Chapter 20 : After the Score
The Monarch Theatre felt different with her in it.
Two days of laying low, watching news reports about the "suspected burglary" at Daggett Industries. The contractors had woken up with headaches and memory gaps. Daggett was screaming about theft, but without evidence of what was taken, the police had little to pursue.
Now Selina sat on the stage, counting money.
"Forty-seven thousand, two hundred." She split the pile in half. "Your share: twenty-three, six hundred. I rounded up."
I took the stack. More money than I'd ever held at once—in either life.
"The jewelry moved fast?"
"I have good contacts." She produced a folder. "The documents are trickier. I made copies for both of us. Original stays with me, but you have full access to everything."
I opened the folder. Daggett's sins, laid bare—illegal dumping records, bribe payments, cover-up correspondence. Enough to destroy him publicly, or to leverage him privately.
"What are you going to do with it?" I asked.
"Haven't decided yet. Exposing him would feel good, but..." She shrugged. "Sometimes leverage is more valuable than vengeance."
"Spoken like a true professional."
"I learned from the best." She produced a wine bottle from behind a stack of old props. "Celebration?"
We drank on the abandoned stage, surrounded by faded grandeur and accumulated dust. The wine was good—better than anything I'd had before Alberto's dinner.
"Where did you come from?" Selina asked eventually. "Really."
"I told you. Not from around here."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have." I met her eyes. "Some things are better left in the past. You understand that."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "Fair enough. We all have our secrets."
We talked. Not about the job—that was done. About other things. She told me about foster homes that treated children like inconveniences. Running away at fourteen. Learning to steal because it was the only skill that kept her alive.
I told her about feeling like a stranger in my own skin. About building something from nothing, piece by piece. About the satisfaction of creating order in chaos.
Half-truths that felt like whole ones.
The wine ran out. Neither of us moved.
"You know what I don't understand about you?" Selina said. She'd shifted closer over the past hour, close enough that I could smell her perfume beneath the theatre dust.
"Tell me."
"You have a code. A real one, not just words you use to impress people." She tilted her head, studying me. "In this city, that should make you weak. Instead, it makes you... different."
"Different good or different dangerous?"
"Both." She moved closer still—reaching for something, ostensibly. The blueprints we'd never cleaned up. But she didn't reach.
"You're different too, Selina."
"I'm a thief."
"You're more than that."
The moment stretched. We were inches apart. I could count her eyelashes, trace the curve of her lips.
"Darek." It was the first time she'd used my name. Not "Broker." Not "partner." Darek.
"Selina."
She leaned in—
Police sirens. Close. Getting closer.
We both froze. The moment shattered like glass.
Selina pulled back, the careful mask sliding into place. "Patrol car. Probably nothing, but..."
"But you don't take chances."
"Never." She was already moving toward the window, checking the street below. "They're passing by. Still..."
"Another time."
She looked back at me. Something complicated moved behind her eyes.
"Another time," she agreed.
And then she was gone—out the window, into the night, leaving nothing but perfume and the ghost of what almost happened.
I sat in the empty theatre for a long time, finishing my wine alone.
"Gotham is strange. I have twenty-three thousand dollars, leverage on a corporate criminal, and feelings for a woman who steals things for a living."
The wine tasted like her.
"I wonder what she's doing now."
But I had responsibilities. Territory. People counting on me.
Tomorrow, I'd return to the Narrows. Tonight, I'd allow myself this moment of wondering.
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