Chapter 15: The Cold Truth
The air in the print shop attic was thick with the smell of dust and damp plaster. A single battery-powered lantern sat on the floor, casting long, jagged shadows up the slanted walls. Milo watched, the ache in his side from the graze now a dull, persistent throb, as Sofia turned her back to him.
Her fingers worked the hidden clasp at her neck. With a sigh of released tension, the leather of her Green Arrow suit peeled open down the line of her spine. She shrugged her shoulders, and the top half of the suit slid down to her waist, pooling around her. The lantern light licked over the smooth, taut skin of her back, the delicate architecture of her shoulders, the dark spill of her curls now freed and clinging to the sweat-damp nape of her neck.
Milo’s breath caught. It wasn’t a deliberate seduction; it was the impersonal, weary act of shedding a skin. That made it more intimate. Every movement was fatigue and vulnerability. The memory of her in the tunnel, pressed close in the dark, her body sturdy and sure against his, flared to life in his gut. The attraction he’d ruthlessly banked since finding her again roared back, a simple, primal heat that had nothing to do with conspiracies or Kingpins.
She hooked her thumbs into the remaining leather at her hips and pushed it down, stepping out of the suit in just a simple pair of black underwear. The curve of her hip, the swell of her backside, the powerful line of her thighs—all were revealed in the unforgiving lantern light. She was all strength and youth, a stark contrast to the grimy, decaying room.
She stood there for a moment, utterly still, her head bowed as if listening for threats in the silence beyond the walls. The lantern light gleamed on the fine sheen of sweat along her spine, and the shadows hollowed the delicate dip above her hips.
Milo’s own breath sounded too loud in the cramped space. The throbbing in his side faded beneath a sharper, more urgent pulse. He remembered the cool efficiency of her hands checking his bandages in the tunnel, the way her body had shielded his from falling debris. That professional closeness had sparked something, and now, with the suit discarded, that spark became a current he couldn’t ignore.
He pushed himself up from the old desk he was leaning against, the wood groaning in protest. The movement was slow, deliberate, each step a conscious choice over the voice in his head that hissed Sarah’s name. The dusty floorboards whispered under his boots.
She didn’t turn, but her shoulders tensed minutely, a telltale ripple across her skin. She knew he was moving. He could see the rapid flutter of her pulse at the base of her throat.
“Your back,” he said, his voice rougher than he intended. “You’ve got a bruise forming. Right shoulder blade.”
“It’s nothing,” she murmured, but she didn’t reach for the pile of civilian clothes beside her. “A ricochet off the concrete in the pump yard. My suit took most of it.”
“Let me see.” It wasn’t a request. He closed the final distance, the heat of her body reaching him before his hands did. The air between them was charged, thick with plaster dust and the clean, sharp scent of her sweat.
He approached her.
His fingertips, calloused from years clutching pens and cameras, brushed the edge of the darkening blotch on her skin. She inhaled sharply, a quick intake of breath that wasn’t from pain. Her skin was fever-warm under his touch.
“It’s gonna be a masterpiece,” he said, his tone attempting lightness but falling into a low rasp. He traced the periphery of the bruise, feeling the slight swell. “All the colors of the rainbow. Very festive.”
A soft, shaky laugh escaped her. “You’re a terrible doctor, Davidson.”
“I’m a journalist. Observation is my specialty.” His other hand came up, not touching yet, hovering near the curve of her waist. The lantern light danced over the slopes and planes of her, highlighting the strength in her form. “Observation tells me you’re holding your breath.”
She was. He could see the tension in her ribs. Slowly, he let his palm settle on her hip, just above the line of her underwear. The contact was electric, a jolt that went straight through him. Her skin was impossibly soft over the hard muscle beneath.
“Milo,” she whispered, a warning or a plea—he couldn’t tell.
“I know,” he said, his mouth close to her ear. He did know. He knew about Sarah, waiting in the wind with Scott. He knew about the trap being set across the city, the danger that lurked in every shadow. None of it mattered in the face of this simple, gravitational pull. His thumb stroked the dip of her waist.
She turned her head, her dark curls brushing his chin, her profile etched in gold and shadow. Her eyes, when they met his, were wide and unsure, stripped of the Green Arrow’s certainty. In them, he saw the same war he felt: duty against desire, loyalty against the raw need for comfort in a world coming apart.
His control snapped.
He turned her fully to face him, his hands framing her face. For a heartbeat, they just stared, the unspoken things hanging thick between them. Then he kissed her.
It wasn’t gentle. It was hungry and desperate, a collision of all the fear and adrenaline of the night. She kissed him back with equal fervor, her arms snaking around his neck, her fingers tangling in his hair. The pain in his side was a distant echo.
He walked her backward until her shoulders met the cold plaster of the wall. The lantern shuddered, sending shadows leaping. He broke the kiss, breathing hard, his forehead resting against hers.
She pulled him back down, her mouth finding his again with unerring accuracy. Her hands slid under his shirt, tracing the bandage on his ribs before roaming over the tense muscles of his back.
The rational world—Sarah, Scott, Kingpin, the entire collapsing city—receded into a dull roar. There was only here, now: the taste of her, the feel of her skin under his palms, the urgent, whispering friction of their bodies. One of his hands drifted down, over the swell of her hip, his fingers slipping beneath the elastic of her underwear.
Her skin was hot silk under his touch. She gasped into his mouth, her hips arching off the wall, pressing into his hand. Every rational argument dissolved in that sound, in the feel of her yielding to him. The world narrowed to the texture of her curls wound around his fingers, the salt taste of her neck, the pounding of his own heart loud in his ears.
“Wait,” Sofia breathed, but her hands were clutching his shoulders, pulling him closer. “Milo, we can’t—”
“Why?” he murmured against her collarbone, his fingers moving lower. His own need was a sharp, blinding thing, obliterating guilt. “Give me one good reason that matters right now.”
She didn’t have one. Her head fell back against the plaster with a soft thud, her eyes squeezed shut.
Her breath hitched, a sharp, ragged sound in the dusty quiet. His name was a sigh on her lips, part surrender, part anguish. His mouth followed the path of his hands, tasting salt and warmth, learning the landscape of her.
The world beyond the attic ceased to exist. There was only the groan of old wood under their weight, the dry scrape of plaster, the frantic symphony of their breathing. He was everywhere, his hands mapping her with a rough sort of reverence that left her trembling. She fumbled with the button of his jeans, her knuckles brushing against the stark reality of his arousal, and any last pretense of resistance burned away.
She was lightning in his arms, all taut energy and sudden, breathtaking force. When he finally sank into her, pressed against the cold wall, she bit down on a cry, burying her face in the worn leather of his jacket. It was less about passion than necessity, a physical confirmation they’d survived the night, a desperate anchor against the chaos. He moved with a focused intensity, each thrust a silent argument against the world falling apart outside.
Her nails dug into the fabric covering his shoulders, her legs locked around his hips. The lantern light blurred at the edges of his vision. For a handful of minutes, there was no Green Arrow, no jaded reporter, no betrayal waiting in the wings. There were just two bodies chasing a fleeting, essential warmth, a mutual pact of forgetting.
He rested his forehead against the cool plaster beside her head, trying to catch his breath. The reality of what they’d done crashed in with the subtle ache returning to his side.
He could feel the slow trickle of sweat between their pressed chests. The frantic energy dissolved, leaving a heavy, complicated quiet in its wake. He carefully eased back, helping her find her footing on the uneven floorboards.
Without a word, she gathered her clothes—a soft grey t-shirt and jeans from her pack. He watched her dress, the simple act feeling more vulnerable than what they’d just done. He righted his own clothes, the silence stretching like a live wire.
They didn’t speak. They just lay down on the thin mattress in the corner, the dusty blanket pulled up, her back fitted against his chest. Exhaustion claimed them both within minutes, a black, dreamless void.
Sofia woke to the warmth of lips on the nape of her neck. Early morning light, gritty and grey, filtered through the single filthy window. Milo’s arm was a solid weight around her waist, his chest against her back.
“Mmm,” he mumbled into her skin, his voice thick with sleep. “Developing a real taste for this.” His lips traced a slow path along her shoulder. “Sleeping with superheroes. It’s a niche market, but I’m acquiring a palate.”
She smirked into the thin pillow, the events of the night solidifying into a sharp, aching clarity. “You’re twice my age, Davidson. Call it a late-life crisis.”
“And you,” he said, his hand sliding up to gently cup her breast, his thumb grazing her nipple, “moaned my name like it was your job.” He kissed the knob of her spine. “Didn’t hear any complaints about my age then.”
A shiver that had nothing to do with the cold ran through her. She pushed back against him, feeling him stir. “Arrogance isn’t a good look on you.”
“It’s not arrogance if it’s factual.” His kisses journeyed down her back, each one a soft, deliberate brand over her vertebrae. “So, Green Arrow. We’re fugitives in a condemned building. My girlfriend and my mentor are currently baiting a multinational criminal syndicate. What’s our play?”
His tone was casual, but the question sliced through the morning haze. She rolled onto her stomach, letting his lips continue their path. The bruise on her shoulder ached dully under his attention.
“The data Scott uploaded,” she said, focusing on the plan to steady her nerves. “We need to access it, parse it. Find the leverage point. Fisk’s operations, his money trails, his political hooks.”
“A crash course in forensic accounting over burnt coffee. My favorite.” He kissed the small of her back, his hands smoothing over the curve of her hips. “We can’t access it from here. That signal would be a neon sign.”
“We need a blind spot. Somewhere with public access and brutal encryption.” She shifted, a thought forming. “The university library. Sub-level three. The archival servers for the physics department. They’re isolated, shielded. I have student credentials that’ll get us in after hours.”
He nuzzled the back of her thigh, his stubble scratching deliciously. “A date in the stacks. Romantic.”
“It’s a plan, not a date.” She pushed herself up, breaking the contact. The cool air raised goosebumps on her skin. She swung her legs off the mattress and reached for her jeans.
As she stood to pull them on, he was there. He rose behind her, his body warming her back. He nuzzled the side of her neck, his arms slipping around her waist. “Coffee first, though. Priorities.”
He delivered a swift, playful slap to her backside. The sound was sharp in the quiet room.
She jumped, a gasp leaving her lips. A bright, surprising warmth bloomed where his hand had connected, mixing with the soreness from the night before. She didn’t turn, didn’t want him to see the flush she felt on her cheeks or the secret, thrilling jolt it sent through her.
“Child,” she muttered, zipping her jeans.
“Liar,” he whispered into her hair, his tone knowing. He gave her hip a final squeeze before turning to hunt for his own shirt.
She walked to the small hot plate, her steps feeling strangely light. The trap was set across town. The Kingpin’s net was closing. But here, for this fractured moment, the sunlight was grey, the coffee was terrible, and the ghost of his touch was a brand on her skin.
But here, for this fractured moment, the sunlight was grey, the coffee was terrible, and the ghost of his touch was a brand on her skin. That ghost followed her through the rest of the morning, a persistent phantom warmth as they gathered their gear in silence. It lingered while Milo sent a coded ping from a fresh burner—their agreed all-clear signal to Scott’s scrambled network.
The response was almost immediate. Coordinates, not to the loft, but to a derelict boathouse on the industrial river’s edge. A neutral, exposed ground. Milo read the message, his face unreadable. “They’re alive. They want a meet.”
Sofia just nodded, tightening the strap on her quiver. The Green Arrow suit was back on, a necessary carapace. She didn’t look at him as they slipped out of the attic and into the city’s bleary morning.
The boathouse stank of stale river water and rotting wood. Sarah paced, a restless shadow in her Black Cat suit, her lenses scanning the broken windows for movement. Every rustle of debris made her flinch. Scott leaned against a rusted winch, utterly still, his eyes on the single doorway. The air between them was a taut wire, humming with everything they hadn’t said since the rooftop standoff at Grayson Mill had ended in a storm of sirens and a tactical retreat.
A scrape of a boot on concrete outside. Sarah froze. Scott’s hand went to his hip.
Two figures slipped through the door, backlit by the grey afternoon. Milo, looking rumpled and older, a fresh bandage visible under his half-open jacket. Sofia beside him, her posture rigid in her green leathers, face unreadable behind her domino mask.
For a heartbeat, no one moved. The silence was a physical thing, crowded with the weight of separate hells survived.
Then Sarah was moving. A choked sound escaped her modulator as she ripped her own mask off. Her face was pale, smudged with exhaustion and relief. She crossed the space in a few quick strides, her eyes only on Milo.
“You’re okay,” she breathed, her voice raw. Her hands came up, fluttering near his jaw, his shoulders, as if to confirm he was real.
“Mostly,” he managed, a crack in his usual gravel. He saw the fresh scratches on her neck, the wild fear in her green eyes. All the planned quips died in his throat. The sight of her, whole and frantic for him, obliterated the memory of the attic wall, the feel of another woman’s skin.
He pulled her into him, his arms banding around her waist, lifting her slightly off the damp floor. She buried her face in his neck, inhaling the familiar scent of him beneath the sweat and grit. “I thought—when the comms went dead after the Mill—”
“I’m here. I’m right here, Red.” His voice was thick. He pulled back just enough to look at her, his thumbs wiping at the tears tracking through the grime on her cheeks. The guilt was a poison pill in his gut, but her warmth in his arms felt like the only true thing left in the world.
He kissed her.
It was deep, and desperate, and full of a gratitude that edged into pain. Her fingers gripped his hair, holding on as if he might dissolve. It was a kiss of reunion, of averted loss, a silent vow against the chaos that sought to pull them apart. They clung to each other, mouths seeking reassurance, a temporary seal over all the unspoken fractures.
Scott looked away first, his jaw working. He focused on a rusted nail in a beam, the sight of them together a precise, expected ache he hadn’t fully braced for. He’d known it would hurt. Knowing didn’t soften the blow.
Sofia turned her head sharply, examining a gap in the wallboards as if it contained the universe’s secrets. The leather of her gloves creaked as her hands clenched into fists. The memory of Milo’s mouth on hers, his hands on her hips, was now a searing betrayal witnessed in the flesh. She felt exposed, foolish. The mask was a blessing.
The kiss broke, but they stayed forehead-to-foreath, breathing the same air. Sarah finally opened her eyes, looking past Milo’s shoulder. Her gaze found Scott, then Sofia. The moment fractured back into the reality of four people in a ruin.
“We need to talk,” Sarah said, her voice steadier now, still holding Milo’s hand. “All of us.”
They huddled on overturned crates, a council of war in the damp gloom. Milo laid it out—the archived servers at the university, a potential blind spot to access the data. Sarah detailed the Kingpin’s response at the mill, the professional, militarized efficiency of his new enforcers. “It’s not street muscle anymore. It’s a private army. Finch was just the middle manager.”
Scott finally spoke, his voice a dry rasp. “The data’s useless if we can’t weaponize it. We need a broadcast, not a byte. Something that can’t be scrubbed, can’t be buried by his lawyers or his cops.”
Sofia leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. “The Kingpin’s annual fundraiser for the city’s public safety fund is in three days. Black tie, media circus, every sycophant and city official in one room.” She looked at Sarah, then Milo. “He’ll be there, playing the benevolent patriarch. His entire legitimacy, wrapped up in one night.”
A slow, grim smile spread across Milo’s face. It was the look he got when a story clicked into place. “We crash the party.”
“We don’t just crash it,” Sarah said, the Black Cat’s playful menace coloring her tone. “We give a presentation. We broadcast every dirty dollar, every buried body, every crooked handshake from his own podium. Live. To every screen in the city.”
“The venue’s a fortress,” Scott grunted. “Perimeter security, private scanners, encrypted comms.”
“Which is why he’ll feel safe,” Sofia countered. “Arrogance is a vulnerability. I’ve done thermal layouts of the place for a… campus project. There are maintenance conduits from the old heating system. They lead backstage.”
The plan coalesced in the rotten air, a dangerous, half-formed thing. They would need forged credentials, a hack into the venue’s broadcast control, a diversion, and a flawless escape route. It was impossible. It was the only move left.
The plan was insanity, but it hummed with a terrifying plausibility. For the next forty-eight hours, Scott’s loft became a war room. Printouts of blueprints stole the last of his printer’s ink. Chinese takeout containers formed greasy stalagmites on the floor. The air tasted of cold coffee and sustained tension.
Milo and Sofia vanished for a six-hour stretch, returning with the grim satisfaction of a successful digital heist. “The university servers worked,” Milo said, dumping a heavily encrypted drive onto Scott’s desk. “It’s all here. The shell companies, the wire transfers to the police commissioner’s ‘campaign fund,’ the forensic reports he had altered. It’s a roadmap to his empire.”
Sarah, her suit patched from the mill, practiced routes through the maintenance conduits on a virtual map Sofia rendered. “The access panel is behind a drape in the green room,” she muttered, tracing a line on the screen. “Fifteen feet of crawl space. I’ll be spit-polished and sipping champagne before they know I’m in the walls.”
Scott handled the logistics of the real world. Fake invites sourced from a forger he’d put away a decade before. A blind-eye rental van. “The diversion’s the problem,” he grumbled, cleaning his pistol for the third time. “We need eyes to pop, not just a fire alarm. Something loud and undeniable.”
Sofia didn’t look up from fletching a fresh arrow. “Leave the loud part to me.”
The night of the fundraiser arrived cloaked in a fine, chilly rain. The Marcanova Hotel gleamed like a wet tooth, limousines disgorging the city’s elegant parasites under a massive awning. Inside, crystal glittered and laughter sounded like breaking glass.
Milo, in a tuxedo that smelled of mothballs, moved through the crowd with a recorder in his breast pocket, his press pass hanging loose. He spotted Fisk holding court—a mountain of a man in a tailored white dinner jacket, his voice a calm, rolling bass about civic renewal. The hypocrisy was so thick Milo could taste it.
Sarah, as Black Cat, was already a ghost in the architecture. She moved through the stainless-steel intestines of the hotel, the tight silence of the maintenance shaft swallowing all sound. She emerged behind the velvet drape in the dimly lit green room, exactly as planned. Through a crack, she watched a nervous stage manager adjust a microphone. The Plexiglas podium where Fisk would speak glowed under a lone work light.
Outside, in the van parked three blocks away in a delivery zone, Scott watched a bank of monitors. Feed one: the ballroom, from Sofia’s tiny camera concealed in a lapel pin on a waiter she’d bribed. Feed two: the rooftop, where Sofia herself was a rain-slicked shadow, her bowstring taut. Feed three: a schematic, a single red blinking light representing Sarah’s position backstage. “Black Cat is in the nest,” Scott said into his throat mic, his voice flat. “Green Arrow, give me sightlines.”
“Police sniper teams on the adjacent roofs,” Sofia’s voice came back, modulated and cool through his earpiece. “Four visible. They’re scanning the crowd, not the sky. They’re his.”
Milo’s voice crackled next, sounding strangely cheerful amidst the clinking glasses. “Our host is heading for the podium. Showtime in two.”
Sarah watched Fisk approach from the wings, a giant smiling and nodding. Her fingers flew over a compact device wired into the hotel’s AV system. The digital skeleton key Sofia engineered bypassed firewalls with silent efficiency. “I have control of the main screens and audio,” she whispered.
“Wait for my mark,” Scott ordered. Tension coiled in the van, in the rafters, in the crowd.
Fisk tapped the microphone, the thump echoing through the grand hall. “My friends,” he began, his voice washing over the assembled power brokers. “We gather tonight not merely to celebrate, but to reaffirm our covenant with this city—a covenant of order, and of strength.”
Milo edged closer, the recorder now a live transmitter feeding everything to Scott’s drives.
“Now,” Scott said.
On the roof, Sofia breathed out and released. The arrow wasn’t aimed at Fisk. It whistled down, a calculated trajectory, and struck the central crystal chandelier above the dance floor. Not with an explosion, but with a precisely timed electromagnetic pulse from its tip.
Every light in the ballroom died. The crowd gasped, a unified animal sound of surprise. Emergency floods flickered on a half-second later, casting everyone in harsh, slanting shadows.
Fisk frowned, leaning into the mic. “A minor technical—”
His voice was drowned out. Because on the thirty-foot emergency screens flanking the stage, which now hummed to life with a different feed, Wilson Fisk’s face appeared. It was a forensic financial slide: a transfer of five million dollars from a known Liechtenstein holding company to an account labeled “Mayor’s Inner Circle Policy Initiative.”
The crowd murmured, confused.
The slide changed. A scanned coroner’s report, a cause of death altered from ‘blunt force trauma’ to ‘accidental fall.’ The victim’s name was a dockworker who had protested Fisk’s waterfront development.
The murmurs grew louder, edged with unease. Fisk stared at the screens, his placid mask dissolving into something cold and terrifying. “What is this?” he boomed, not into the mic, but at the darkness backstage. “Security!”
“They’re a little busy,” Sarah’s voice purred over the PA system, the modulator layering her tone with playful menace. The feed switched to live security footage Scott had hacked, showing Fisk’s own private guards wrestling with uniformed police officers—real ones, from Internal Affairs, whom Scott had quietly tipped off. Chaos was unfolding in the hallways.
Panic began to ripple through the black-tie crowd. Someone screamed.
From the ceiling, Sofia descended on a graphene line, landing in a crouch between Fisk and the fleeing guests. She rose, arrow nocked and aimed squarely at his chest. “Don’t move, Mr. Fisk. The city’s auditing your books.”
Fisk’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t look at the arrow. He looked past her, into the crowd, where Milo was calmly snapping pictures with a long lens. “You,” Fisk snarled, the civilized philanthropist utterly gone, replaced by pure, ruthless Kingpin. “You gutter-press parasite.”
“Subpoenas are being served at your offices and six homes as we speak,” Milo called back, lowering the camera. “The story’s already filed. Front page, above the fold.”
It was the moment Fisk broke. With a roar that didn’t seem possible from a human throat, he grabbed the heavy Plexiglas podium and hurled it, not at Sofia, but towards the crowd, towards Milo. It was a calculated act of terror, to create a stampede, to shatter the narrative.
Sofia’s arrow flew, pinning the sleeve of his jacket to the wooden stage backdrop. He ripped it free, splinters flying.
Sarah dropped from the lighting rig above, landing behind him. “Party’s over, Wilson.” Her reinforced heel connected with the back of his knee. The joint buckled with a sickening pop.
He went down, hard, but swept a massive arm back, catching her across the ribs. The breath left her in a pained gasp. She rolled with the impact, springing back as Sofia fired again, this arrow embedding in the stage floor between his grasping hands.
Then the real police stormed the room, led by a granite-faced IA captain Scott had vouched for. They swarmed the fallen giant, their guns a forest of steel pointed at the man they’d all clinked glasses with ten minutes before. The cuffs looked absurdly small on his wrists.
The fight left him all at once. As they hauled him to his feet, his eyes found Sarah’s. It wasn’t a look of hate, but of weary, profound understanding. She had broken his order. The game was lost.
In the chaotic aftermath, under the broken chandelier and the gaze of a hundred phones, Milo found Sofia near a service entrance. Rain from the open door misted her face. The green leather was slick with it.
“Hey,” he said.
She looked at him, her mask still on, but her eyes were utterly exposed. “Hey.”
They stood in the noisy silence of victory. The thing between them in the attic was a ghost now, palpable and already fading. He stepped closer, the smell of rain and cordite hanging between them. He cupped her cheek, his thumb brushing the edge of her mask.
He kissed her. It was soft, a slow and final punctuation mark. A thank you, and a goodbye. She kissed him back, her hands resting lightly on his chest, not pulling him closer, just feeling the beat of his heart one last time. When they parted, she offered a small, sad smile.
“Go find your girl, Davidson,” she whispered. Then she turned and melted into the rain-swept night, a shadow returning to its element.
Across the ruined ballroom, near the stage, Sarah found Scott. He was talking to the IA captain, his posture rigid with leftover adrenaline. When he saw her, he excused himself. They walked to a relatively quiet corner behind a toppled floral arrangement.
“We did it,” she said, the words feeling inadequate.
“We did.” He looked old under the emergency lights, the lines on his face deep canals of exhaustion. But his eyes were clear. “You should go. He’s waiting for you.”
She swallowed. The memory of his hands on her in the kitchen, of his body shielding hers on the rooftop, of everything unspoken and unfinished, tightened her throat. “Scott…”
He shook his head, a gentle stop. He reached out, his rough hand cradling her jaw. He looked at her for a long moment—seeing the girl, the Cat, the woman he’d fallen for against every rule of his own life. Then he leaned in and kissed her.
It wasn’t like the desperate kiss in his loft. It was slow, deep, and full of a profound, surrendering affection. A farewell to a possibility. She kissed him back, her fingers curling into the fabric of his rain-damp shirt, committing the feel of him to memory. When it ended, they rested their foreheads together, breathing the same air for a final, private second.
“Be happy, kid,” he murmured. Then he turned and walked back toward the captain, back toward the world of badges and reports, leaving the vigilante in the shadows behind.
A week later, pale morning light painted Milo’s cramped apartment. He woke to the sensation of lips trailing down his chest, over the fading yellow of his bruise. He groaned, a hand coming down to tangle in Sarah’s fiery hair.
“Mmm. Best alarm clock ever,” he mumbled, his voice sleep-roughened.
She looked up, her chin resting on his stomach, a wicked grin on her face. “You were snoring. It was a civic nuisance.” She resumed her kisses, moving lower.
His free hand groped on the nightstand, finding his phone. The local paper’s digital front page was open. His own byline stared back at him, above a headline that read: SLEEPING WITH BLACK CAT: An Insider’s Account of the Kingpin’s Fall. The article had everything: the tension, the near-misses, the sensual description of the masked vigilante’s daring—enough sordid detail to sell a million copies but not a single clue to her identity. The comments section was a chaotic mix of outrage at Fisk and pure, unadulterated envy for the unnamed journalist.
He smirked, dropping the phone. “I’m officially the most envied man in the country.”
“You’re officially insufferable,” she said, but her eyes sparkled. She stretched, climbing out of bed. She wore only one of his old band t-shirts, which barely covered the lace tops of her black panties. She padded toward the kitchenette.
He watched her go, the way the soft cotton clung, the perfect, captivating sway of her hips and the curve of her backside as she rummaged in the fridge for eggs. The scent of brewing coffee began to mingle with the warmth of her left on the sheets.
He lay back, the newspaper’s validation a dull buzz compared to the simple, profound reality in his kitchen. The city was quieter. The shadows felt lighter. And here, in this messy, sunlit room, was everything.
Sarah cracked an egg one-handed, glancing over her shoulder to catch him staring. She smiled, a real, unguarded, morning smile.
Milo shook his head, a low laugh escaping him. He truly had hit the jackpot.
The end.