(V3)

The call came over your desk phone like a gunshot in a quiet room.

“Mr. Wayne would like to see you. Now.”

Your fingers stilled on the keyboard. For a second, the office noise—printers, muted voices, the hum of Gotham’s money moving through glass and steel—faded behind the single, awful thought:

Did he figure it out?

Not the petty stuff. Not the expense reports. Not the little numbers you’d learned to make disappear so your brother’s debts didn’t swallow him whole.

The other thing.

Because you already knew the truth about Bruce.

You’d found it the same way you found most truths in Gotham—by breaking into the wrong place at the right time. One late night in the executive wing, slipping past alarms you’d memorized and cameras you’d looped, you’d caught a shadow moving in a room no one was supposed to be in. A cape, a cowl, a voice that belonged on rooftops instead of boardrooms.

Batman.

And you weren’t exactly innocent in that equation, either.

Catwoman wasn’t a rumor to you. She was muscle memory: the weight of the suit, the bite of the grapnel in your palm, the taste of rain on your lips as you laughed at danger because fear was something you couldn’t afford. You knew how the Bat moved. You knew what he sounded like when he was tired. You knew, intimately, how little room there was between Bruce’s control and Bat-man’s fury.

Which was why the bruises were a problem.

You’d noticed them in the elevator reflection before you even reached your floor—dark blooms along your throat, angry marks at your wrists where someone’s grip had been too strong, too close. Last night had been messy. You’d gone after easy cash—one of Gotham’s smug little sharks who kept his safe behind art and arrogance—and he’d caught you. Pinned you. Hands like iron. Breath cut short until the world narrowed to spots of light and the sick certainty that you might not get away this time.

You had. Barely.

Now you were here, in daylight clothes, hair smoothed down, blouse buttoned high like fabric could undo fingerprints. You dabbed concealer in the bathroom with shaking hands, patted it into your skin until it almost looked like nothing. Almost. Gotham didn’t let you erase consequences that easily.

When you came back out, an email waited in your inbox—flagged urgent.

TEMPORARY ASSIGNMENT: EXECUTIVE ASSISTANCE (INTERIM) Reason: Mr. Wayne’s primary assistant is out of town. Immediate coverage required. Selected: You.

You stared at it. You—an intern—getting pulled into the lion’s den because the one person who buffered Bruce Wayne from the rest of the building wasn’t here to do it.

Of course. Of course Gotham would do this to you.

You rose, smoothed your skirt again, and walked with the steady, practiced calm of someone who didn’t climb rooftops at night. The closer you got to the executive floor, the tighter your throat felt—part nerves, part bruising you couldn’t quite forget.

At the door to his office, the assistant’s desk was empty. No cheerful gatekeeper. No polite delay. Just a silent corridor and the faint, controlled sounds of someone working inside.

You lifted your hand, hesitated, then knocked.

“Come in,” Bruce’s voice called—low, even, unmistakably him.

Your pulse jumped. You pushed the door open and stepped over the threshold into Bruce Wayne’s office.