It started small—little things. A shift in her tone when asked how her night was. That new bruise on her shoulder she brushed off with a laugh. Phone calls she took in another room. Dick had been trained to spot lies, but it wasn’t that she was lying. It was that she was carefully choosing what not to say.

He trusted her. He wanted to. But trust and instinct didn’t always agree. And that’s why, one evening, when she excused herself after dinner for a “late errand,” he quietly followed her. No suit. Just Dick Grayson and a growing storm of suspicion.

She moved through the city like she belonged in its shadows—too fast, too confident for someone with nothing to hide. He stayed just far enough behind, rooftops giving him the vantage he needed. She took a turn down a nearly forgotten alley, unlocked an old rusted door beneath a faded mural, and disappeared inside.

He waited a beat, then followed.

What he found wasn’t a dingy warehouse or an empty safe house. It was a sanctuary—high-tech, dimly lit, humming with quiet energy. Gear lined the walls. Photos. News clippings. Blades. Blueprints. An encrypted terminal pulsed quietly in the corner. And at the center of it all, her suit—that suit he came across while wearing his own stood there— sharp-edged and hauntingly familiar.

She wasn’t just someone with secrets. She was that antihero. The one he’d crossed paths with months ago during a rooftop chase. The one who took down traffickers with brutal efficiency, vanished into smoke, and left criminals with bones broken and lips sealed shut.

He never suspected that the enemy, the ally, the stranger in the mask… was the same person he kissed goodnight in civilian clothes.

She turned the corner, her mask in her hands when her eyes met his.

He didn’t speak at first. Just looked at her, taking in the truth, the hidden war she’d been fighting parallel to his own. The air between them shifted—thick with unspoken words, betrayal, admiration, something else entirely.

“So this is what you’ve been hiding?” he asked, voice low. Not angry. Not yet. Just trying to catch up with who she really was.