Chapter 24: Retaliation
The silence in the penthouse after Roman left him standing in the bathroom was a physical weight. It pressed on Reese’s ears, a high-pitched hum underneath the pounding of his own heart. The cream on his side was a cold, greasy barrier, but beneath it, the burn throbbed in time with his pulse, a deep, angry reminder of failure.
My exposed nerve.
Roman’s words echoed. They didn’t feel like an accusation of weakness, but a statement of fact, a reclassification of his entire existence within Roman’s empire. He was no longer just an asset. He was a liability with a face and a signature.
He looked at himself in the vast, dark mirror above the double sinks. He looked like shit. Pale beneath his tattoos, the scratches on his face stark and bloody, his hair a mess of sweat and pipe-grime. His eyes held a hunted, furious light. He braced his hands on the cool marble countertop, hanging his head, trying to breathe through the fire in his ribs and the one in his gut.
The stillness was a cage. Every second that ticked by was another mile Crane was putting between them, another moment for him to examine the knife, to plan, to dig that bolt out of his shoulder and savor the pain as data. Reese couldn’t stand it. The clinical care, the quiet order to sleep—it felt like being put on a shelf. Like he was already a problem to be managed.
He pushed off the counter, a jolt of agony making him suck air through his teeth. He grabbed a clean black towel from a stack, carefully patting the excess cream, not drying it, just blotting. He left the ruined shirt and jacket in a heap on the floor. Walking stiffly into the bedroom Roman had pointed to—a guest room done in shades of grey and steel, impersonal and perfect—he found a simple black t-shirt in a drawer. Getting it on was a delicate, breath-held ordeal of stretching and cursing.
He needed air that wasn’t filtered through Roman’s wealth. He needed to move. To do something. The idea was stupid, born of pain and pride, but it took root and flowered into a compulsion. He couldn’t just lie in a silk-draped room and wait. He was a street fighter, not a convalescent.
Reese left the room, his footsteps silent on the thick carpet. The penthouse was a tomb of muted light and shadow. He moved past the library, past the bar with its empty glass, toward the foyer and the elevator. His jacket was gone, his weapons were gone, but he had his hands. He’d find Crane in a basement clinic, stitching himself up. He’d finish it with his fucking thumbs if he had to.
His hand was reaching for the elevator call button when a voice cut through the gloom.
“Where do you imagine you’re going?”
Roman leaned against the doorway to his own bedroom, silhouetted by the low light within. He had changed out of the robe into dark trousers and a sleeveless undershirt that showed the hard lines of his arms. He held no glass now. His hands were empty.
“Out,” Reese said, not turning around. His finger hovered over the button.
“No,” Roman said, the word flat and final. “You’re not.”
“I’m not a dog to be put in a room,” Reese snapped, finally looking at him. “He’s out there. Hurting. I can track him. I can—”
“You can what?” Roman pushed off the doorframe and took two steps into the foyer. His presence seemed to expand, filling the space. “Stumble through the Narrows, half-cooked, until you pass out in an alley? Or until one of Crane’s terrified lackeys puts a bullet in your head for the price of a fix? You think he hasn’t scuttled back to one of a dozen boltholes by now?”
“I have to do something!” The shout tore from Reese’s throat, raw and ragged. It wasn’t just about Crane. It was the alley, the fear gas, the shame of being seen as protection that failed, the fucking steam valve. It was Roman’s clinical fingers on his burned skin and the terrible softness in his voice when he’d said You handled me.
“You have done enough,” Roman said, his voice dropping into a dangerous register. “You have given him a prize. You have made yourself a subject of interest. The only thing you will do now is stay here and heal.”
“I’m not one of your porcelain dolls, Roman. I don’t just sit on a shelf and look pretty for you.”
“I am aware,” Roman said, a cold smile touching his lips. “You are the one who gets broken and then tries to walk on the shattered pieces. It’s not admirable. It’s idiotic.”
The condescension was the final spark. The rage, the pain, the helpless adrenaline with nowhere to go—it all coalesced into a white-hot wire in Reese’s chest. A failure. An idiot. An exposed nerve.
He turned away from the elevator, away from Roman, and took two stumbling steps back into the living area. The movement was pure, directionless fury. His eyes landed on one of the large, dark mirrors lining the wall—a sleek, abstract slab of smoked glass.
Before he even knew he was going to do it, his right hand—his good side, the unburned, strong side—was coiled into a fist.
“Reese.” Roman’s voice was a warning crack.
Reese ignored it. He saw his own reflection, pale and wounded and furious. He saw the man who let Crane get away. He saw the liability.
He swung.
The punch wasn’t clever or aimed. It was a blind, full-force discharge of frustration. His knuckles connected with the center of the mirror with a sound that was not a crash, but a deep, resonant thud. For a split second, nothing happened. The glass held, webbed with a single, intricate asterisk of cracks centered around his fist.
Then, with a sighing, crystalline groan, the entire sheet gave way. It didn’t shatter outward, but collapsed inward, a waterfall of dark, jagged pieces slumping to the plush carpet in a heap. The noise was astonishingly quiet, a soft cascade of broken edges.
Reese stood there, his arm extended, his fist still clenched. Shards of mirror stuck out from his knuckles, glittering in the low light. Blood welled instantly, a dozen tiny cuts beading red and running in thin rivulets down his fingers. He felt no pain from it, only a distant, ringing shock. The mirror was gone. In its place was a blank, dark backing board, a void on the wall.
Silence, deeper than before, swallowed the room.
He heard Roman’s footsteps behind him, measured, unhurried. He didn’t turn. He stared at the wreckage he’d made, at his bleeding hand, at the stupid, pointless evidence of his temper.
Roman stopped beside him. He didn’t look at the broken glass. He looked at Reese’s hand, then at Reese’s profile, rigid with shame.
“Feel better?” Roman asked, his voice devoid of any inflection.
Reese didn’t answer. He just breathed, harsh and ragged.
Roman’s hand came up. He didn’t grab Reese’s wounded fist. Instead, his fingers closed gently around Reese’s wrist, his thumb pressing against the racing pulse point. His touch was cool, firm. He turned Reese’s hand over, palm up, examining the damage with a detached, almost clinical interest. The blood dripped onto the carpet, dark on dark.
“It’s always the reflection you attack, isn’t it?” Roman mused, his voice low. “Never the thing itself. Just the image of what you think you see.”
Reese tried to pull his hand back, but Roman’s grip tightened, not painfully, but with absolute, unyielding certainty.
“Come here,” Roman said, not a request, but a quiet command.
He led Reese, unresisting now, the fight bled out of him into the broken glass, back to the bathroom. He sat Reese on the same edge of the tub. He ran the cold water, took a fresh towel, and began the process again. This time, he picked the tiny, sharp slivers of mirror from Reese’s knuckles with a pair of tweezers from the cabinet, each extraction precise and swift. He washed the cuts, applied antiseptic that stung with a clean, sharp clarity Reese welcomed.
Roman worked in silence, his focus complete. When he was done, he wrapped the hand in a clean bandage, securing it with neat, efficient movements.
“The mirror was lined with a protective film,” Roman said finally, as he tidied away the supplies. “Tempered glass. You’re lucky. You could have severed tendons. You could have bled out right there on my rug.”
He turned, leaning back against the counter, looking at Reese with an expression that was impossible to decipher. “Was it worth it? The statement?”
Reese looked down at his bandaged hand, then at the floor. “It wasn’t a statement.”
“Everything you do is a statement.” Roman pushed off the counter. “Now you have two injuries. One from an enemy. One from yourself.” He walked to the doorway, pausing. “The room is still there. Use it. Or don’t. But if you try to leave again tonight, I will have Toller sit on you. And he’s not as gentle as I am.”
He left, closing the door softly behind him.
Reese sat in the bright, sterile light, the hum of the exhaust fan the only sound. He looked at his bandaged hand, then at the ruined skin on his side, visible under the thin shirt. He felt hollowed out, scraped raw. The adrenaline was gone, truly gone now, leaving only the bone-deep ache of his burns and a deeper, more familiar ache of something like humiliation.
He stood, his body protesting every movement, and walked back into the guest room. He didn’t lie on the bed. He sat on the floor, his back against the foot of it, his knees drawn up. He stared at the blank, dark wall opposite.
In his mind, he saw not the broken mirror, but the knife. His knife. In Crane’s possession. He saw Roman’s symbol on the hilt, glinting in the low light of some damp basement lab. A trophy. A puzzle.
An exposed nerve.
He rested his bandaged hand on his knee, the throbbing in his knuckles a steady, grounding pulse. Outside, Gotham glittered, a vast and uncaring circuit board of lights and shadows. Somewhere in its depths, Jonathan Crane was hiding, hurting, and thinking.
Reese closed his eyes. He wasn’t sleeping. He was waiting. The rage had been purged, splintered across the floor. What was left was colder, harder, and infinitely more patient.
What was left was colder, harder, and infinitely more patient. It was a quiet, grinding stone where the fire had been. He couldn’t stay in the sterile guest room with its empty grey walls. It felt too much like a cell, too much like being put away.
He stalked back into the living room, his movements stiff and graceless. The heap of shattered mirror still lay on the carpet, a dark, glittering monument to his temper. He ignored it, walking around the perimeter of the room as if pacing the length of a cage. The city’s lights bled through the floor-to-ceiling windows, casting long, distorted shadows that twisted with every pass he made.
Exhaustion hit him like a dropped weight, a sudden sag in his bones that nearly buckled his knees. The fight, the flight, the burn, the rage—it all came due at once. He stopped at the large, obsidian sectional sofa that faced the empty skyline. It looked sinfully soft.
He lowered himself onto it, hissing as the movement pulled at the cooked skin of his side. He didn’t lie down. He sat slumped in the corner, one hand cradling his bandaged knuckles, the other pressed lightly over his burn. He stared at the broken mirror shards, their edges catching the ambient light like malevolent stars.
Sleep came for him not as a gentle descent, but as an ambush. One moment he was glaring at the fragments of his reflection, and the next, the darkness behind his eyes was absolute and complete.
Grey morning light seeped into the room, flat and tired. Reese woke with a jolt, a sharp gasp catching in his dry throat. He was tangled in the throw blanket from the back of the couch, his neck stiff from the awkward angle. For one confused, hopeful second, he didn’t remember.
Then the pain arrived. A deep, persistent throb in his side, a sharper, prickling ache across the back of his hand. The events of the previous night reassembled themselves with brutal clarity: the steam, the escape, Roman’s fingers, the mirror. The shame was a faint, sour aftertaste now, largely burned away by the simpler, more immediate need to assess the damage.
He carefully pushed himself upright. Every muscle protested. He felt deeply, indelibly grimy. The tactical gear from last night was gone, but the memory of the tunnel’s damp and Crane’s terrified eyes clung to him like a film.
He needed to get his head right. He needed to be something other than a patient, something other than a liability sitting on Roman’s designer furniture.
With slow, deliberate movements, he stood and walked to the bar. He bypassed the expensive whiskey for the sink. He ran the tap cold, cupping his hands under the stream and splashing his face. The water was a shock, sluicing away the fog of painkillers and poor sleep. He did it again, and again, until his skin felt tight and awake.
He caught sight of himself in the polished black granite behind the bottles. He looked like he’d gone through a woodchipper. The scratches on his face were dark, scabbed lines. His eyes were shadowed. The borrowed t-shirt was rumpled.
“Composing yourself?” Roman’s voice came from the entrance to the hall.
He was already dressed, impeccably so, in a charcoal suit that looked like it had been poured onto him. He held two mugs of coffee. He didn’t wait for an answer, just walked over and set one on the bar next to Reese.
Reese looked at the mug, then at him. “Is this part of the nursing shift?”
“It’s part of the ‘shut up and listen’ shift,” Roman said, taking a sip from his own mug. His eyes were clear, calculating, all trace of last night’s strange softness gone. “How’s the hand?”
Reese flexed his fingers under the bandage. It pulled, but it worked. “Functional.”
“And the other thing?”
“It’s still there.” Reese picked up the coffee. It was black, hot, and exactly as strong as he needed. He took a long swallow, feeling it forge a warm path through the chill in his gut. “Have you heard anything?”
“Crane’s vanished. No chatter on the street, no hospital visits from a man with a crossbow bolt in his shoulder. He’s licking his wounds.” Roman leaned against the bar, studying him. “He’ll be studying yours, too. That knife. It’s distinctive.”
“I know.” Reese’s grip tightened on the mug. “So what’s the play? We sit and wait for him to put the pieces together?”
“We don’t wait.” Roman set his mug down with a soft click. “We move first. But we move correctly. Not with bleeding fists and a death wish.” He reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a sleek, silver phone, sliding it across the bar to Reese. “Your old one is compromised. This is clean. My number is the only one in it.”
Reese looked at the phone, then back at Roman. “You’re giving me a phone.”
“I’m giving you a leash,” Roman corrected, his tone neutral. “I need to know where you are. At all times. The location sharing is always on. If you turn it off, I will find you, and the next conversation will be significantly less civil.”
It was a demand, an intrusion, a claim. Reese felt the old defiance spark, a quick flare in his chest. He looked from the phone to Roman’s impassive face. The spark died, smothered by cold pragmatism. Roman was right. He was an exposed nerve. Crane had his knife. A leash, however galling, was also a tether to the only power in Gotham that could protect him now.
He picked up the phone. It was cold and heavy in his bandaged hand. “Just you?”
“Just me,” Roman confirmed. “You’re off the general roster until further notice. Your only job is to heal and to think. I want you to reconstruct every second of last night. What he said. How he moved. Where he looked. I want the scent of the place.”
Reese nodded, slipping the phone into his pocket. It felt like carrying a piece of Roman’s will with him. “And then?”
“And then,” Roman said, finishing his coffee, “we use what he knows about you against him. He thinks he’s acquired a specimen. We will make him regret his curiosity.” He glanced at the broken mirror. “Clean that up. Then get Toller to take you to get your things from your place. You’re staying here.”
It wasn’t a question. Reese didn’t treat it like one. “For how long?”
“For as long as it takes for Jonathan Crane to understand,” Roman said, turning to leave, “that touching what’s mine is the last mistake he will ever make.” He paused at the threshold. “Don’t break anything else. Some of it is actually valuable.”
Then he was gone, leaving Reese alone with the cool morning light, the taste of good coffee, and the weight of the new phone in his pocket. He looked at the mess of glass on the floor. He would clean it up. He would get his things. He would wait.
But the waiting felt different now. It had an edge, a direction. He took another sip of coffee, his eyes on the skyline where Gotham was shaking off the night. He wasn’t a patient on a shelf. He was bait in a trap. And for the first time since the steam had hit him, that felt like a purpose he could understand.
And for the first time since the steam had hit him, that felt like a purpose he could understand.
He finished the coffee, the heat a temporary anchor in his gut. Then he found a stiff-bristled hand broom and a dustpan in a utility closet off the kitchen. He knelt, the burn on his side protesting with a sharp, stretching pain, and began sweeping the glittering fragments of his reflection into a pile. Each scrape of glass on glass was a tiny, grating echo in the silent room. He was methodical, careful not to miss the smaller shards that caught the light like trapped insects.
He dumped the wreckage into a black trash bag, the pieces clattering together with a final, definitive sound. Tying the bag shut felt like sealing away the last of his pointless rage. He left it by the elevator door, a neat black package of his own idiocy.
Toller arrived twenty minutes later, his keycard beeping the lock. He filled the doorway, his usual placid expression in place. He took in Reese’s battered face, the bandaged hand, the stiff way he held himself. “Boss said you needed an escort. You look like hell.”
“Feel like it, too,” Reese said, walking past him toward the elevator. “Let’s just get this done.”
They rode down in silence. In the garage, Toller gestured to the same grey sedan from the night before. “Your chariot.”
The drive to Reese’s old apartment in the narrows was a journey back in time, through layers of grime and diminishing hope. The streets grew tighter, the buildings more hunched. He hadn’t been back in weeks, not since the nights on Roman’s couch had slowly become something else.
“You moving in upstairs for good, then?” Toller asked, his eyes on the road.
“Seems like it.”
“Huh.” Toller didn’t offer congratulations or judgment. “He doesn’t usually let people stay.”
“I’m not ‘people.’ I’m a liability with a burn.”
“Same difference to him,” Toller said, turning onto Reese’s block. “Only liabilities he keeps this close are the ones he can’t stand to lose.”
Reese didn’t have an answer for that. The car rolled to a stop outside a four-story brick tenement that listed slightly to the left. It smelled of wet concrete and simmering cabbage, a familiar, depressing anchor. His third-floor walk-up felt like a museum of a life he was already shedding.
Toller waited in the hall, a silent, mountainous sentinel. “Make it quick. This place gives me the creeps.”
The apartment was a single room with a kitchenette and a bathroom the size of a closet. It was stale and cold, the air undisturbed. Everything in it felt like a prop. He opened the closet, stared at the row of jeans and worn t-shirts, the leather jacket he’d saved for months to buy. None of it felt like his anymore.
He grabbed a rugged black backpack from the floor. He didn’t pack clothes. He went to the small, scarred desk by the window. From the bottom drawer, he pulled a thick, rubber-banded stack of envelopes—his brother’s letters from Blackgate, the only thing he’d never pawned. He stuffed them in the pack.
He slid open the desk’s pencil tray. Underneath a clutter of pens was a slim, matte-black switchblade with a mother-of-pearl inlay, a teenage prize from a long-dead confidence game. It was useless against anything serious, but it fit his hand perfectly. It went into his pocket, a familiar weight.
From the shelf above the desk, he took two paperback books, their spines cracked: a worn collection of Raymond Chandler stories and a faded field guide to urban birds, absurdly out of place in Gotham. He hesitated, then pulled a small, framed photograph from behind the books. It showed a younger Reese, his hair longer, standing arm-in-arm with a grinning, gap-toothed kid on a sun-bleached boardwalk that no longer existed. He didn’t look at it long. He wrapped it in a t-shirt and placed it gently in the pack.
That was it. Three items and a knife. The rest—the cheap plates, the second-hand TV, the bed with its sagging mattress—was just furniture, just noise. He shouldered the pack, its weight negligible. He took one last look around the room, at the life he’d built out of scraps. It felt like looking at a stranger’s belongings.
He locked the door behind him, leaving the key in the lock. Toller raised an eyebrow at the meager bag. “That’s everything?”
“Everything that matters,” Reese said, walking past him toward the stairs.
The return trip felt shorter. The grey car slid back into the polished underground garage, a metal fish returning to a sterile tank. The elevator ride up was silent. When the doors opened into the penthouse foyer, the air was different. Colder. Emptier.
Roman was gone, off to wield his empire from some other dark room. The silence was total, a high-quality vacuum sealed around him. Reese stood in the vast living room, the backpack hanging from one hand. The space where the mirror had been was now just a darker rectangle on the wall, a blank space that accused nothing.
He walked to the guest room, but didn’t enter. He kept walking, down the hall, past closed doors, to the final doorway at the end. Roman’s room. The door was ajar.
He pushed it open. The scent of him—whiskey, sandalwood, the metallic hint of ozone—was stronger here. The bed was impossibly large, the sheets perfectly taut. The room was a study in controlled power. He backed out, closing the door softly.
In the end, he went back to the living room sofa, the same corner he’d occupied the night before. He dropped his backpack on the floor beside it. He sat, the cushions enveloping him. Outside, the afternoon was fading into a dusty, orange-grey twilight.
He was a nerve, exposed. He was bait, set. He was here, in the dragon’s den, by choice and by command. He pulled the switchblade from his pocket, flicked it open with a practiced snap. The blade caught the dying light. He held it, feeling the balance, then snapped it shut again.
He placed it on the glass table in front of him, within easy reach. Then he leaned back, his bandaged hand resting on his stomach, his other hand over the burn on his side. He watched the lights of the city begin to ignite, one by one, like stars in a filthy firmament. He didn’t move. He just waited, the silence a presence as solid as stone.