Chapter 3: The Laboratory's Dark
The rain was a cold, relentless scourge, washing the chemical stink from their gear in gray rivulets. They stumbled into the lee of a collapsed conveyor belt, the skeletal remains of industry offering meager shelter. Behind them, Ace Chemicals glowed from within, a contained inferno of green and orange flame that licked at the high windows without sound. The purge cycle had done its work.
Selina doubled over, hands on her knees, vomiting a thin stream of bile onto the cracked asphalt. The adrenaline and the residual heat from Bruce’s body were gone, replaced by a hollow, shaking cold. The data drive was a hard lump in her thigh pocket.
Bruce leaned against a rusted beam, his head bowed. Rain sluiced off the armored plates of his back. He was favoring his left leg, where the blast door had caught him. A dent warped the calf plate, and a dark streak, maybe oil, maybe blood, seeped from the joint.
“You’re hit,” she spat, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
“It’s nothing.” His voice was strained, the modulator cracked from damage or fatigue. “The drive.”
She pulled it out, holding it up. The tiny green LED blinked rhythmically in the gloom. “Happy? Your precious data.”
He pushed off the beam and limped toward her. Every step was a study in controlled pain. He took the drive, his gauntleted fingers brushing hers. The contact was electric, a jarring reminder of the raw collision in the dark alcove, the feeling of him still leaking from between her thighs.
“It’s a start.” He tucked the drive into a compartment on his belt. “We need to move. GCPD will cordon the river in ten minutes. Fire department after that.”
“We?” She laughed, a short, bitter sound. “You got what you came for, Batman. Mission accomplished. Go brood in your cave.”
He moved suddenly, a lunge that belied his injury. He had her pinned against the wet metal of the conveyor belt, one arm bar across her collarbones. Rain dripped from the edge of his cowl onto her face. “You saw what they were doing in there. You think this ends with one server farm?” His breath fogged in the cold air. “The data is encrypted. It will take time to crack. And they know it’s gone. They’ll scatter, go deeper, start again. With new test subjects.”
“And that’s my problem why?” She glared up at him, not struggling. The pressure on her chest was familiar, a brutal cousin to the weight of him inside her.
“Because you took the job.” He leaned closer. “Because you’re in it. Your DNA is all over that tower. Your signature is on the bypass of the lower security grid. You’re a loose end now, Selina. For them, and for me.”
The implication hung in the rancid air. He would track her, contain her. Or they would find her and peel her apart to see what she knew.
“So kill me,” she whispered. “Clean up your loose end.”
His head tilted. The white lenses of the cowl were unreadable. “No.”
He released her and turned, taking a shuffling step back toward the swirling rain and the distant sirens. He was leaving. Again.
A fury, hotter than the chemical fire, erupted in her chest. It wasn’t about the mission, or the data, or the people in the cages. It was about the taste of him still in her mouth, the sore, claimed feeling between her legs, and the absolute certainty that he would walk away and make her just another piece of the tragedy he carried.
“You coward,” she snarled.
He froze.
“You can fuck me in a hole while animals scream downstairs. You can use my body like a fucking stress reliever. But you can’t say what this is. You can’t even look at me without that mask on.”
Slowly, he turned back. His hands went to the sides of his cowl. There was a hiss of pressure, a click. He pulled it off.
Bruce Wayne’s face was pale, washed clean by rain. A fresh cut, probably from flying debris, leaked a thin line of blood from his temple into his eyebrow. His hair was plastered dark to his skull. His eyes were the real shock—stripped of the lens’s distortion, they were just eyes. Exhausted. Pained. Furious.
“Is this what you want?” His voice was naked now, raw. “To see the man? He’s not better. He’s worse. He’s the part that wanted to put you through that wall. He’s the part that doesn’t know how to walk away.”
She closed the distance between them. The rain fell in sheets, sealing them in a private, roaring world. She put her hands on the cold, segmented plate over his chest. “Then stop walking.”
She kissed him. It was nothing like in the alcove. That had been a battle. This was a surrender. Her mouth was soft, open, inviting him in. For a heartbeat, he didn’t move, a statue in the downpour. Then a sound, like a dam breaking, tore from his throat. He dropped the cowl. It clattered on the ground.
His arms went around her, crushing her to him. The armor was hard and cold, but his mouth was blisteringly hot. The kiss deepened, turning desperate, hungry. His tongue thrust against hers, claiming, exploring. She tasted rain, blood, and the faint, ever-present edge of his bitterness.
Her hands scrambled for the latches of his chest plate, fingers slipping on the wet metal. He understood. He found her wrists, guided them to the hidden releases. A series of clicks, and the central plate loosened. He shrugged it off, letting it fall beside the cowl. The under-suit was a black, moisture-wicking fabric, stretched taut over the hard planes of his chest and abdomen. She could feel the frantic beat of his heart beneath her palms.
She pushed him back. He stumbled, his injured leg buckling slightly, until his back hit the slimy concrete wall of a runoff culvert. Her fingers went to her own gear, tearing at the closures. The polymer trousers were harder, stiff with cold. He helped, his large hands ripping the seam at her hip in his impatience. The sound of tearing fabric was lost in the storm.
He bunched the material down her thighs, just enough. His own under-suit had a frontal zip. He yanked it down, freeing himself. His cock sprang out, thick and already fully hard, the head dark and flushed against the grey gloom.
He didn’t wait. He hooked his hands under her thighs, lifting her. She wrapped her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck. The wall was at her back. He positioned himself and drove up into her in one brutal, seamless motion.
The cry was ripped from her, lost to the wind and rain. He was impossibly deep, filling the sore, empty ache his previous invasion had left. There was no slow build, no tender pace. This was pure, unadulterated need. He fucked her with hard, piston-like drives, pushing her up the rough wall with each thrust.
The cold rain sluiced over them, over where their bodies joined, a shocking contrast to the furnace heat building inside her. She could hear the wet, slapping rhythm of their coupling, a filthy counterbeat to the rain. He buried his face in her neck, his teeth grazing her skin.
“Tell me to stop,” he growled, his voice a vibration against her throat. His hips hammered into her. “Tell me this is wrong.”
“It is wrong,” she gasped, clinging to him, meeting every jarring thrust. “Fuck you. Don’t you dare stop.”
He groaned, a sound of pure capitulation. One arm locked around her back, holding her secure. His other hand slid between their pounding bodies, his fingers finding her clit. He rubbed, hard and rough, the calloused pads creating a devastating friction.
“Come for me,” he demanded, his thrusts becoming erratic, losing their mechanical precision. “I want to feel you lose control. I want to feel you forget everything but this.”
His words were the final trigger. The orgasm detonated, a silent, white-hot supernova that erased the plant, the fire, the screaming dogs, the rain. She convulsed around him, her inner muscles clenching and milking his length in relentless waves. A broken, sobbing scream was torn from her lips.
The sensation of her tightening around him shattered his last shred of control. With three final, deep, grinding thrusts, he slammed her against the wall and held there. A raw, ragged shout escaped him as he came, his release pumping into her in hot, pulsing jets. She felt every spasm, the intimate flood a branding in the freezing rain.
He stayed there, buried inside her, his forehead pressed to the wall beside her head. His whole body trembled with the aftershocks. Slowly, gently, he lowered her until her feet touched the ground. Her legs almost buckled. He held her up, his arms still around her.
They stood locked together, the rain washing over them, cleaning nothing. He was still inside her, softening. The physical intimacy was grotesque and profound.
“Selina.” Her name was a plea.
She leaned into him, her face against the wet fabric of his under-suit. “I know.”
They disentangled slowly, awkwardly. He turned away to fix his clothing. She pulled her torn trousers up, the material cold and clinging. She felt utterly hollowed out, scraped clean.
He retrieved his chest plate and cowl, but didn’t put them on. He held them, looking at her. The cut on his temple still bled, a tiny thread of red diluted by rainwater.
“The data will lead somewhere,” he said, his tone flat, returning to the only language he had. “A bank. A shell company. A person.”
“And we follow it.” She didn’t phrase it as a question.
He nodded once. “Together. On my terms.”
A ghost of her old smile touched her lips. “You keep saying that. Your terms seem to involve a lot of getting fucked against walls.”
For a second, something flickered in his eyes.Not humor. Something darker, more possessive. “They do.”
He reached out, his thumb wiping a smear of dirt from her cheekbone. The gesture was tender. It frightened her more than the sex had.
“My place,” he said. “It’s secure. We can decrypt the drive there. You can patch your gear.”
“The Batcave?” She arched an eyebrow.
“No.” He finally began re-donning the armor, the plates sealing with definitive clicks. “Somewhere else. Somewhere… mine.”
He was inviting her in. Not just into his war, but into a space behind the masks. It was the most dangerous offer he’d ever made.
The sirens were closer now, blue and red lights staining the low clouds over the city.
“Lead the way, Bruce,” she said, her voice barely audible over the dying storm.
He fastened the cowl. The man vanished, replaced once more by the symbol. He offered her a hand. After a heartbeat, she took it. His grip was firm, anchoring. He pulled her into the shadows, away from the fire and the light, two predators bleeding the same wounds, heading into a deeper, more private dark.
He moved through Gotham’s underbelly not as a shadow, but as a force of erosion, and she followed, a silent phantom in his wake. Her thighs were slick with a mix of rain and him, the soreness a persistent, throbbing reminder. The journey was a blur of service tunnels and echoing drainage culverts, the city’s hidden arteries. He never looked back, but his pace was measured, an unspoken allowance for her fatigue and his own injury.
They emerged not in some dank cave, but into a private, subterranean garage of polished concrete and severe angles. The air was climate-controlled, sterile. A line of vehicles, from the utilitarian to the obscenely powerful, stood in silent formation. This wasn’t a lair. It was a vault.
“Get in,” he said, his voice still grating from the modulator’s abuse. He gestured to a black sedan, its lines clean and unremarkable.
“Chauffeur service?” She slid into the passenger seat, the leather cold through her torn gear. “I figured we’d grapple.”
He ignored her, settling into the driver’s seat with a suppressed wince. The engine activated with a whisper. A partition of dark glass rose silently from the dashboard, sealing them from the front. The car moved, gliding up a ramp and into a tunnel. “The cave is compromised for this. The data stream could be two-way. They might anticipate that.”
“So this is your safe house.” She watched the tunnel walls, featureless concrete, streak by.
“It’s my home.”
The words landed heavily in the enclosed space. The car ascended another ramp, and then they were outside, rolling smoothly along a high stone wall draped in ivy. An immense iron gate swung inward without a sound. The gravel drive crunched under the tires, a long, winding path through sculpted darkness. Then the house appeared.
Wayne Manor was less a building and more a geological event hewn from limestone and memory. It loomed against the night sky, a symphony of peaks and gables, its countless windows dark. It didn’t look lived in. It looked enshrined.
Selina said nothing. The scale of it, the quiet, grieving wealth, was a physical pressure. This was the source of the shadow. This empty monument was what financed the war. The car stopped before a grand portico. He killed the engine. The silence was absolute.
“Christ, Bruce,” she finally breathed.
“It’s just a house.” He opened his door, the interior light doing nothing to illuminate the vastness around them. She followed, her boots silent on the antique stone. The front doors were oak, three times her height. He pressed his palm against a panel. A mechanism thudded softly within, and one door swung inward.
The hall that greeted them could have housed her entire clocktower. A vaulted ceiling vanished into darkness. A staircase wider than a city street swept upwards. The air smelled of beeswax, old books, and beneath it, a hollow, dust-scented chill. It was the opposite of the chemical plant’s violent sterility. This sterility was born of absence.
He led her past portraits of dead Waynes, their eyes following in the dim security lighting. Their footsteps echoed. He pushed open a heavy door into a library. Two stories of leather-bound books, a ladder on a brass rail. A fire crackled in a hearth large enough to stand in, newly lit, its warmth not yet reaching the room's edges.
“Sit,” he said, shrugging off his damaged chest plate and letting it drop onto a Chesterfield sofa with a thud. He went to a mahogany desk, removing the data drive from his belt and plugging it into a sleek, standalone terminal that looked absurdly modern amid the antiquity.
Selina didn’t sit. She prowled the room’s perimeter, her fingers trailing over leather spines. “All this space for one broken boy.”
“The decrypt will take hours,” he said, ignoring her. He tapped a command sequence. Lines of code began scrolling on the screen. “There’s a guest suite upstairs. Water’s hot. You’ll find clothes.”
She stopped at the fireplace, holding her hands to the flames. The heat began to seep into her bones, awakening the aches. “A guest suite. How hospitable.” She turned. He was staring at the screen, his profile sharp in the firelight. The cut on his temple had dried. He looked younger without the armor, and infinitely older. “You brought me to the heart of your fortress just to tell me to go take a shower?”
“I brought you here because it’s the one place they won’t look.” He finally looked at her. “And because I couldn’t leave you out there.”
“You keep saying that like it means something.”
“It does.” He stood abruptly, the motion stiff. He limped around the desk, closing the distance between them. The fire cast dancing shadows across the tense planes of his face. “It means I’m making a mistake I can’t take back. It means you’re in my house.”
She didn’t back away. “And that makes me what? Yours?”
His hand came up, not to strike, but to cradle the side of her neck. His thumb stroked the rapid pulse under her jaw. “It makes you a vulnerability. The worst kind. One I want right where I can see it.”
His mouth was on hers before she could retort. This kiss was different from the rain-soaked violence by the river. It was slow, deep, and suffused with a terrifying certainty. It tasted of ash and desperation and the unique quiet of the enormous, empty house. She kissed him back, a low sound building in her throat.
His hands went to the fastenings of her torn gear, methodical now. He peeled the wet polymer from her shoulders, letting it fall to the Persian rug. Her undershirt followed. The firelight painted her skin in gold and shadow. He looked his fill, his gaze a physical caress that felt more intrusive than the fucking had.
“Bruce,” she whispered, the name strange in the sacred silence of the library.
In answer, he lowered his head and took her nipple into his mouth. He sucked, hard, his tongue circling the pebbled peak. A jolt of pure electricity shot straight to her core. Her fingers tangled in his damp hair, holding him there. He switched to the other breast, lavishing it with the same rough attention, his teeth grazing in a way that made her gasp.
He sank to his knees before her. His hands hooked into the waistband of her trousers and the underwear beneath, dragging them down her legs. She stepped out of them, naked now except for her boots. The fire warmed her backside. His breath, hot and uneven, ghosted over her belly, then lower.
He didn’t ask. He simply put his mouth on her. His tongue was flat and broad, licking a slow, deliberate stripe from her entrance to her clit. She jerked, a cry echoing softly in the cavernous room. He gripped her hips, anchoring her, and buried his face between her legs.
This was not finesse. This was consumption. He ate her pussy with a single-minded hunger, his tongue fucking into her, then swirling around her clit, then plunging deep again. He used his lips, his teeth, the rough scratch of his stubble on her inner thighs. The sounds were obscenely wet, loud in the quiet. She looked down, saw the dark crown of his head between her thighs, and the visual undid her.
“Oh god, right there,” she choked out, her knees buckling. He held her up, his tongue circling that exact, perfect spot with relentless pressure. Her orgasm built not as a wave, but as a sudden, brutal convergence of sensation. It slammed into her, twisting her spine. She came with a shattered cry, her hands clenching in his hair, her release flooding his mouth.
He drank her down, his groans vibrating against her sensitive flesh until she shuddered and pushed his head away, oversensitized. He rose, his own need blatant in the tent of his under-suit. His eyes were black, dilated with desire. He backed her until her bare shoulders met the cold stone of the mantelpiece.
He fumbled with his zip, his usual precision gone. He freed himself, his cock jutting thick and urgent. He spat into his palm, slicking himself, and notched his head at her entrance. She was dripping, open from his mouth. He pushed in, a slow, stretching invasion that made them both groan.
He filled her completely, a solid, burning presence. He paused, buried to the hilt, his forehead dropping to hers. Their breaths mingled. “This is the mistake,” he whispered, his voice wrecked.
“Shut up,” she breathed, and rolled her hips.
He began to move. It was a deep, measured rhythm, each withdrawal agonizingly slow, each thrust a profound re-claiming. The stone was cold against her back, his body furnace-hot against her front. The only sounds were their ragged breathing, the wet slap of skin, and the crackle of the fire.
He bent his head, sucking a bruise into the junction of her neck and shoulder. His hands gripped her ass, lifting her, changing the angle. He hit a spot deep inside that made her see stars. “There. Fuck, Selina, right there.”
His pace quickened, losing its control. The slaps grew louder, more frantic. He was mumbling against her skin, filthy, broken phrases. “So fucking tight. Taking me so deep. My god.” His hand slid between them, his thumb finding her clit again, rubbing in rough circles.
Another climax, unexpected and searing, coiled and burst. She screamed, the sound echoing off the bookshelves, as she convulsed around him. Her nails scored down his back through the fabric of his under-suit.
It was too much. He drove into her three more times, a final, brutal cadence, and stilled. A raw, guttural shout was torn from his chest as he came, his hips stuttering, pumping his release deep into her womb. He clung to her, his whole body shaking through the pulses.
They slumped together against the mantel, slick with sweat, boneless. He was still inside her, softening. The fire popped. A log settled.
Slowly, he pulled out. The aftermath was a cold, intimate emptiness. He stayed close, his arms around her, his face buried in her hair. They didn’t speak for a long time.
Finally, he stirred. He fetched a throw blanket from the sofa, wrapping it around her shoulders. He righted his clothing, his movements weary. The terminal on the desk beeped, once.
He looked at the screen, then back at her. His eyes were haunted, sated, full of a terrible knowledge. “The decryption’s finished. It’s a location. A bank in Zurich.”
She pulled the blanket tighter, the smell of him and sex clinging to her skin, embedded in the wool. The mission had just become real again. It was in the room with them. “When do we leave?”
He didn’t answer immediately. He walked to the towering window, looking out at the dark grounds. “In the morning. There’s a jet.” He turned, his silhouette framed by the night. “You should sleep. The suite is up the stairs, third door on the left.”
He was dismissing her back to the role of guest, of asset. The intimacy of the last hour was already being compartmentalized, filed away behind the steel shutters in his eyes.
Selina nodded, the weight of the house, the mission, and him settling on her like a pall. She moved toward the door, the blanket trailing behind her. As she reached the threshold, she paused.
“Bruce?”
He didn’t turn from the window. “Yes?”
“The next wall you fuck me against better have a softer landing.”
A fraction of a second. The barest tightening of his shoulders. “Noted.”
She left him there, a solitary figure in a library of ghosts, the coordinates to a Swiss bank glowing on the screen before him. The data was cracked. The path was clear. The man was an utterly uncrackable enigma, and she was in his house, with his scent on her skin and his come inside her, walking alone down a million-dollar hallway to a gilded cage of a bedroom. The mission, she realized, was the simple part.