.”
Selina’s stomach turned over. That’s where Harley had been last night, why she hadn’t been at the apartment. “Is she all right—”
“Don’t pretend that you give a shit.” Harley’s chest heaved. “He told her to tell me that if we don’t spring him free immediately, he’ll make sure my mom receives his own brand of justice.”
Bile coated her throat as Selina pleaded, “Put the bombs away, Harley. If they’re dragging your mom into it, we won’t mess around. He’ll be out tonight. Just put those bombs away.”
Panic flared in Harley’s blue eyes, right beneath the rage. “He is going to hurt her—”
“I know,” Selina breathed. “And I won’t let that happen. I swear.”
“Your promises are shit,” Harley hissed. “You think we don’t know where you went last night? Who you went with?”
Selina shot Ivy a look. So much for a code of not screwing over allies. Ivy mouthed, I’m sorry.
Selina said to Harley, “It’s not what it seems.”
“Part of the game?” Harley mocked. “Hooking up with the enemy?”
“Put the bombs away, Harley,” Selina said.
Ivy was shaking beside her, looking like she’d vomit over the stained concrete. But she said, voice clear and steady, “If the Joker is out, Harley, you know how bad things might—”
“He won’t touch you,” Harley snapped at Ivy. “I told you that. You, my mom—you’re safe.”
“But what about the other people?” Ivy demanded, voice trembling. “What about them?”
“Who gives a shit?” Harley’s left thumb shifted on the bomb.
“I do,” Ivy breathed. “I do, Harley!”
Selina cut in, “If the buyer sees those bombs, you can say goodbye to the bribe cash.”
Harley leveled a seething look at her. “How about we show him whatever’s under that mask instead—”
The warehouse doors blew open in a cloud of smoke, the windows exploding a second later.
And a SWAT team from the GCPD stormed in.
Selina had marked the exits and defensible locations in the warehouse. She rolled toward a hulking tower of machinery as Harley lobbed her bombs, swearing.
They detonated with a flash and bang that shattered windows and sent dust raining from the ceiling. Ivy sprinted for Harley’s side, thumbing free a few of those beautiful flowers. She hurled them toward the police, smoke instantly filling the space.
But the GCPD had marked them, too. And the SWAT team that burst through the doors were all wearing gas masks. Ivy lobbed more flowers toward them anyway, vines snapping into the fog, the smoke now near-impenetrable.
The police had the exits guarded. Gordon was taking no risks.
But the window closest to them, twenty feet away…“Here!” Selina shouted through the smoke to Harley and Ivy. “Now.”
Harley had slid on a gas mask courtesy of Ivy, and as she emerged, throwing bombs blindly into the smoke, police shouting orders to fall back, to cease fire, a trickle of blood was sliding down her arm. She’d been clipped. Nothing bad, but Ivy was pressing a hand to Harley’s wound. Blood coated Ivy’s pale fingers, her wrists.
They slid to a stop behind the machine that Selina was braced against. Selina pointed toward the window. “Another squadron is outside, waiting. We make a run for it—we can surprise them if we leap through.”
“They’ll shoot us before we clear the window,” Ivy said, sizing up the distance, the squad no doubt in the alley beyond.
“I’ll buy you time,” Selina panted. “You keep running. Don’t stop.”
Harley studied Selina as the shouts from the SWAT team across the factory floor grew closer. “What about you?”
“I didn’t think you cared.”
Selina could have sworn something like regret flickered in Harley’s blue eyes. But Ivy ordered, “We need to move. Now.”
Selina didn’t give them another warning as she charged for that window. A trap—a big one—lay outside.
She drew the blade from down her back, bullwhip clenched in her other hand. At her side, through the smoke, green flashed—Ivy’s own vine-whip.
Selina reached the window. “Blow it out, Harley!”
A bomb answered—Harley’s last. Glass was still shattering as Selina leapt atop the crate beneath the window, grabbed the sill, and swung herself through and out.
An armed SWAT team waited by the back door a few feet away, guns pointed, masks over their faces as they whirled toward where Selina landed.
“DROP YOUR WEAPONS AND—”
Selina didn’t hear the rest. She snapped her whip through the air, catching the nearest