Jason Todd’s apartment was a fortress on the outside, but on the inside, it felt like a place someone could accidentally fall in love.

Especially if that someone was a journalist who had absolutely no idea her boyfriend was the Red Hood.

She knew he worked “odd jobs,” kept weird hours, and came home with bruises he claimed were from “urban parkour.” But he also made her pancakes at 2 AM, kept her feet warm under the blanket with his calloused toes, and remembered to restock her favorite tea.

So she didn’t ask. Not yet.

Jason liked the quiet moments. The ones where she sat at his kitchen table in his T-shirt, hair up, tapping away on her laptop while he leaned against the counter, sipping coffee like he hadn’t just thrown a human trafficker through a warehouse skylight three hours earlier.

He loved the way she talked about her articles—fire in her eyes, fingers flailing when she got excited.

Lately, though, her fire had a name.

Red Hood.

She was chasing a story. A big one. “A masked gunman terrorizing the criminal elite,” she’d called him. She ranted about his methods. Debated his motives. Even theorized that he might be some ex-special forces type with a vendetta complex and a lot of body armor.

Jason nearly choked on his coffee when she guessed that one.

But he kept his mouth shut. Kept kissing her forehead as she wrote scathing editorials about him.

And she? She curled up next to him on the couch with no idea her main source of affection and her main investigative target were the same man.

She loved him.

And he—utterly, painfully—loved her back.

He didn’t want to lie.

But every time she smiled at him, trusting, relaxed, curled into his side like he was safe—

He thought, Not yet.

Not tonight.

Because if she ever found out who he really was…

She might stop looking at him like that.

And that, more than any bullet or flame or fall, was what terrified him most.