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The mark tossed his head back and laughed, and so missed Slade’s third pass around the gala, his back to most of it in favor of the small gaggle in the corner by the floor-to-ceiling windows. Slade pretended to sip his champagne to hide his annoyance and exchanged a few pleasantries with a gray-haired, bespectacled man that turned out to be a city council member before politely excusing himself for another circuit.
Around him, the Wayne Manor ballroom glittered from the chandeliers overhead to the jewelry of the women in attendance, all of it reflecting off the polished floor and hemmed in by circular tables along the walls, each covered in a spotless, white tablecloth. Dressed to match the occasion in a black tuxedo that likely cost more than what the milling waitstaff were paid in a month, Slade blended in—a little too well, if he’d been here an hour and hadn’t accomplished his objective yet. Though at six-foot-five and with his distinctive eyepatch covering his missing eye, he perhaps shouldn’t blame himself that his mark’s powers of observation resembled that of a stone post.
Sal Bostwick was a nasty little rodent of a man with sad, brown eyes and a mustache so thin it looked as if it had been drawn on with a freshly-sharpened pencil. He owned a series of used car dealerships in Gotham and a fine veneer of respectability that hid the underside of his business and real source of his fortune: providing transportation and clean vehicles to Gotham’s astonishing array of crime. Once, he’d had a business partner, a Mr. Manny Riggs; about six or seven years back, Slade had completed a routine contract for the pair.
A week ago, Riggs had contacted him again. From the way he told it, sitting in his dilapidated office, sectioned-off from a warehouse near the river, he’d tried to move on when Bostwick had shut him out of the business. He’d tried to forget, if not forgive, when Bostwick stole his fiancé. But, when Bostwick had successfully outmaneuvered him for a lucrative smuggling operation and slept with his beloved baby sister, Riggs had finally reached the end of his rope.
Or so Slade had gathered from Riggs’ long-winded, swear-filled rant. It hadn’t been terribly interesting.
What had been, and what had, conversely, nearly caused Slade to walk, was Riggs’ desire for a bogeyman, for Slade to circle around Bostwick like a hawk before finally swooping in for the kill.
“I want him to see his death coming,” Riggs had said.
Resisting the urge to roll his eye, Slade had accepted the contract with a condition: “This will be risky. I may require additional payment if he runs.”
To which Riggs had agreed, and so Slade had skulked around on rooftops, shot out the window of a restaurant while Bostwick and Riggs’ former fiancé had dinner, and blown up a car a few calculated seconds prior to Bostwick entering, all to no effect. And now, he meandered through a gala making small-talk, exercising muscles unused since the parties Adeline threw back when they were married.
On the fourth pass, Bostwick at long last looked up at the right moment. His face turned waxen, the smile slipping from it like oil as he started badly enough to slop champagne over his knuckles. At his side, Riggs’ former fiancé turned to him in concern, her poison-green dress swirling about her legs.
Finally. He’d finish it tonight. Follow Bostwick’s car and put a bullet through the back window and his skull, all smooth and simple and according to plan, except…
Except someone kept staring at him.
The sensation of being watched itched against his skin, drawing his shoulders tight. It had started around the time he stepped into the ballroom and only increased since, but every time he turned around, only the unassuming clusters of Gotham’s wealthy and powerful greeted him, not a one looking in his direction or sparking his suspicion. He’d have suspected the butler, but Slade wouldn’t be here tonight if Wintergreen’s intelligence hadn’t placed Alfred Pennyworth in London to visit family. Wintergreen had related enough stories of Pennyworth’s time in the war and MI6 that Slade would want to buy him a drink if he thought Wayne or Pennyworth himself would ever allow it.
The watched feeling again hit Slade’s back with an almost physical pressure. This time, he half-turned with his bad side, keeping his eyepatch between him and the mystery onlooker until he snapped his head around and caught a flicker of movement, of a slight figure, blue-black hair above a dark tuxedo jacket.
A hand fell on Slade’s shoulder, forestalling any pursuit. Reluctantly, he turned his attention to the smiling face of the gala’s host.
“Hey, glad you could make it!” Bruce Wayne said, hand still on his shoulder, shaking him a little in what he probably thought was a friendly manner and was actually intensely annoying. “Mr. uh—sorry.” The smile turned sheepish. “My secretary at the office puts together the guest list for these.”
“Wilson. Slade Wilson,” Slade said, holding out his hand if only because that would make Wayne’s own leave his shoulder. He’d briefly considered an alias, the name Slade Wilson no longer separate from his alter ego, not since the Jackal had discovered the connection and used it to slash a knife across Joey’s throat, but Wayne didn’t run in the sort of circles where he was likely to hear it.
True to form, his smile never wavered as he pumped Slade’s hand, and then, much to Slade’s chagrin, took him by the shoulder again. “Wilson! So nice to meet you,” Wayne said. “What is it that you do?”
“Private security,” Slade replied shortly, his smile like a mask. “This is a lovely party, Mr. Wayne. You must thank your secretary for the invitation.”
He laughed like Slade had just told the world’s best joke. “Oh, I will, I will!” he said, the grip on his shoulder firming as they walked, pulling Slade to the doors leading to the balcony with surprising strength. “Private security! You’ll have to tell me all about it. Not to shop talk at a party, but we do have more than our fair share of...incidents...in Gotham, and I’ve been on the lookout for—”
“Brucie!” a delighted voice shrieked, about one octave shy of shattering glass.
Three women entered through the doors to the balcony, society girls in dresses with slits up to their hips and necklines down to their navels, sparkling to put the crown jewels to shame, and heels that looked designed to break their ankles. They swarmed around Wayne like locusts, and Slade seized the opportunity to slip out of his grip.
The shrieking one reached him first, arms together to push her cleavage into his face. “Brucie, you promised you’d dance with me,” she simpered.
“He still owes me one from last time,” another butted in.
“Do you have any real wine, Brucie dear?” the third asked, holding up her glass and giggling. “This champagne is all bubbles!”
“Uh, ladies…” Wayne began, his face red and his smile distinctly uncomfortable.
Amusing as it was, Slade had neither the time to play spectator nor the desire to let Wayne catch his ear again. He left Wayne to his admirers and turned back to the gala—and to a glimpse of that slight figure, darting off into the crowd.
Slade followed, cutting around the islands of chattering people like a shark through the water. He shouldn’t; a glance at Bostwick’s corner showed it vacated, and he should be tracking him down, fulfilling the contract, and getting out of this city. But nagging instinct insisted the mystery figure posed a complication, and if that aimed him true, well. He’d better deal with it now.
Dark hair bobbed for a split-second as a woman moved her arm towards a waiter’s trays of canapes, then vanished behind a group of laughing men. The figure’s talent for evasion only spurred Slade further, firming his resolve. He brushed past one of the waitstaff, excused himself to a drunken woman who reached for his arms, and arrived abruptly at the other edge of the gala.
He spun in a slow circle, scanning the crowd. It yielded no slipping movement, nothing small and lithe attempting escape. Just as Slade began entertaining the idea of giving it up and pursuing Bostwick, he found it—or rather, him. A dark-haired teenage boy sat at one of the tables with his back against the wall as if he hoped stillness would save him.
Not a bad idea, as it nearly had. Slade kept the kid in his periphery as he made a show of setting down his champagne flute (still full, but sweating unpleasantly) and exchanging it for another. He looked to the tables as if considering his options, letting his gaze settle on the one with the kid, and began walking towards it. The kid’s eyes went a fraction too wide for a fraction too long before he hastily dropped them down to the white tablecloth.
Arriving at the table, Slade placed his hand on the back of the chair across from its only other occupant. “Is this seat taken?” he asked.
The kid blinked up at him, eyes a startling shade of blue. “Yes—I mean, no!” he corrected himself quickly. “I mean, it’s ok if you sit.”
So: definitely nervous. Interesting. “Thanks,” Slade said as he pulled the chair out and took a seat. “I hope you don’t mind me saying,” he ventured, “but you look a little young to enjoy a party like this.”
“That’s what I said, but Bruce says if I’m not here for at least a little while, people are gonna think he keeps me locked up,” the kid told him, put-upon in a distinctly teenage fashion.
“You’re Richard Grayson,” Slade said, one question answered. Wayne’s young ward, taken in after the tragic deaths of his parents in an orchestrated circus accident because the owner wouldn’t pay off the mob.
Richard Grayson nodded. “Yeah, but you can call me Dick. Everyone does.”
In response, Slade reached his hand across the table. The kid took it and pumped it twice, exactly like his mentor, and Slade bit the inside of his cheek so as to hide the humor of the moment; boys his age didn’t usually react favorably when compared to their fathers.
“Slade,” he said, introducing himself. “It’s nice to meet you, Dick.”
“It’s nice to meet you, too,” Dick replied, taking his hand back. “Do you work, or—?”
Or was he one of the idle rich, living off an inheritance. The kid hadn’t quite figured out how to phrase it delicately yet. “I work,” Slade said. “Private security.”
“Oh, that’s cool,” Dick said, and sounded like he might actually mean it. “We have to use that sometimes with all the, uh—” He gestured vaguely. “Y’know.”
“Your resident crazy clowns and plant people?” Slade asked. This was Gotham, after all, a carnival pretending to be a city.
Dick smiled. “Yeah,” he said. Jerked his chin towards Slade and asked, “How’d you get into private security?”
“I was in the military when I was younger,” Slade said, dressing his lie with elements of truth. “It seemed like a natural transition.”
“Did you like it? Being in the military?” Dick asked next, so disconcertingly earnest that Slade found himself answering.
“I found it fulfilling,” he said.
Silence passed between them for a moment, Dick seeming to absorb this before asking, “Then why’d you’d leave?”
That brought it all back, sharp and sudden as a knife through his spine. The serum, the experiment. Waking up in the hospital to Adeline and Wintergreen informing him he’d been in a coma, drawn and tired and relieved to see him conscious. The weeks afterward, vacillating between impossible strength one minute and trembling weakness the next. Of course, the strength had won out in the end, opening his mind and increasing his speed and reflexes and giving him the advanced healing that had saved his life more times than he could count.
All it had cost was everything else.
Because I signed up to be a guinea pig, and they couldn’t see me as anything except a liability when it worked, Slade didn’t say. “Difference of opinion,” he said instead, and decided to turn it around. “Are you interested in a military career, Dick?”
“I don’t know,” Dick said. “Bruce wants me to go to college.”
“Do you want to go to college?” Slade asked.
Before answering, Dick signaled one of the passing waitstaff and said, “Thanks!” in response to the flute of pale, fizzing liquid set in front of him. Dick took a drink, and while Slade was debating whether to quip about the drinking age in Gotham, said, “Bruce wants me to go to a fancy college and then go to work for Wayne Enterprises. He’s got my whole future planned out.” A half-shrug suggested he had mixed feelings about this. “But then...I don’t know. I’d always be a spoiled rich boy.”
“You weren’t always a spoiled rich boy,” Slade said, dredging up his rudimentary knowledge of Dick’s previous life. “Do you miss the circus?”
“Yeah,” Dick admitted quietly. “Don’t get me wrong, Bruce is great. I’m very lucky,” he amended. “But the circus was my first home, and yeah, I miss it.”
“I think that’s normal,” Slade assured him, and got a small smile in return.
More than that, he was normal, as normal as a circus-raised orphan adopted by a billionaire could be. And yet...there was something about him that Slade couldn’t quite put his finger on, like familiarity, like forgetting something important. Then again, where one looked for conspiracies, one often found them. Most likely, Dick was just a bored kid who’d picked an unfamiliar face to follow around at his guardian’s party, and Slade was jumping at shadows.
“I could always be a gymnastics teacher,” Dick said, stirring a mixing straw around his drink. “My parents were acrobats.”
“Yes, I remember reading that somewhere,” Slade said, and because it was the only sort of thing to say in this situation, “I’m very sorry for your loss.”
Dick inclined his head slightly. “Thank you. It was a long time ago.”
They’d reached a stopping point, where Slade should tell Dick goodnight and set out after Bostwick. Only, it seemed a sour note to leave the kid on, dwelling over his parents’ deaths, alone in a room full of people. Slade tried to balance his smile between sympathetic and friendly, asked, “You’ve kept up with it, then? The acrobatics?”
“Oh, yeah,” Dick said, brightening instantly. “Bruce actually set up this whole room with trapezes and mats on the floor and everything. I practice almost every day.”
“I bet you’re very good,” Slade said, pushing his balanced smile a little closer to the friendly side.
Dick grinned, a confidence that bordered on cocky. “I know some moves. I could show you the gym if—sorry,” he said, blushing sudden and furious. “I guess you probably don’t want to leave the party.”
“I don’t imagine Mr. Wayne likes his guests to wander,” Slade said apologetically, covering his smile with a sip from his champagne glass. As if following his lead, Dick took his own drink and swallowed half the glass in one go, and Slade considered him critically, his flushed cheeks, his excited conversation.
It wasn’t his business. If Wayne wanted to let his ward get drunk at a party, it had nothing to do with—oh, what the hell. “How old are you, kid?” he asked.
“Fifteen?” Dick said, perplexed, then looked between Slade and the glass in his hands. “Oh! It’s just sparkling grape juice. They know not to give me real alcohol.” He wrinkled his nose and said, “It tastes bad, anyway.”
“And how would you know that?” Slade asked, mock-scolding.
“Bruce lets me have a little wine with dinner sometimes. He says it’s better if I try it at home,” Dick said. “I usually don’t even finish it.”
Slade snorted through his nose. “If he’s smart, he probably gives you the bad stuff on purpose so you won’t develop a taste for it.”
“Probably!” Dick agreed, laughing, and Slade was struck by the realization that he liked this kid, far more than he was expecting to like anyone here tonight, the genuine enthusiasm life hadn’t sucked out of him yet, the way he hadn’t looked at Slade’s eyepatch twice or mentioned it once.
Then, Dick’s line of sight caught something past Slade’s shoulder. He froze, the laugh cut off like someone had hit his mute button. A shadow fell over the table, and Slade looked up to see Wayne, escaped from his hangers-on and smiling like he wanted to scream.
“Hello again, Mr. Wilson. I hope Dick hasn’t been talking your ear off,” he said.
“Oh, no. I’ve found it quite refreshing,” Slade said. “We were just talking about acrobatics.”
Evidently, that had been the wrong thing to say. Dick shrunk down in his seat, and Slade swore he could feel the temperature drop.
Wayne’s voice came out equally frosty. “Is that so?”
“A credit to your parenting, I’m sure,” Slade said, laying it on too thick, trying to cover up whatever the hell was happening here.
And, in the process, somehow making it worse. Dick paled a little, and Wayne’s polite smile held on by a thread. “Thank you for saying so,” he said. To his ward: “Dick, I need to speak with you in private.”
“But—” Dick tried to say.
“Now,” Wayne said, turned to granite, the last of his affected kindness evaporating.
Dick shot him a mutinous look, but dropped his gaze after a few seconds and slunk out of his seat. “It really was nice to meet you,” he said quietly.
“Please excuse us, Mr. Wilson,” Wayne said breezily, his mask back in place as his hand settled on Dick’s shoulder. “Enjoy the gala. The caterers really outdid themselves on the canapes this time.”
He turned without waiting for a response, steering Dick towards the doors leading out of the ballroom and deeper into the manor. Slade watched them until the doors swung softly shut. He should go. He should really, really go. Bostwick could be past city limits by now, or worse, on his way to the airport. Riggs might be willing to pay Slade’s travel expenses, but that didn’t mean Slade was willing to drag this contract out longer than necessary.
But he couldn’t stop seeing Wayne’s hand on Dick’s shoulder, couldn’t stop feeling how firm that iron grip had been. Leaving his champagne and the gala behind, Slade moved fluidly to the doors, paused to ensure no one was looking, and slipped into the dark hallway beyond.
*
It didn’t take long to find them. Wayne couldn’t stray far from his party, and Slade doubted he’d go back towards the front of the house, so he turned left down the hall and picked up the murmur of voices at the first juncture. He rounded the corner and leaned against the wall next to the first door on the right.
The solid oak of it would have prevented most others from eavesdropping, but most others hadn’t volunteered for his particular brand of military experiment. To Slade’s ears, their words came through as clearly as if they stood right next to him. He inhaled deep and smelled residual wood smoke and old paper—Wayne had dragged the kid into his study, Slade guessed, the fire in the grate recently burned out. Keeping an ear out for any waitstaff or wayward guests that might approach from the other direction, Slade strained his other to listen.
“I wasn’t doing anything!” Dick protested. “I was just talking to him!”
“About acrobatics?” Wayne asked sharply.
Lower, grumbling, Dick said, “That doesn’t mean anything.”
“And what about when it does? The man isn’t stupid, Dick,” Wayne said. “I can handle your obsession with him when you’re off with your friends, or when it’s that collage in your room—”
“It’s not a collage, Bruce! It’s intel!”
“—or when you’re spending your allowance on another dossier—and yes, Dick, I know about that—but not when you’re following him around the gala all night!” Wayne said. “With you distracting him, I still have no idea what he’s actually doing here!”
“Were you going to find it out on the balcony?” Dick asked flippantly.
A withering beat of silence, and Wayne said, “At that point, I was just trying to keep him away from you. Again, not what I should be worrying about.”
“Good job,” Dick said with heavy sarcasm.
“He’s dangerous, Dick,” Wayne said, deeply, deadly serious. “You know that better than most.”
“All I’m trying to do is gather information. Build a case,” Dick said. “How is that any different from what you do?”
Wayne sighed. The barely perceptible cadence of footsteps carried through the floor to the soles of Slade’s dress shoes. He pictured Wayne walking up to his ward, a hopefully kinder hand on the kid’s shoulder.
“You’re getting too caught up in this and losing sight of what’s important,” Wayne said. “That’s a good way to get yourself hurt, or worse. I need to know your head’s in the right place.”
“It is. And I know what’s important,” Dick insisted.
“Good to hear,” Wayne said with the faintest note of approval. “Mrs. Davenport just arrived. I need you to entertain the girls.”
Dick groaned. “But Annabelle always wants to paint my nails, and Kylee keeps trying to kiss me, and she has braces,” he whined in protest.
“Then it will be a good opportunity to practice setting boundaries,” Bruce said, and, with all the weariness of experience, “You’re going to need it.”
“I hate galas,” Dick said.
“You and me both, chum. Think of them as a necessary evil,” Bruce said. “Now, keep the Davenport girls out of trouble, and stay away from Slade Wilson.”
As Dick promised he would, Slade retreated further down the hall and around another corner, hiding in the shadows as the door to the study opened. He held his breath until the sounds of their movement and speech grew fainter and finally disappeared back into the noise of the gala, then let it out slowly.
So. Wayne knew who he was. He knew, and the sight of his kid chatting happily away with a killer-for-hire had sent him into a protective panic, and that was the only part of the whole exchange that made a damned bit of sense. His neglect to call the police Slade could rationalize as a face-saving move, perhaps, a desire not to ruin the gala, but from what he knew of Bruce Wayne…
Slade stopped there. What did he know of Bruce Wayne?
Bruce Wayne had witnessed the violent murder of his parents in a mugging gone wrong, undoubtedly the thing that had tugged his bleeding heartstrings enough to take in an orphaned circus boy. He’d grown up largely in the care of his butler, earned a respectable bachelor’s degree but declined to take his education any further, and had since occupied himself dabbling as the CEO of Wayne Enterprises and throwing his considerable fortune around in a series of philanthropic ventures. The magazines said Wayne had a face to beat half of Hollywood and a body to match, gave him a reputation as a ladies’ man, but not that of a womanizer. The press also described Wayne as a ‘himbo’, a word Slade regretted learning for the valuable space it now took up in his brain.
None of which matched up even a little with the experience of the last ten minutes.
Which brought Slade back to: What did he know of Bruce Wayne?
Not a damned thing.
Suddenly, that seemed like a very pressing problem. And, at the center of it, was Dick Grayson. Cheerful, normal, fifteen-year-old Dick Grayson, who sought to emulate his mentor by keeping dossiers on mercenaries and something that wasn’t a collage in his room.
“Fuck,” Slade said, and then, more emphatically, “fuck.”
The professional in him said to forget it, to finish his contract and leave the rich boys to their hobbies, to whatever useless bits of information they could glean. But he could always find Bostwick later, could track him to the other side of the planet if necessary, and Slade knew in his bones that he’d never get in here this easily again.
Meaning, he was going to sneak away from Bruce Wayne’s gala to break into a teenage boy’s bedroom.
Even in his head, it sounded bad.
*
Searching room by room would get him nowhere, the manor too large and the night too short to find Dick’s room by the process of elimination. Slade found a staircase and moved to the second floor, paused at the landing, and continued on to the third, just below the attic. The manor became a puzzle in his mind, one he set about solving. Dick called himself an acrobat; he’d take a room up high, somewhere with a view, with the whole world spread out below. He might even want a tree outside to climb down if he were the reckless, adventurous type, which Slade’s scant interaction with him indicated was the case.
On the third floor, Slade brought the full extent of his capacities to bear, all his ill-gotten gifts. He eliminated the corridors where the scent of dust and mothballs hung thick, where the carpet looked as if it hadn’t seen footprints in months, if not years. Heading towards the back of the manor, matching his direction up with his mental map of the exterior, Slade passed another hallway and then stopped, stepping back and peering into the gloom.
There, halfway down, a faint glimmer of light shone from the crack beneath one of the doors. Slade stole towards it, the carpet eating any sounds his feet might have made, and tried the knob. It swung open at his touch, revealing—
An ordinary bedroom. It clearly belonged to Dick and not his guardian, going by the size of the clothes strewn about the floor, the scene illuminated by the lamp on the bedside table. Slade stepped into the space and eased the door shut behind him. Bed, unmade, sheets powdery blue and twisted around a comforter that might have been navy or black. Desk, strewn with papers and holding a sleeping computer, its power light gently strobing on and off. Dresser off to the side, half the drawers open. Closet and bathroom doors similarly open, revealing more thrown-about clothes. A window, drapes partially pulled to reveal the branches of a tree outside, just as Slade had imagined. A bookshelf, volumes stacked haphazardly and leaning on each other. Posters on the walls featuring dinosaurs and outer space and other things out of National Geographic, on every wall except the one behind him, which instead featured a tapestry of a mountain scene from floor to ceiling.
No sign of a collage, or a not-a-collage, as the case may be. No dossiers or so much as a scrap of damning information among the papers on the desk when Slade flipped through them, only scribbled sheets of homework and a few partially finished crossword puzzles. Possibly, the kid kept his files on the computer, the power light continuing its rhythmic blinking as Slade considered it. He moved on; if the rest of the room yielded no results, he could always steal the hard drive when he left.
A framed picture leaned on the bedside table, the glare of the lamp above it obscuring the glass until Slade got close. It resolved into an image of a man and woman in their late twenties or early thirties, dressed in multicolored leotards. The woman held an infant in her arms, and the man behind her smiled widely at the camera, his arms around them both: Dick and his parents.
For the first time in a long time, Slade thought of his boys at that age, of the first time Adeline let him hold them. Then, he stopped thinking about it. Not here, he told himself. Not now.
Turning away from the nightstand, he did another visual sweep of the room, puzzling over Wayne’s so-called collage when the room appeared devoid of any photographs save the just-examined monument to the dead. His eye settled on the tapestry again. Something about it bothered him indefinably, the size and style and display of wealth incongruous compared to the rest of the room. Its edges wavered in the breeze of the air conditioning, and the long line of a drawstring, nearly invisible in the shadow of the doorframe, shifted slightly. Not a decoration, but a hiding place.
Slade crossed the room and pulled the drawstring, the tapestry rippling together and sliding off to the other side of the wall. He took a step back for a better vantage point, and the world opened up.
Or rather, a map of the world. Lines and labels reached out from cities, notes in a carefully cramped hand that nonetheless matched the scribbled homework on the desk. Slade leaned in to examine the closest one, Tokyo, and then the next city, and the next. Times, dates, and names. Slade knew them all, knew them in a way that made his heart pound in his temples and his mouth go dry. It was him. It was all him.
The map didn’t cover every contract he’d carried out, but it covered enough. Occasionally, a blurry or distant photograph of him accompanied one of the labels, annotated by Dick Grayson’s horribly perceptive notes. New lance? one read, and Slade’s spine tried to contract like he had the kid’s eyes on him again when he matched that to the date—not a month after he’d gotten an upgrade.
Some of the labels ended in alphanumeric sequences, an A-37 here, a C-105 there. Slade followed them as he moved west, down to the accountant he’d killed in San Francisco last summer, two to the back of the head for stealing from the wrong people. Where it ended, almost at the corner of the room, the drawers began. A set of six, built into the wall and nearly missed in his distraction over the map, Slade on top of them before he noticed. He pulled one open and found, for the first time that night, exactly what he’d expected: neatly stacked manila folders, labeled to match the letter-and-number codes.
Picking up the first, Slade flipped it open. A piece of paper fluttered out, smaller than the rest paper-clipped together. He snatched it out of the air and smacked it back on top of the stack, made out a handwritten note, and inhaled sharply. His already pounding heart jumped into his mouth.
Rob, the note read, Here’s the latest. Be careful, and remember what I told you. -A.
A for Adeline, the brief message in her familiar script. And there, on the next page, the Searchers Inc. logo down in the bottom corner where he knew it would be, from his ex-wife’s organization, from his ex-wife personally selling information on his activities to a fucking teenager.
He hung his head and closed his eye briefly. “God damn it, Addie.”
The rest of the file contained information on the two men he’d killed in Bristol a month ago, uncomfortably close in time if not in space, and (satisfyingly incorrect) speculation on who his client might have been. Slade held the note in place and closed the folder again, returned it to the drawer, but not before he again read the name at the top.
Rob.
“Who the fuck is Rob?” he muttered aloud.
Slade stepped back to the center of the room to take in the entirety of the map, all its timestamps and photographs and human beings he’d reduced to obituaries. Detailed and meticulous and, dare he say, professional, not the rich boy’s hobby he’d imagined when eavesdropping downstairs, the half hour that had elapsed since then weighing him down like an age. If he wasn’t so horrified and utterly fucking gobsmacked, he might even be impressed.
This little expedition had so far resulted in more questions than answers, but one thing stood out abundantly clear: neither Bruce Wayne nor Dick Grayson were what they seemed.
Tearing his gaze away from the map, Slade stalked over to Dick’s bed. He tore the sheets off, lifted the mattress to find any slits cut in, any hiding places, did the same with the box spring, checked under the bed. Tugging on the carpet gently did not lift it up—nothing hidden under the floorboards. Slade moved on to the nightstand next, then the desk, rifling through drawers and coming up empty. The bathroom also proved itself opaque and frustratingly void of clues, the cabinet under the sink containing only toiletries and a box of tampons Slade puzzled over for a second before putting back.
He shoved the clothes in the closet aside, hangers scraping along the rack, and found something. A long, polished staff fell out, heavy wood like the kind used in martial arts. Slade caught it in his hand, on the verge of a revelation, and then he stepped on it.
A scrap of fabric slipped around under his shoe. Stooping, not letting go of the staff, Slade picked it off the floor and held it to the light. Black and thin, two eye-shaped cut-outs interrupted its length, which curved slightly to fit around a face. A domino mask.
Slade let the mask flutter back to the floor where he’d found it. His mind was clear again, his heart calm in his chest. The answer slotted in with the relief of a dislocated joint popped back into its socket.
Footsteps out in the hall called his attention sharply, too light to match Wayne’s gait. Slade moved like a cat, over to the opposite wall and behind the door so he wouldn’t be immediately visible when it opened. He didn’t run, didn’t pick a better hiding spot, didn’t do what might be the smart thing and leave without anyone the wiser. He’d been flayed open, put on display, turned around dizzyingly and made to feel a fool.
That required an answer.
When the door opened, Slade attacked. A rustle of clothing or just the displacement of air provided sufficient warning, and Dick dodged at the last second, spinning and narrowly missing the blow Slade aimed at the back of his head. He swung the staff again, only for the kid to move like Slade knew he would, in a gravity-defying backflip that almost looked like flight. Dick was fast—faster than him, even—but Slade had a greater reach, and a weapon, and, most importantly, the element of surprise.
The next arc of the staff caught Dick in the chest, and Slade pressed the advantage to shove him against the wall, in the center of the map. A line leading to New York cut starkly right next to his head, a time, a date, and a name. Dick’s blue eyes shone with fear and shock, his breathing labored against the staff as Slade rolled it up to his throat.
Leaning in close, Slade bared his teeth and spoke between them.
“Hello, Robin.”
*
Two years prior, Slade had crouched on a Manhattan rooftop, a mark in his sights and a second from finishing his contract when he’d been suddenly and unceremoniously stopped by a girl wielding a lasso. She couldn’t have been older than twelve or thirteen, a detail that let him underestimate her as he managed to escape the lasso’s constricting grip, right until she punched him with the force of a fucking semi truck.
Adding insult to injury, another kid dressed like he thought it was Halloween and wanted to be Robin Hood began shooting at him with arrows, and yet another boy in a ridiculous yellow cape had swung down from a higher roof and used the momentum to knock Slade right on his face when he’d attempted shooting back. No sooner had he stood than another boy began running in circles around him at a speed that created a localized windstorm and made it impossible to see.
For the grand finale, a final boy had come careening through the air on the back of a dolphin and knocked Slade into the river.
And that was how Slade met the Teen Titans.
It hadn’t been his finest moment.
He did finish that contract, though only at the end of fifteen hundred miles, several weeks, and one hell of a lot more trouble than the payment was worth. Since then, the Titans had been a thorn in his side and a pain in his ass. Slade had seriously considered avoiding New York or possibly even charging more to operate in the city—if only for a second before a righteous fury caught up and he wanted to kick himself for even thinking it. How much was his reputation worth if a group of kids could shove him this far off base?
“And where the hell are their parents?” he’d seethed to Wintergreen after the first time, returning to his Manhattan penthouse soaking wet and dripping all over the foyer. “If Grant or Joey ever start running around with stupid names and stupid costumes, I’ll kill them myself.”
Wintergreen had raised an eyebrow at Slade (suddenly and acutely aware he’d picked the name Deathstroke the Terminator and decided to dress like a cross between a fourteenth century knight and eighteenth century pirate) and had wisely neglected to comment.
The Titans transformed into an occasional annoyance, another group of masks to skirt around if possible, to dispatch quickly if not. Slade had learned early to stop pulling his punches on account of their age, even the ones without powers—he’d lobbed Speedy’s trick arrows back at him before they could release their payload, caught Robin’s ankle once and slammed him down onto concrete. Robin quickly emerged as the leader, the real threat, the one the rest of the team fell apart without, the one best at rolling with the punches, who stumbled back to his feet, wiped the blood from his nose, and kept coming.
Given his adult counterpart, that shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise.
He’d met the rest with theirs, either before or since: Wonder Girl cheering Wonder Woman on as she kicked Slade the length of a full city block, Speedy with his arms crossed and his expression sour on the occasions Slade worked with Green Arrow, Aqualad silently riding on the back of a sea turtle as Slade parlayed with Aquaman on behalf of a terrified oil-drilling expedition that had paid him for the privilege, Kid Flash and the Flash simply seizing him by his arms the last time they’d caught him in Central City and depositing him at his home across the ocean in Kenya.
And yet, Robin still managed to stand out from the rest. The first time Slade ran into him and the Batman in Gotham, several months after his impromptu swim in the Hudson, Robin announced his presence by blocking Slade’s clear shot with his body and avoiding the bullet by a fraction of an inch. Undeterred, he’d proceeded to attack Slade head-on, a ball of rage a third of his size spouting off about “Not in my city!” until the Bat managed to grab the scruff of his neck like a wayward kitten. Cutting his losses, Slade had used the distraction to disappear into the night and fulfill his contract at a more convenient time.
Slade matched it with the boy he’d met tonight, fitting seamlessly together, his smile, his dark hair, the easy way he moved. The innocuous questions that now seemed perfectly aimed as a way to get under Slade’s skin, in his head, to see what made him tick. The lack of interest in his missing eye similarly changed from politeness to irrelevance because of course, Dick knew already. Dick had seen already, because after all that, Slade had gone and complicated things by saving his life.
Swallowing against the staff still pressed to his throat, Dick tried to save face. “I don’t know what you’re—”
“Do you really think that after a display like that, you can still get away with lying to me?” Slade hissed, pressing the staff down harder. “I found your mask. I found your files, Rob. Now, do you care to relate what my ex-wife told you?”
“I don’t think you want to know,” Dick said, bravely, stupidly defiant.
Slade whipped the staff across his chest again, pinning his arms and wrapping a hand around his throat, warning, not squeezing. He could feel the pulse there, light and fast as a bird’s. “That,” he ground out, “is only the beginning of what I want to know.”
“She said...” Dick began, faltered, continued, “She said you let your son’s throat get slit rather than go back on your word to a client, and Joey’s mute for life now. She said you won’t care that I’m a kid, and I shouldn’t rely on that to save me.”
God, Addie probably thought she was protecting the kid rather than fueling his obsession. “Well, she’s not wrong,” Slade said, her assessment of him no better or worse than expected. He surveyed the map again and asked, “Is this all from her?”
“No. Some of it, but not all of it,” Robin told him. “I pieced together a lot from the news and coroner’s reports. There’s a—you have a sort of pattern, if you know where to look.”
“Hmm,” Slade intoned, idly re-reading a label connected to Nova Scotia, above Dick’s head. “It’s very good. Very thorough.”
Confusion pinched Dick’s forehead. “Thanks?”
“What’s it all for?” Slade asked. “I mean, what’s your end goal here?”
“I don’t know, I—” Dick shrugged as much as he was able. “I guess I thought if I put together enough data, I could find a way to make you stop.”
“Decapitation should do it,” Slade said mildly. “I don’t think I can regenerate from that. But you don’t kill people, do you?”
The tight pull of Dick’s mouth said he’d hit a nerve. “No. But I could help send you to prison for a very long time.”
“Come now, you’re not that naive,” Slade scoffed. “I’m too valuable, kid. Even if you did manage to lock me away, some government official in a pressed suit and squeaky shoes would be there within the hour to make me an offer I can’t refuse.”
“It’d still slow you down,” Dick said stubbornly.
That was true enough. “Perhaps I should have let you die when I had the chance,” Slade said softly and pressed his thumb over the beating vein in Dick’s neck, just enough to limit the circulation to his brain, make him a little lightheaded.
A little over a year ago, Robin had committed the colossally idiotic act of following Slade into a burning building and nearly suffocating on smoke, the end result a zero-sum game: the mark died anyway, but Slade hadn’t been the one to kill him. He had, however, been the one to carry an unconscious vigilante to the safety of fresh air, though not before a falling beam had caught Slade in the face and sheared most of his mask clean off.
Threading in and out of consciousness, he’d hoped Dick wouldn’t recall too clearly what he looked like, and by the time the other Titans showed up and Slade offered him up as a temporary truce, he’d replaced his ruined mask with a spare. It might not have started there, the map, the files, the digging into his life. But it couldn’t have helped.
The corner of Dick’s mouth quirked, his smile small and ironic. “Your mistake,” he said.
“Sure,” Slade allowed. “And tonight was yours.” He leaned in close, bent his knees to look right in Dick’s face. “Tell me, kid, how much do you think someone would pay for the Batman and Robin’s real names? And how do you think Wayne will look at you,” he asked, softer, closer, mere inches apart, “when he finds out it was all your fault?”
He drank it in, the emotions washing over Dick’s face in waves, the fear, the anger, the despair. The shine of unshed tears in his eyes as he said, “He has money,” like choking on the words.
“Ah, ah,” Slade scolded. “Blackmail’s a risky business. He can’t trust me not to demand more at a later date, and I can’t trust him not to send one of his superpowered friends after me to dig into my mind and make me forget I was ever here.” He let up on the beating vein a little and asked, “What would you do in my place?”
“Incapacitate me. Find proof. Sell it to the press,” Dick said. His gaze slid off to the side, color rising to his cheeks in shame. “You might get more if you sold it to someone like Luthor, but that’d be the fastest way to get your money’s worth and take the target off your back. There’s no point going after just you if everyone knows.”
“Good. Very good,” Slade said and watched the color in Dick’s cheeks deepen. “You’re the smart one, aren’t you? That’s why you’re the leader.”
A short, breathless laugh escaped him, as if to communicate that Dick didn’t feel very smart right now, or maybe that he didn’t feel like a leader in Wayne Manor, in the shadow of the Bat.
“You don’t want money, and we can’t just let each other go,” Dick said, summing up the situation. “Then what do you want?”
And it was the pertinent question, but the kid said it…
He said it looking right at Slade’s mouth.
Slade almost, almost laughed. The night took on a new dimension: Dick following him around the gala, the things he’d asked Slade, the things he’d said, like he was trying to sound interesting. The map on Dick’s wall and the flush in his cheeks, both at the table downstairs when Slade had thought him drunk and a minute ago, in response to Slade’s very good. Fear and arousal weren’t the strangest wires to cross, but Dick must have tangled them into quite a knot if they’d ended up here.
The baby bird had managed to develop a crush on him.
Speculatively, Slade slid his hand up under Dick’s jaw and positioned his face to better catch the light. He would be gorgeous someday, with his blue eyes and olive skin, his blue-black hair and the sweep of his long lashes, his high cheekbones and strong jaw and perfect bow of his lips. The earlier, eavesdropped conversation between him and Wayne indicated Dick had trouble with girls already. And Slade could appreciate the attention of a pretty young thing, just—he took in Dick’s smooth cheeks, free of even the faintest peach fuzz, and the very slight way he trembled against Slade’s hand still holding his throat. Not this young. Certainly not with the kid’s guardian two floors down and liable to arrive at any minute.
But that didn’t mean Slade couldn’t save him for later.
“I want you…” he trailed off and leaned in, until Dick’s eyes slid shut and his lips parted and Slade drew close enough to breathe across them. Then, he bypassed Dick’s mouth to speak the rest like a secret right in his ear: “...to keep your mouth shut, kid.”
He let go and stepped back, and Dick sagged against the wall like he’d been relying on Slade to hold him up. Dick shook his head, dazed. “What?”
“Mutually assured destruction. I don’t want Wayne to know that I know; you don’t want Wayne to know that I know.” He flicked his gaze to the wall behind Dick, the giant map covering it. “You keep my secrets, and I keep yours.”
“How do I know I can trust you?” Dick asked, heavy with suspicion.
“Exposing a mask like that is more trouble than it’s worth. I’d have the whole Justice League breathing down my neck, and even I can’t take that much heat,” Slade said. “Don’t get me wrong, kid. If you double-cross me, I will know, and then I will wring every bit out of this that I can get.”
Slowly, Dick nodded. “Ok,” he said. “How do you know you can trust me?”
“You’re a smart kid. I think you’ll make the right decision,” Slade said, and because dragging Dick’s crush on him out into the open would likely have the opposite effect: “Call it a gamble, but”—he smiled—“I’m feeling lucky.”
Dick smiled back, a tentative, fragile thing, and Slade knew he had him. Hook, line, and sinker.
Shifting the staff to his left hand, Slade reached out with his right. “Do we have a deal?”
“Deal,” Dick said as he took it. He held it a moment too long, fingertips skimming along Slade’s palm as they parted.
Then, Dick blew his breath out, drew himself up to his full height (somewhere in the middle of Slade’s chest), and he became Robin in that instant. The leader of the Teen Titans, Batman’s student and sidekick and partner since—Slade did a quick mental calculation—the tender age of nine.
“Ok,” he said authoritatively. “Let’s get you out of here.”
“Can’t I leave with the rest of the guests?” Slade asked, intrigued.
“No. You’ve been gone too long—he’ll be looking for you,” Dick said. “You might’ve gotten in here on your own, but you’re not getting out that way.” He tilted his head to the side and asked, “You can keep a secret, right?”
He offered his hand, and Slade took it, letting the kid pull him through the bedroom door and out into the concealing darkness of the hall.
*
They ran through the manor in silence, the only sound Dick’s controlled breaths and the occasional creaks of an old house settling. Past closed rooms and draped windows letting in slivers of ghostly moonlight, Dick led him to a different staircase than the one he’d ascended. He slowed his pace on the way down, the hand still in Slade’s squeezing briefly in warning as they reached the ground floor. There, Dick cracked open the door at the bottom and peeked into the hallway, nodding once before dragging Slade along.
“Where are we going?” Slade murmured as Dick pulled him to a stop, glancing around a corner.
“You don’t know the rooms, so why does it matter?” Dick asked.
“Is it the study?” Slade guessed.
Dick’s head whipped around. “How—? Oh. You could hear us in there?”
“I have better hearing than most,” Slade said. “Which is how I know someone’s coming from that direction right now.”
A few more seconds confirmed it, the sound of waitstaff talking causing Dick to gasp in alarm. “This way,” he said, doubling back down the hall and tugging Slade behind him.
The study, when they reached it, looked much like the image in Slade’s head—a large desk, bookshelves lining the walls, a pair of armchairs facing a burned-out fireplace. Dick took him over to one of the bookshelves and stood on his toes to reach the alabaster, severe-looking bust of a man Slade didn’t recognize. Possibly a Roman emperor, but he didn’t have much time to consider it. With a grunt of exertion, Dick twisted it sideways, and the whole bookshelf swung out from the wall.
A passage appeared behind, leading out into the dark.
“C’mon,” Dick said breathlessly, pulling him inside. A few steps in, the bookshelf shut behind them.
Light sensors illuminated the tunnel around them as they walked, appearing ahead and disappearing at their backs. In a few minutes, the space opened up into a cavern. If not for Dick’s hand in his, still leading him along, Slade would have stopped and stared. As it was, he did his best to look while keeping up the pace, at the fucking Tyrannosaurus Rex statue towering nearly up to the ceiling, the Batman and Robin suits preserved in glass cases. The mythical Batcave, hidden not out in the woods nor in some cave up in the mountains, but right here below the manor of the richest man in town.
One of the Robin suits missed its domino mask, and Slade felt his mouth pull into a smirk, knowing full well where it was. And then they were out of the cave and running down another long passage, faster now, towards a light at the end.
In a minute, they dead-ended at a wall with a single, bare bulb hanging from the ceiling above it. Slade looked to Dick, but Dick didn’t look back, occupied by feeling over the rock until he hit an invisible catch. Like the bookshelf upstairs, it slid open, and they emerged into moonlight and the sound of crickets, impossibly loud after the noiseless interior.
The passage had led past the edge of the property, out onto a dirt service road and serendipitously close to where Slade had stowed his vehicle in anticipation of chasing down Sal Bostwick. He breathed in the scent of dirt and greenery. At his side, Dick hopped up and squatted on a rocky outcrop, a vantage point that left him a little above Slade’s head. The scant light caught his grin, glinting off his teeth—he’d enjoyed that, the running, the close escape.
“Can you find your way from here?” he asked.
“Yes,” Slade told him. He cast a look behind them and asked, “You’re sure about this? He won’t know we came this way?”
“We had to relax the security protocols with all the people here for the gala. Trust me, if you tripped something, we’d know already,” Dick said. He shifted his weight and asked, “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me what you were really doing here tonight?”
Slade looked at him sideways and said, “You suppose correct.” He knocked his shoulder against Dick’s knee. “Don’t worry, kid. I’m sure you’ll find out.”
To which Dick (because he was a smart kid) did not look the least bit reassured. “Huh,” he said.
“And get rid of that damned map. Not too soon—you don’t want Wayne reading into it,” Slade amended. Smiled and said, “You want to know what I’ve been up to, you can always just ask.”
“Ok,” Dick said equivocally, to the second part if not the first.
Abruptly, he leaned forward at an angle Slade expected to proceed him sliding off the rock. He moved in automatically, but Dick didn’t fall. Keeping his balance, he swooped down and kissed Slade right in the middle of his forehead.
“For luck,” he said, his grin now lopsided.
While Slade performed some kind of 3D chess trying to figure that one out, Dick scrambled down and back into the passage they’d exited through. The door shut behind him, blending in seamlessly with the rest of the rock.
Alone, Slade laughed in equal parts amusement and disbelief. He strolled off down the access road, towards his car and his Deathstroke suit, and went to see about killing a man.
***