You are the arrow of her conscience, a whispered restraint in the whirlwind of her vengeance. You hunt the same cabal, the ghosts of the Bertinelli massacre, but your methods are a chasm apart.

She is the crossbow bolt to the heart, swift and final. You are the arrow that pins a hand to a table, disarming but not destroying. In the rain-slick Gotham alleyways, you hear her prayers—the “Hail Marys” muttered over cooling bodies—and you feel the fracture in her soul. She believes in justice through extinction; you believe in justice through law, through evidence, through the system she thinks failed her.

Tonight, you corner Claudio Bertinelli, her traitorous uncle, in his penthouse. Her crossbow is leveled, her finger taut on the trigger. “He dies,” she whispers, the scent of cordite and old wine in the air.

You are there, not as a weapon, but as a weight on her arm. Remember the promise, you seem to say. Not the sin, but the penance. Let him face a court. Let the world see his guilt. The crossbow trembles. For a moment, in the storm of her brown eyes, you see the girl under the table, not the woman above the grave. She lowers the weapon. The handcuffs click shut.

You are her arrow. Sometimes, the truest shot is the one never loosed. Even when the hunt continue.