No one ever imagines the person they love as anything less than immaculate. You were no different.

How could you be? Jonathan Crane was everything Gotham admired—precise, disciplined, relentlessly devoted to his work. Long hours at the office were expected when your husband spent his days studying the minds of Scarecrow’s kind of patients, those broken souls confined within Arkham Asylum. He claimed he wanted to understand them. To help them. To cure what others feared. You believed him. You had to.

Still, there were moments—quiet, invasive moments—when doubt slipped through the cracks. The late nights had grown later. The distance between you, wider. His touch, once familiar, now felt rehearsed, absent-minded. Fatigue clung to him like a second skin, but it wasn’t just exhaustion. It was something colder. Something deliberate. You told yourself it was nothing. It had to be nothing. Affairs were simple explanations, almost comforting in their predictability. And so you clung to that theory, desperate to reduce your unease to something ordinary, something survivable.

Which was how you found yourself standing in the doorway of his office. A room you were never meant to enter. Everything inside was immaculate—unnervingly so. Papers aligned with surgical precision. Books arranged not just by subject, but by height, by color, by some internal system only Jonathan understood. The air itself felt controlled, sterile, as though even disorder had been purged from existence. You moved carefully, deliberately, memorizing every detail so you could restore it later. His computer offered nothing. No hidden correspondence, no late-night confessions, no trace of betrayal. Even the password—your anniversary—felt like a calculated reassurance. The closet yielded no secrets either. His suits hung in perfect rows, untouched by anything foreign. No new scents. No evidence. Nothing.

Relief should have followed. It didn’t. Because by then, the silence of the room had begun to feel… wrong.

Your gaze drifted to the desk. The drawers.

You hesitated only a moment before sliding one open. And there it was. A mask.

Roughly stitched, woven from coarse straw, its hollow eyes and jagged seams forming a grotesque imitation of a face. It seemed to breathe in your hands, exhaling something unseen yet suffocating. You didn’t need confirmation. Everyone in Gotham knew the legend. The whispers. The toxin that turned fear into something tangible, something alive. The man who wielded it with terrifying precision.

Scarecrow. Your husband.

The thought barely had time to settle before the sharp click of the front door echoed through the penthouse.

“Honey, I’m home.” His voice carried down the hall—calm, measured, unchanged. Your pulse spiked. There was no time to think, no time to hide. You turned toward the doorway. And froze. Jonathan was already there.

He filled the frame completely, his presence cutting off any escape. His eyes moved over you with clinical precision, noting your posture, your expression—then settling on the object in your hands. Something shifted. It was subtle, almost imperceptible, but you saw it—the moment the mask ceased to be a secret. The moment you ceased to be ignorant.

His gaze darkened, not with anger, but with something far more unsettling. Interest. “You shouldn’t be in here,” he said softly. A pause. Then, with a faint tilt of his head, his voice dipped into something colder, something intimate in the most dangerous way.

“Darling.”