The first thing Ellen Yin registered was the sound.
Not the distant wail of a Metropolis siren. Not the hum of her building's ancient air conditioner. Something else. Something that pulled her out of a dreamless sleep and straight into alertness, heart already thumping before her eyes opened.
Bzzt. Bzzt. Bzzt.
A vibration. A specific, patterned vibration that she hadn't heard in months.
Her hand moved before her brain caught up, fingers fumbling across the nightstand until they brushed against cool metal. The Batwave device. She held it up, squinting at the small screen that now glowed with an active signal indicator. That couldn't be right. She'd disabled it. After leaving Gotham, after making the decision to put three hundred miles between herself and that city, she'd powered the thing down and tucked it into her nightstand drawer. A keepsake. Nothing more.
So how the hell was it working?
Ellen sat up, the thin sheet pooling around her waist. Moonlight sliced through the gap in her curtains, painting silver stripes across her apartment floor. She pressed a thumb to the device's screen, and a set of coordinates blinked back at her. Coordinates to her own building. Her own apartment.
The air shifted.
It was subtle—the faint displacement of oxygen as something moved in the darkness near her window. Ellen's detective instincts fired like synapses in a storm. Her free hand slid beneath the pillow and found the cool grip of her Glock 19. In one fluid motion, she leveled the weapon at the shadows.
"Show yourself."
Her voice came out steady. Commanding. The voice of someone who'd talked down armed suspects and stared into the abyss of Gotham's criminal underworld without flinching.
"Long time, no see, Detective."
The voice's low rasp wrapped around her spine. Familiar and alien all at once. Ellen's finger hovered outside the trigger guard—discipline overriding instinct—as a figure detached itself from the darkness near her window.
Batman.
His cape swept behind him like condensed midnight, pooling at his ankles before settling. The iconic silhouette was unmistakable: the peaked cowl, the broad chest emblazoned with that singular bat symbol, the utility belt gleaming with its arsenal of purpose-built tools. He stood in her Metropolis apartment like he'd materialized from the shadows themselves.
Ellen exhaled slowly. Lowered the Glock. Clicked the safety back on and set it on the nightstand.
"I disabled that," she said, nodding toward the Batwave device still clutched in her other hand.
"I know."
She reached over and switched on the lamp. Warm amber light pushed back the darkness, illuminating the grey of his costume, the way the Kevlar weave caught the light. He looked exactly the same as the night she'd last seen him—perched on a gargoyle overlooking the East End, telling her that Gordon had agreed to restart the Bat-Signal protocols. Telling her that his work was about to get more complicated.
"What are you doing here?" She kept her voice measured. Professional. "Gotham is your city."
"I can ask you the same thing."
The deflection was so utterly him that Ellen almost smiled. Almost. Instead, she let a bitter edge creep into her tone.
"Well, I figured after Gordon and your new sidekicks rolled in, you didn't need me anymore."
The words hung between them. She hadn't meant to say it like that—hadn't meant to reveal the bruised thing underneath her carefully maintained composure. But it was three in the morning, and she was wearing almost nothing, and the world's greatest detective was standing in her bedroom looking at her with those unreadable white lenses.
"I'll always need you."
The words landed differently than anything she'd ever heard him say. Stripped of the growl, delivered with something approaching tenderness. Ellen's throat tightened.
He took a step toward her.
That's when the full reality of the situation crashed into her consciousness. She was sitting on her bed in a loose black tank top and red panties. That was it. No jeans, no blazer, no shoulder holster. Just thin cotton and the awareness that Batman had never seen more of her than her face and hands.
Her arms crossed instinctively, pressing against her chest. The movement only smooshed her breasts together, deepening the visible cleavage above the tank top's scoop neck. She realized this about half a second after doing it, felt heat bloom across her collarbone.
"I… well, I'm sure you manage without me."
Another step. He was close enough now that she could smell the night air clinging to his cape, the faint undertone of metal and reinforced fabric. Close enough that she had to tilt her chin up to maintain the illusion that she was looking him in the eyes.
"I do… but I still miss you."
Close enough that when she breathed in, her chest nearly brushed against him.
Ellen became acutely aware of just how tall he was. How the costume did nothing to hide the muscular architecture underneath—the breadth of his shoulders, the taper of his waist, the way his forearms corded with strength even at rest. She'd seen him fight. She knew what that body could do. But knowing it and standing inches from it were two very different things.
"I… I… it's just that…" She stopped. Swallowed. Tried to assemble the words that had been rattling around her skull for months. "Look. I tried to stay. I really did. But Gordon stepped in and then the sidekicks… I got jealous. I actually got jealous."
The confession felt like pulling a blade out of her own chest.
"And it was then I realized that my feelings for you went beyond fighting crime. My feelings were wholly unprofessional and I…"
Her voice died as Batman raised his gloved hand. Gently—impossibly gently for a man who could shatter bone with those same fingers—he brushed a lock of dark hair away from her face. The gesture was so tender, so unexpected, that Ellen's lungs forgot how to work.
His fingertips traced the curve of her cheek.
She could feel the texture of the glove, the warmth of the hand beneath it. Her eyes fluttered half-closed, and when she opened them again, his face was closer. The white lenses filled her vision. The hard line of his jaw, visible beneath the cowl's opening, was set with an intensity she recognized—not the intensity of combat, but something quieter. Something hungrier.
He kissed her.
It started soft. Tentative. The barest pressure of his lips against hers, a question posed through the language of skin. His mouth was warm despite the chill of the night, and she registered absurd details: the slight chap of his lower lip, the way he held himself perfectly still, giving her all the room in the world to pull back.
Ellen didn't pull back.
Her arms uncrossed and rose, wrapping around the thick neck of his cowl. The material was textured under her palms, the leather-like surface cool and strange. She pulled him closer, answering his question with the press of her own lips, parting slightly to deepen the kiss.
His response was immediate but measured. Strong arms encircled her back, one hand splaying between her shoulder blades while the other settled at the curve of her waist. The cape enfolded around them, blocking out the lamp light, creating a pocket of intimate darkness that smelled of him.
Her fingers slid down from his neck. Over his sculpted chest. The ridges of his abdominals. Lower. Until they reached the hem of her own tank top.
She broke the kiss long enough to pull the garment over her head. The discarded cotton whispered to the floor, and Ellen sat before him, naked to the waist, her breasts exposed to the cool apartment air. Her nipples tightened instantly—from the temperature, from the weight of his unseen gaze, from the electric hum building beneath her skin.
Batman didn't speak. Didn't move. For a long moment, he simply looked at her, and the white lenses felt less like a barrier and more like a spotlight. She was being catalogued, examined, appreciated in a way that made her feel like the only woman in the world.
Then he kissed her again, and this time there was nothing tentative about it.
His mouth claimed hers as his hands found her bare skin. The gloves were gone—she didn't know when he'd removed them, hadn't heard it over the pounding of her own heart—and she felt bare fingers, calloused and strong, trace up the ladder of her spine. The sensation pulled a sound from her throat, something between a gasp and a moan, swallowed by his lips.
He walked her backward. Her knees hit the edge of the mattress, and then she was falling—no, being lowered—onto the bed, his body following hers. His cape settled around them both, and she was caged beneath the mass of him, the hard planes of his chest pressing against her bare breasts through the Kevlar weave.
His mouth left hers and began a journey downward.
Jaw. Lingering at the hinge of it, where tension lived, kissing the knot of muscle until it released. Neck. The pulse point that fluttered like a trapped bird, his lips pressing against the rhythm. Collarbone. A detour to the hollow at the base of her throat, where her breath had gone shallow and quick.
Sternum. He paused there, right above her heart, and she knew he could feel it hammering against his lips.
Then lower.
His hand cupped her left breast, the heat of his palm a shock against her skin. He squeezed with just enough pressure to make her arch into him, and then his mouth was there, hot and wet, closing around her nipple.
Ellen's back bowed off the mattress.
He sucked—not gently, but with a focused intensity that made her gasp. His tongue circled the peaked flesh, traced patterns she couldn't name, applied pressure and release in a rhythm that seemed calibrated specifically to her. As if he'd studied her. As if he'd been paying attention all those months and knew exactly what would make her dig her heels into the mattress and fist her hands in the sheets.
He gave the same attention to her right breast, his hand moving to replace his mouth on the left, thumb stroking the slick nipple he'd just abandoned. Ellen's head fell back. Her thighs pressed together, seeking friction, finding none.
His mouth continued its descent.
Down her sternum. Over her stomach. He paused at each ridge of muscle, each hint of definition earned through years of training and fieldwork. His lips traced the curve of her abs as his hands hooked into the waistband of her red panties.
He pulled them down slowly. Deliberately. The fabric caught briefly at her hips—she lifted them to help—and then slid away entirely, leaving her naked on the rumpled sheets.
Thank God I showered after my patrol, she thought wildly, and the absurdity of the thought almost made her laugh. Almost. Then his hands pressed her thighs apart, and every coherent thought in her skull evaporated like morning fog.
His mouth found her.
The first touch of his tongue against her slit pulled a sound from Ellen that she didn't recognize as her own voice—high and broken and utterly unguarded. He licked her with the same meticulous precision he applied to everything else: reading her responses, adjusting his technique, learning the topography of her pleasure in real time.
His tongue parted her folds. Traced the length of her. Dragged over the swollen bud of her clit with just enough pressure to make her hips jerk.
And his eyes—those white lenses, which she'd never found unsettling until this exact moment—never left her face.
He was watching her. Watching her come undone under his mouth, cataloguing every flinch and moan and desperate arch of her spine. The Batman was on his knees between her thighs, his cape pooling on the floor behind him, his mouth sealed against her pussy, and he was studying her.
The thought undid something in Ellen's brain.
Her hands flew to his cowl—to the bat ears, those iconic points that had struck fear into the hearts of Gotham's criminals. She grabbed them like handles. Pulled his face harder against her cunt. Ground her hips upward, smearing her wetness across the open mouth section of his mask, using the rigid cowl as a fulcrum for her pleasure.
He didn't resist. His tongue continued its work—lapping, sucking, circling—and his hands gripped her thighs, holding her open, keeping her exposed.
The pressure built. Not like climbing stairs, not like some gradual accumulation. It was more like a wave gathering force offshore, invisible until the moment it crashed.
Ellen came with a cry that was half his name and half something wordless.
Her inner muscles clenched around nothing, pulsing in waves that matched the desperate rhythm of her hips. Her grip on his cowl tightened until her knuckles ached. Her vision whited out at the edges, and for a suspended moment, she was nothing but sensation—the wet heat of his mouth, the hard press of the cowl against her inner thighs, the shuddering release that rolled through her body like thunder.
When she finally released him, her arms flopped bonelessly to the mattress. Her chest heaved. The ceiling swam back into focus, and she became aware of the wetness coating her inner thighs, the sheets bunched beneath her, the faint chill of sweat cooling on her skin.
Batman rose.
He rose the way he did everything—slowly, deliberately, with an economy of motion that bordered on theatrical. His cape fell back into place behind him. The utility belt, she realized with a jolt, was already on the floor. She hadn't even heard him remove it.
The click of the belt's release had been too quiet, or she'd been too lost.
Now his hands went lower. To the dark trunks of his costume. To the concealed opening he worked open with practiced efficiency.
What he pulled free made Ellen's breath stop in her throat.
His cock was massive. There was no other word for it. Thick and long and curved slightly upward, the head a dark, glistening bulb that was already slick with pre-cum. A pearl of it beaded at the tip, catching the lamplight. The shaft was heavily veined, the base framed by the dark fabric of his trunks.
He didn't move. Didn't speak. He simply stood there—the Batman, almost fully costumed but for the exposed cock in his bare hand—and waited.
Waited for her to make the choice.
Ellen's hand trembled as she reached for him. Her fingers wrapped around the shaft—couldn't close fully, the girth too much—and guided him toward her entrance. She could feel the heat of him, the weight, the pulse. The head pressed against her slick opening, already soaked from her orgasm, already ready.
She looked up at him. At those inscrutable white lenses.
"Yes," she whispered.
He pushed inside.
The stretch was exquisite. Ellen's mouth fell open, and a sound emerged that was somewhere between a gasp and a sob. She felt herself accommodate him inch by inch—the bulbous head breaching her entrance, the thick shaft following, the impossible fullness of him settling deep in her core.
She wrapped her legs around his waist. Her arms circled his back, fingers digging into the grey fabic under his cape. She pulled him in deeper, deeper, until he was buried to the hilt and she could practically feel him in her throat.
Then she kissed him, tasting the remnants of her own arousal on his lips.
He began to move.
Missionary—they were in missionary, she realized distantly, the most basic position in existence—but there was nothing basic about the way he fucked her. His thrusts were measured and deep, each one a controlled roll of his hips that dragged every inch of his cock along her inner walls. He wasn't jackhammering. He wasn't rushing. He was taking her apart with surgical precision, knowing exactly how much force to apply and exactly where to angle his hips to make her see stars.
His cape draped over them like a blanket. The world outside—Metropolis, Gotham, the job, the jealousy, the months of silence—ceased to exist. There was only the rhythm of his body against hers, the wet sound of their joining, the harsh rasp of his breathing mixing with her own.
"God," she gasped. "Right there. Right—Oh!"
He adjusted. Minutely. Perfectly. The new angle pressed him against something inside her that made her vision tunnel. Her nails raked down his back, finding no purchase on the suit beneath.
The second orgasm built faster than the first—a short, sharp climb that caught her off guard. One moment she was riding the edge, and the next she was falling over it.
She screamed his name, the only name she knew, and Batman's pace quickened. The controlled strokes became something more desperate, more urgent. She heard him grunt—a vulnerable noise that she'd never heard from him before—and felt the pulse of his cock inside her, the hot flood of his release.
He came inside her. Filling her. Marking her.
Ellen clung to him through it, her inner muscles milking every last pulse from his cock, her mouth pressed to the exposed skin of his jaw. The kiss she gave him was tender now, post-coital, softening at the edges.
Then the lamp switched off.
She didn't see him do it. One moment the room was warm with amber light, and the next it was dark, lit only by the moon through the curtains. She felt the weight of him lift off her body, the sudden chill of the apartment air replacing the heat of his presence.
She didn't want him to go. She wanted to ask him to stay—to shed the cowl, to be whoever he was underneath, to sleep beside her in this bed and face the morning together.
But she knew he had work to do, and she was in no state to argue, Her limbs were made of lead. Her eyelids were sinking. The exhaustion of her patrol shift, combined with the bone-deep satisfaction of two back-to-back orgasms, dragged her toward unconsciousness like a riptide.
She felt lips press against her forehead. A kiss. Gentler than anything he'd done to her body, more intimate somehow than being spread open and filled with him.
"If you need me…"
His voice came from near the window. She forced her eyes open, found the silhouette of him framed against the glass.
"…you know how to reach me."
By the time she managed to lift her hand toward him, he was gone. The window was closed. The curtains swayed slightly in the residual draft. The Batwave device on her nightstand still glowed with an active signal.
Ellen Yin's eyes closed, and she tumbled into the deepest, most peaceful sleep she'd had since leaving Gotham, the ghost of his kiss still warm on her brow.