I stare at her.
She laughs once, ugly and broken. “What, just a whore?”
Something cold moves through me. “What?”
“That’s what they thought, isn’t it?” she says, anger rising over the hurt now. “That’s what the people in your office thought when they played that audio.”
I go completely still. “What audio?”
Her face changes.
For a second she looks almost surprised that I don’t know.
Then the whole story comes out in pieces. Fast, ugly, shaking at the edges. The recordings. The office. The whispers. Someone calling her a hooker. The laughter. The way she ran. Alena outside afterward, circling her, saying all the things she already feared might be true.
By the end of it, I’m sitting on the bed with my jaw clenched so hard it hurts. I had heard the gossip when I got back. But by then she was already gone.
I knew enough to know something had happened. Enough to see the fear and the rot on that floor. Enough to fire everyone who touched it, pushed it, spread it.
But I didn’t know that was why.
I didn’t know that was what had been done to her.
“Alena,” I say quietly.
She wipes at her face. “Maybe. I don’t know. I just know it was all out there.”
Rage comes up so fast I have to swallow it down to keep from breaking something in her room. “I didn’t know,” I say. “But I fired everyone who talked about you.”
Her eyes widen. “You fired them without knowing the whole truth?”
“Yes.”
“How could you?—”
“Because you were gone,” I say, sharper than I mean to. Then I rein it in. “And I knew someone had done enough damage to make you leave.”
She looks at me, stunned.
I hold her gaze. “I didn’t need the details to know they deserved it.”
I can see it.
Still, she shakes her head. “It doesn’t change things.”
Maybe not. Maybe it changes everything.
I move closer again, one hand going to her face, thumb catching the last of the tears there. “I want you, Zatanna.”
The words leave no room for interpretation. No teasing. No games. No strategy. Just the truth. And in them, finally, is the confession I have been avoiding by every other name.
Her breathing catches. She looks at me for one long second, then kisses me.
I kiss her back with everything I’ve got.
The sadness goes first. Then the hesitation. Her hands drag me down over her, and I go willingly, one hand braced beside her head, the other sliding under her nightshirt to find warm skin, a breast, the sharp inhale she gives me when I take it in my mouth.
She moans and arches up.
