Bruce's hand closed around hers—slender, snow-white, delicate in his powerful grip.
The sensation was strange.
Softness, yes. That was expected. But there was something else, something subtly familiar about the feel of this particular hand. Like... what? Like he'd held it before in a different context? Like the leather of a glove had been between their skin once upon a time?
Bruce shook his head slightly, dispelling the chaotic thoughts before they could fully form.
"I got here as quickly as I could," he said.
Selina's smile turned sly, cat-like. "Me too."
Selina Kyle and Bruce Wayne.
To outside observers, they made no sense as a couple.
She was a socialite who appeared at high-end banquet venues across Gotham, always impeccably dressed, always maintaining the perfect balance between approachable and mysterious. Her background was deliberately vague—old money, perhaps, or new money pretending to be old. Nobody asked too many questions. Not in Gotham.
He was the playboy billionaire who'd inherited the Wayne fortune, famous for rotating through beautiful women like a collector examining rare art, never committing, never seeming to take anything seriously except his family's charitable foundation.
An unlikely pair. The tabloids said so constantly.
Yet here they were, Valentine's Day evening, dancing together near the fountain in Gotham Square's center while snow fell around them like confetti made of ice.
Selina studied Bruce's face with the kind of attention that suggested she was cataloging details for later use. Her expression carried calm mystery—the look of someone who knew more than she revealed, who enjoyed the game of information asymmetry.
"Did you cut your lip shaving, Bruce?" Her tone was playful, but her eyes tracked the small injury with precision that wasn't quite casual.
Bruce's response came automatic, then awareness caught up half a second later.
The wound. Right. From earlier tonight.
From Batman's encounter with Catwoman in the cemetery, actually, when she'd scratched his face with those wickedly sharp claws. But Bruce Wayne wouldn't know about that, would he? Bruce Wayne had been at home, getting ready for his date, definitely not confronting crime lords over graves.
The injury was so minor he hadn't bothered concealing it. Mistake.
"Shaving," he confirmed smoothly. "Rushed. Careless."
"Your lips—" Selina's finger rose, almost touching the cut but stopping just short. "You should have someone do that for you."
Bruce fell back on his standard deflection. "Alfred has helped me with that more than once."
"I mean—" Selina's face moved closer, her dark eyes locking onto his with an intensity that made his pulse spike. Her perfume drifted between them—expensive, distinctive, somehow both elegant and predatory.
"—find someone more feminine to do it."
The implication hung in the air like smoke.
Invitation? Hint? Proposal?
Bruce's mind raced through possibilities with the speed of a supercomputer. Analyzed angles. Calculated responses. Weighed outcomes.
Don't misunderstand—playboy Bruce Wayne was no innocent. His carefully cultivated reputation came from exactly the kind of rotating relationships that filled gossip columns and sold magazines. Beautiful women appeared on his arm at galas, left discreetly after appropriate intervals, were replaced by equally beautiful successors.
But Selina Kyle was different.
Selina was the black rose among the red—beautiful, dangerous, impossible to fully categorize. And Bruce had been seriously considering what a real relationship with her might mean.
The question of "who will be the future mistress of Wayne Group" was entirely different from "who will Bruce Wayne be photographed with this week." Marriage—actual marriage, not the playboy façade—carried implications. Complications.
And Bruce had other concerns about choosing a spouse.
Concerns involving capes and cowls and secret identities that couldn't be shared.
Master Wayne hesitated.
Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately—he was spared the need to respond immediately.
A figure approached through the falling snow.
"Dear Sir—" The voice came young, feminine, slightly nervous. "Would you like to buy a rose for this lady?"
The flower girl wore a green burqa that covered most of her face and body, leaving only her hands visible. Those hands held a wicker basket filled with roses—blood-red blooms, stems still covered in thorns despite being sold for romantic purposes.
Before Bruce could reach for his wallet, Selina had already extracted a bill.
"It's my treat." Her smile carried satisfaction, enjoyment of taking the initiative, reversing the traditional dynamic where the man purchased flowers for the woman.
"Selina—" Bruce murmured her name, something in his chest warming at the gesture.
He reached for the rose the girl offered.
The moment his fingers closed around the stem, pain lanced through his palm.
Sharp.
The thorns—still attached, not removed, left deliberately dangerous—punctured his skin. Small wounds. Minor injuries. But enough to draw blood, enough to make him gasp and adjust his grip reflexively.
"You're really not popular with sharp objects tonight," Selina observed, amusement coloring her tone.
The flower girl's apology came rushed, panicked. "I—I'm so sorry! These thorns—I should have removed them, I'm so sorry—"
"It's fine." Bruce examined the rose, adjusted his grip to avoid the worst of the thorns, waved his free hand dismissively. "Don't worry about it. Go ahead, kid."
"Okay, sir. Thank you, sir."
The girl in the green burqa turned away quickly, basket swinging.
Under the concealing fabric, her smile widened.
Mission accomplished.
Maroni's Restaurant
Same Evening, Fifteen Minutes Later
Vernon Wells had left the kitchen twenty minutes ago, escorted to a private dining room where expensive veal waited alongside Sal Maroni's corrupting influence.
Maroni himself now sat alone in his office, leisurely flipping through the evening edition of the Gotham Gazette. The headline screamed something about the Holiday Killer and increased GCPD patrols. Maroni's smile suggested he found the whole situation amusing.
Jude no longer stood at the dishwashing station.
Instead, he'd been promoted—if you could call it that—to active waiter duty. He moved between kitchen and dining room with the smooth efficiency of someone who'd done this work for years rather than hours, carrying loaded trays, delivering meals, clearing plates with choreographed precision that made him invisible in the best possible way.
But internally, he was grumbling.
The system had scheduled this Valentine's Day mission. The evening was growing late—already past nine PM—and the mission notification still hadn't changed. Neither success nor failure. Just... pending.
Could the target already be here? Jude wondered, carrying a tray of empty wine glasses back to the kitchen. Do I need to identify them myself? But that doesn't match the system's usual notification style.
He'd been operating under the assumption that the mission would trigger obviously when the target appeared. Clear notification. Unmistakable signal.
Nothing so far.
"Is the target Maroni?" Jude glanced toward the office where the crime lord sat reading his newspaper, looking remarkably content for someone spending Valentine's Day alone. "But this guy's spending the evening solo. That's... weird for a Valentine's mission, right?"
Jude also liked spending Valentine's Day alone—or rather, he'd never had anyone to spend it with, so alone became the default. But he was reasonably certain he wasn't supposed to be giving chocolate to a middle-aged crime lord.
Although...
How about giving it a try?
Just as Jude began seriously considering the logistics of offering chocolate to Sal Maroni without getting shot, the restaurant's front door opened.
Two figures entered.
The effect was immediate and electric.
Every head in the dining room turned. Conversations paused mid-sentence. Even the waiters slowed their choreographed movements, caught by the sheer presence of the newcomers.
Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle.
Gotham's most eligible bachelor and one of its most mysterious socialites, entering together on Valentine's Day evening, clearly on a date.
The tabloid value alone was astronomical.
"Bruce—" Selina's voice carried a hint of exasperation. "Are you really in such a hurry to go home?"
"No, Selina." Bruce's response came slightly delayed, like he was operating on autopilot. "I'm not in a hurry to go home."
His tone sounded wrong. Distracted. Like someone reading lines without fully processing their meaning.
Something was off.
Bruce felt it too—the strangeness of his own voice, the sense that he was watching himself from outside his body, that his mouth was moving and words were emerging but the connection between thought and speech had been severed.
Green.
Everything seemed tinted green.
The restaurant's warm lighting. Selina's dark hair. The white tablecloths.
All suffused with a faint verdant hue that hadn't been there before he'd accepted that rose.
What—
"Then stay here with me for dinner?" Selina's giggle sounded genuine, but underneath it ran a current of frustration.
She pulled him toward an empty table, grip firm on his arm.
Ever since buying that bouquet of roses from the strange flower girl, Bruce had been distant. Distracted. Kept mentioning going home, cutting the evening short, like his mind was somewhere else entirely.
It made her want to grab him by the lapels and demand his full attention.
I should have scratched him more in the cemetery, she thought with dark amusement. That got his attention well enough.
But looking at his handsome face—even distracted, even clearly struggling with something—she felt the familiar pull of genuine affection.
Damn it.
Fortunately, they'd reserved a table earlier. Otherwise spending Valentine's Day alone would have been truly pathetic.
The moment Bruce and Selina stepped fully into the restaurant, Jude's vision exploded with notifications.
SYSTEM ALERT
[Mission Target Has Appeared]
[Any Method Acceptable]
[Objective: Make Bruce Wayne consume Valentine's Day chocolate before both subjects leave the restaurant]
[Time Remaining: Until Departure]
[Failure Consequence: Mission Failed, No Reward]
Jude stared at the notification, then at Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle settling into their table, then back at the notification.
Of course.
Of course the system mission involved Gotham's most prominent billionaire and the woman who was definitely Catwoman even if nobody was supposed to know that.
He knew that situations where the system directly gifted an advanced skill typically meant either extreme difficulty or extreme importance.
This qualified as both.
And Jude needed to get chocolate to Wayne before they left.
How?
At that moment, Selina's gaze swept across the restaurant.
Her eyes landed on Jude.
Recognition sparked.
Her expression brightened immediately.
Perfect.
If she wanted to liven up this increasingly dull evening, she needed someone interesting.
And Jude Sharp was, without question, one of the most interesting people she'd encountered in months.
The waiter who couldn't shoot straight but somehow survived every gunfight. The man who'd scared off an attacker with nothing but a voice modulator. The person who fed orphans and drove a cursed car and appeared at crime scenes with such regularity that Gordon probably had a dedicated file.
Selina's smile turned genuine.
"Waiter—" She raised one elegant hand, voice carrying across the dining room with perfect projection.
"We'd like to order."
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