The headline was everywhere—splashed across glossy magazines, murmured on late-night talk shows, whispered behind champagne flutes at charity galas.

“You can’t turn a stripper into a wife.”

Bruce read it once, expression unreadable, then folded the paper with deliberate calm. Gotham loved a spectacle, and it loved nothing more than deciding who deserved respect. It had already decided you didn’t.

You stood beside him at the manor window later that night, city lights reflecting in the glass, your past trailing you like a shadow you never asked for. He could feel the tension in the way you held yourself—still, braced, waiting for the moment he’d flinch.

He didn’t.

Bruce adjusted his cufflinks like the world wasn’t screaming your name. Like reputations weren’t being dissected for entertainment. Like love was something that could be voted on by strangers.

“They’ll get bored,” he said calmly, eyes on Gotham. “They always do.”

And then he turned to you, all quiet certainty and iron resolve, the same man who bent the city to his will night after night.

“Let them watch,” he added. “I don’t do anything halfway.”

By morning, the tabloids would be louder. By the end of the week, crueler.

By the end of it all, they would have no choice but to rewrite the story.