The dart hit them both. One shot, two bodies, and Mr. Lucky watched it happen through the scope with his breath held and his heart doing that little skip it always did right before the money landed. Stephanie Brown went down first, mid-laugh at something her friend had said, her ponytail swinging as she dropped. Cassandra Cain turned toward the sound — too late, always too late when the dart was already in her neck — and folded like a puppet with the strings cut. They hit the pavement of the alley within a half-second of each other, two girls in street clothes who'd thought nobody was watching.
He lowered the rifle. His hands were steady. They were always steady when it mattered.
"Lucky, lucky, lucky," he muttered, and slid the bolt back, and let himself grin so wide the gold tooth caught the streetlight.
The alley off Finger Street was exactly the kind of place two off-duty vigilantes would cut through without thinking. He'd been watching them for three weeks. Not them specifically — he'd been watching the neighborhood, the same way he'd watched a hundred neighborhoods, because Mr. Lucky didn't make plans, he made opportunities. Then one night he'd seen the blonde in the purple hoodie buying a hot dog from the cart on the corner, and he'd seen the way she moved, and he'd thought, huh, and then he'd seen the other one come out of the shadows beside her, and he'd known.
Spoiler and Orphan. Out of costume. Out of contact. Walking home through an alley like regular people.
He'd followed them for six blocks after that first sighting, keeping to the rooftops, and he'd watched them split up and go into separate buildings and come out again in the morning, and he'd understood the shape of it: two girls with two apartments and one friendship, no comms, no backup, no Bat watching over their shoulders. Off the clock. Nobody knew where they were.
Nobody would know where they'd gone.
He crossed the alley in eleven steps. The blonde was sprawled on her back, one arm flung out, the small scar on her chin catching the light. The other one had landed on her side, black hair fanned across the concrete, and even unconscious her face held that stillness — like she was listening to something he couldn't hear.
"Nice to meet you both," he said.
He zip-tied their wrists behind their backs first, then their ankles, then looped a tie through both sets so they couldn't kick. The black-haired one he did twice, because he'd read the files and he wasn't an idiot. The blonde he did once and then again anyway, because her arms were strong and he liked the way the plastic bit into her wrists.
He loaded them into the trunk of the sedan he'd parked two blocks over, one at a time, and neither of them stirred. The dart dose was his own mix — ketamine base, a little fentanyl, a little something he'd bought off a chemist in the Bowery who owed him a favor. It kept them under for six hours and left them groggy for twelve. Long enough.
He drove to the marina with the radio on low and his fingers drumming the wheel.
The boat was a forty-two-foot cabin cruiser he'd won in a card game three years ago and never once regretted. He'd named it Lucky Lady because he wasn't subtle, and he kept it fueled and provisioned at all times, because a man who lived the way he lived never knew when he'd need to leave in a hurry. He backed the sedan up to the dock, and he carried them aboard one at a time, and he laid them on the cabin floor while he untied the lines and started the engine.
The diesel thrummed up through the deck. The porthole showed black water and the lights of Gotham receding. He set the autopilot for the run south and stood in the cabin doorway and looked down at them.
"Lucky," he said. "Lucky, lucky, lucky."
The cabin smelled like diesel and old carpet and the faint salt of the sea coming in through the vents. He pulled the black leather gloves off one finger at a time and tucked them into his jacket pocket, because he didn't want to leave prints and he didn't want to leave fibers, and because his hands were the part of him he trusted most and he liked to have them bare when it mattered.
He started with the blonde.
Her hoodie was soft, worn thin at the cuffs, and it came off over her head with a little resistance from the ponytail. Underneath she wore a black tank top and a plain cotton bra, and her skin was warm and flushed from the drug. He pulled the tank up over her ribs and unhooked the bra and let her breasts spill out, and he made a low sound in his throat, because he'd been imagining this for three weeks and the reality was better.
Small, firm, the nipples a pale pink, and when he ran his thumb across one it stiffened under his touch even though she was out cold. He did it again. Watched her face for any flicker, any sign she was swimming up toward consciousness, and saw nothing but the slack peace of deep sleep.
"That's it," he said softly. "Good girl."
He stripped the rest of her — jeans, boots, socks, the plain black underwear — and laid it all in a neat pile on the bench seat. Then he did the same to the other one, and the other one was harder, because her body was all muscle and the black athletic wear clung to it, and when he got her out of it he had to stop and just look.
Cassandra Cain was built like something designed. Lean and corded, every line of her deliberate, a scar on her shoulder that he traced with one finger because he wanted to know what had made it. Her breasts were smaller than the blonde's, darker nipples, and her stomach was flat and hard and her thighs were the kind of thighs that could crush a man's throat if she wanted to.
He laid them side by side on the cabin's narrow bunk, face up, wrists still tied behind them, and he stood over them and took his cock out of his jeans and held it in his fist and just looked for a while.
Two of them. Two of the Bat's girls, naked and helpless on his bunk, and nobody in the world knew where they were.
He knelt between them.
He started with the blonde's tits because he'd been thinking about them since the hot dog cart. He straddled her chest, his knees on either side of her ribs, and he pushed her breasts together with both hands and slid his cock between them. The heat of her skin, the soft give of the flesh, the way the head of him peeked out the top of the channel he'd made — he groaned and thrust, slow, watching his own cock disappear between her tits and come back slick with his own pre-cum.
"Fuck," he said. "Fuck, that's good."
He fucked her tits for a long time. Long enough that his thighs started to burn and his breathing went ragged and the pre-cum made the slide wet and easy. Her face stayed slack, mouth slightly open, and every time he thrust up between her breasts he could see the small scar on her chin and the flutter of her eyelids and he thought about how she'd wake up eventually and how she'd have no idea.
He pulled out before he got too close. He wasn't done.
He moved up her body and straddled her face instead, and he pushed his cock against her lips until they parted, and then he slid in.
Her mouth was warm and wet and unresisting, and he fucked it slow at first, watching her throat, watching the way her jaw went slack to accommodate him. He got a hand in her hair — the ponytail had come loose and the honey-blond strands were everywhere — and he used it to angle her head and push deeper, and he felt the head of his cock bump the back of her throat and he felt her gag reflex twitch and he didn't stop.
"That's it," he said. "Take it. Take all of it."
He fucked her face until tears leaked out of the corners of her closed eyes, and then he pulled out and wiped his cock on her cheek and moved to the other one.
Cassandra Cain's mouth was different. Tighter. More deliberate even in sleep, like her body couldn't help being precise. He pushed in and she took him deep on the first thrust, no resistance at all, her throat opening for him like she'd been trained for it, and he laughed out loud because of course she had. Of course the Bat's silent little weapon could deepthroat a man without waking up.
He held her head with both hands and fucked down into her throat, and he watched her dark brown eyes stay closed and her chest rise and fall with slow sleeping breaths, and he thought, this is the best night of my life.
He pulled out of her mouth and went back to the blonde's tits, because he liked her better. He'd known he would. The blonde had something in her face, even asleep — a stubbornness, a fight — and he wanted to be inside her in every way a man could be inside a woman.
He fucked her tits again, harder now, his balls slapping against her sternum, and then he moved back up and fucked her mouth again, and then back down, and he kept going back and forth between the two of them until his thighs were shaking and his breath was coming in grunts and he knew he was close.
He pulled out of the blonde's mouth and jerked himself over both of them, and he came across their faces and their chests, rope after rope of it, striping the blonde's cheek and the other one's throat and both sets of tits, and he watched it land on their skin and drip down and pool in the hollow of the blonde's collarbone.
"There," he said, breathing hard. "There. Now you're both mine."
He sat back on his heels and looked at them. Two naked girls, tied, covered in his cum, breathing slow and even in the diesel-smelling dark. The boat rocked gently under him. Somewhere above, the stars were out over open water.
He liked the blonde more. He'd known that from the first moment he'd seen her at the hot dog cart, laughing at something, her whole face open and bright. The other one was a weapon — beautiful, but a weapon, and weapons were for using and then putting away. The blonde was a person. The blonde had a face he wanted to keep looking at.
He got up and found the duffel bag in the locker under the bench. Heavy canvas, zippered, big enough for a body if the body was folded right.
He picked up Cassandra Cain and folded her into it. Knees to chest, arms tucked, head bent forward. She didn't resist. She didn't wake. He zipped the bag closed and stood there for a moment with his hand on the canvas, feeling the shape of her inside it, and then he carried her up onto the deck.
The night air was warm and salt-heavy. The Caribbean was somewhere ahead of them, and the water here was deep and dark and would keep a secret forever. He set the bag on the gunwale and looked out at the black sea and the faint line of the horizon and the nothing beyond it.
"Nothing personal," he said.
He pushed the bag over the side.
It hit the water with a flat splash and sank fast, the canvas darkening as it went under, and he watched until he couldn't see it anymore, and then he stood there a while longer, listening to the water slap the hull, feeling the boat rise and fall under his feet.
He went back down into the cabin.
The blonde was still on the bunk where he'd left her, cum drying on her skin, her chest rising and falling. He wiped her off with a towel from the galley — her face, her tits, her stomach — and then he turned her over onto her stomach and pulled her hips up and looked at her from behind.
Her ass was round and firm and pale, and between her legs, when he spread her, she was dry but soft and pink and he pushed two fingers into her anyway just to feel it. Tight. Warm. Sleeping.
He spat on his cock and spat on her cunt and pushed in.
She was tight enough that it took a moment, and he went slow, watching himself disappear into her, watching her back arch slightly under him even in sleep. When he was all the way in he stopped and held still and just felt it — her body wrapped around him, clenching and releasing in the slow rhythm of her breathing, and he thought about how she had no idea, how she'd wake up sore and confused and never know why.
Then he fucked her.
Slow at first, long strokes, pulling almost all the way out and pushing back in, and then faster, harder, his hips slapping against her ass, one hand fisted in her hair and the other gripping her hip. The bunk creaked under them. Her body moved with his, limp and unresisting, and he fucked her like that for a long time, changing the angle, going deeper, feeling her cunt get wetter around him as her body responded to what was being done to it even though she wasn't awake to know.
"That's it," he said. "That's it, sweetheart. Take it."
He came inside her. Deep, with his hips pressed flush against her ass, and he felt his cock pulse and empty into her and he held there until he was done, and then he pulled out slow and watched his cum leak out of her and run down the inside of her thigh.
He sat on the edge of the bunk and caught his breath and looked at her.
Then he went to the locker and got out the kit.
The syringe was pre-loaded. He'd mixed it himself, the same chemist's work, but different — a compound that would scrub the last few weeks out of her head and leave her suggestible and soft and looking for someone to tell her who she was. He'd used it before, on a girl in Bludhaven, and she'd woken up calling him sir and never once asked where she'd come from.
He found the vein in the crook of her elbow and slid the needle in and pushed the plunger down.
She didn't stir. She wouldn't. The compound needed the subject under, and she'd be under for another few hours, and when she woke up she'd be someone new.
He put the kit away and went up on deck and stood at the helm and looked at the stars and the black water and the horizon that was beginning to show the first faint gray of dawn.
Behind him, in the cabin, Stephanie Brown slept with his cum drying between her thighs and her old life already dissolving in her blood.
He'd retire after this. He'd thought about it for a while, and now he knew. No more jobs, no more scores, no more slipping through windows in the dark. He'd take her somewhere warm and quiet and he'd buy a house with good light and he'd paint. He'd always wanted to paint. And he'd keep her, and she'd be his, and she'd never know she'd ever been anyone else.
"Lucky," he said, to the water. "Lucky, lucky, lucky."
He set the autopilot for the island and went below to sleep.