Chapter Text
Prologue
Washington DC, 1984
Diana landed softly on the balcony outside of her apartment, her boots barely making a sound on the concrete ledge that circled the entire building. She didn’t want to disturb the stillness of the night that had fallen over the city.
She pulled at the balcony door — it was kept unlatched at all times to provide for more convenient comings and goings, should the need arise unexpectedly. It gave easily, sliding open without a sound, the inside of her apartment drowning in shadows. A place of comfort that didn’t feel like one, not anymore.
She lingered just outside, listening carefully, although what for, she wasn’t sure anymore. But nothing moved, nothing stirred, and the dissonance between that and the storm raging inside of her made her breath catch a little and her mind swim.
She stepped through the doorway and paused again, eyes moving over the dark shapes of furniture — a quilt draped over the back of the couch, a bookshelf pushed against the wall. Silent witnesses without a life of their own.
It was the silence that caught Diana off guard, more than anything else. As though someone had flipped a switch, bringing everything to a sudden halt.
After the fight was over; after the blood had stopped pumping through her veins in earnest and when the taste on her tongue was no longer of ash, it was the silence and stillness, so unnatural and abrupt, that had landed on her like a blow. The emptiness that the broken spell had left behind so consuming it threatened to turn her inside out.
She waited for the feeling to leave but it seemed to have followed her home, as well.
Steve’s watch was sitting near a framed photograph. His picture—a newspaper clipping meant to keep his name remembered—on the shelf above it, his smile bright and open and infectious. And like every other time Diana looked at it, her chest constricted with longing.
The Dreamstone had never brought him back, it had only allowed Diana to believe what she had wanted to believe. What she had wanted to believe for so long that she had been willing to accept an illusion for reality, her dreams for possibility, and sacrifice everything in order to hold on to them.
A fool.
A desperate, broken-hearted fool grasping at straws and letting a madman pull at her strings, using her like a puppet.
She moved inside, the air around her thick, making her feel like she was walking through water. There was a cup he had left on the table the morning she had taken him shopping. Yet, there was no smell of him lingering in the room—she hadn’t expected it to still be there, but the absence of it slashed across her senses all the same.
Her shoulder throbbed a little. The four parallel marks left by the swipe of Cheetah’s paw had stopped bleeding, but Diana was still aware of them, a little mad at herself for letting her guard down enough for the strike to land, a little grateful for the distraction from the gnawing ache eating her up from the inside.
The wound had started to close up already. In another hour, there would be no trace of it left, and just like everything else that had to do with Barbara Ann and who she used to be, it would simply become another chapter of Diana’s life that she knew there was no going back to.
She could see it now, small things she should have noticed before but was too swept away to pick up on. How all of their conversations seemed to be only about their shared memories, as though he had not lived prior to meeting her. How each time she had brought up his friends, he would only speak of the things she knew already. How he had seemed to brush off her words about visiting his family, his childhood home, as though it was nothing.
But it was not the case, Diana was realizing now. Each wish made on the stone created by the God of Lies had a twist to it. She had gotten Steve Trevor back except it had not been him, not really.
It had been merely someone — something — constructed out of her memories entirely. Everything he had said to her was something she had wanted to hear. The things she had seen in him were the things she had expected to see.
Diana’s gaze travelled over the room and landed on a photograph she had placed on the nightstand only yesterday. One that was meant to be of her and Steve, snapped by a passer-by in a park—because he had never seen a portable camera before, and she wanted so desperately to make him part of this world.
Where there had been two people before, Diana was alone now, her smile relaxed and happy but the person who had made it so nowhere to be seen. The spot beside her was empty, capturing instead a couple sitting on a picnic blanket in the background. (She hadn’t noticed them on the day the photo was taken.)
Her stomach clenched, coiling into a tight knot, stealing her breath away and leaving her feeling sick.
Not real. Never had been.
She could feel him still—feel the touch of his hands, the smell of skin when she would press her face to his neck. But even those memories, despite startling clarity in the middle, felt like they were brittle around the edges. The harder she tried to hold on to them and bring them into focus, the faster they crumbled.
With numb fingers, Diana picked up a pillow from the bed. One from Steve’s side. She pressed her face to it, inhaling deeply, but there was nothing but the smell of fresh linen on it.
She wondered then, absently and without much care, if there was anyone whose wish hadn’t come true with a catch to it. Or if everyone who had fallen prey to Maxwell Lord’s cruel scheme had had something dear to them twisted into something ugly and painful in a game set up by a maniac?
Diana dropped the pillow as if it burned her.
There was a shirt draped over the footboard of the bed. She reached for it, surprised to realize it was not hers. Instead, it was one of the few garments she had purchased for Steve the week prior. One she had picked because she had thought it brought out the blue of his eyes so nicely.
Diana trailed her fingers along its collar, soft cotton smooth against her skin.
The one thing that she hadn’t expected, hadn’t seen coming even after everything she had lived through it the first time she had lost him, was how completely and utterly gone a person could become in just a split of a second.
She had thought, back in 1918, that nothing could ever possibly hurt more than it had when she had watched Steve’s plane go up in flames, a supernova in the pitch-black sky ripping her in half from the inside. But now that this moment had come, his presence but a memory once again, and her heart was tearing at the seams once more, her chest so tight with grief she could barely take a breath for fear of ceasing to exist.
I can save today. You can save the world.
He had remained true to his word, on that wretched day sixty-six years ago. But close to seven decades later, Diana was no closer to the mission that Steve had put upon her than she had been on the day when he had climbed into that plane to give her the few more precious moments she’d needed to defeat the God of War.
The world needs you, Diana. You know what you need to do.
She repeated Steve’s words in her head.
(Or were they her own, spoken from the depths of her mind? She couldn’t trust anything he had said to her, for all of it was born out of her wishful thinking and desperation. Every smile he had brought out, every confession had been nothing but her desire for something she could never have.)
For the first time in her life, she wondered if it was true.
She has been raised to believe that the world needed her, them, the Amazons. That they were brought to life with a mission to make it a better place. But she didn’t see it anymore, and maybe she hadn’t for a long time.
Her hands curled around his shirt. She took a step back. And then another one. And then one more until she reached the far wall. She slid to the floor, the silent making of a sob trying to rip its way out of her chest, her throat tight and burning with tears that were still to come.
Diana dropped her head in her hands, her fingers still curled over fistfuls of the soft cotton, and buried her face in it as tears spilled at last. She could smell him still, not caring if the scent was there or if it was merely her mind continuing to play tricks on her in an attempt to save her sanity from spiralling into an abyss of despair.
She breathed him in, her tears soaking the fabric as she begged the night to give him back to her.
But this time, no one heard her.
Chapter 1
Paris, 2018
Steve lets go of her hands and steps forward, transfixed. The planes sitting on the dark airfield are nothing out of the ordinary to Diana, but to him—she can’t imagine.
This is what she must have looked like when she stepped off the boat that had brought her to this world and onto the busy streets of London, unsure where to look first or how to take it all in. She smiles, watching him as his gaze moves around slowly, his jaw a little slack in awe. She would have teased him about that, or about forgetting her in an instant if the look on his face wasn’t so endearing that it makes her heart hurt.
“You wanna choose?”
“This one!”
He steps towards one of the jets, reaching his hand over to touch the polished wing of the plane before him. A tug of concern arches through Diana’s chest, the memory from the past tugging at her heart. She pushes it away, pressing her lips around a smile, delighted by Steve’s excitement.
And then the plane explodes and a wave of heat is tossing her backwards as his voice calling her name pierces the air—
Diana woke up as a scream tore its way out of her throat, the heat of the fire chasing her all the way from the dream. Her skin was clammy with cold sweat, her hands twisted around fistfuls of the sheet that was tangled around her body, reminding her of the tanker treads that had once kept her from rushing after Steve, a hundred years ago.
With her heart pounding against the inside of her ribs, she forced her hands to unclench. Her throat was tight, each breath a struggle. She closed her eyes and inhaled slowly, willing the crazy gallop of her heartbeat to slow down.
That day, in the Air and Space Museum, there had been no explosion and no one got hurt, but it didn’t stop her mind from taking a good memory and tangling it into a knot with an older one, one that had shattered her world once.
Diana had stopped wondering if nightmares would ever let her be a long time ago.
She sat up slowly, rubbing a tired hand down her face before turning towards the nightstand where the clock read 4:27 AM. Two hours before she needed to be out of bed. On instinct, she turned to the other side of her bed, running her hand over the cold sheets, the pillow untouched. After the war, she used to reach for Steve in her sleep almost nightly, the ache of finding the spot empty making her want to fold in on herself and cease to be.
It had taken her decades to break out of a habit forged by only one night. In 1984, the instinct had returned, together with the disappointment that would settle in her stomach each time she had found no one there. Or, even worse, someone else there. Someone who was not Steve.
Diana pulled her hand back.
She sighed and pushed the covers aside, sliding onto the cool floor. She got dressed in the semi-darkness dispersed by nothing but the faint light from the street lights streaming through the thin curtains on her window, choosing to forgo turning on the lamp. She twisted her hair into a knot near the nape of her neck and picked up her phone from the nightstand. Sleep wasn’t an option, her mind too wired and restless despite the busy day behind her and the busier one ahead.
In the hallway, she paused, considering making herself a cup of tea. But the idea wasn’t appealing, the aftershocks of adrenaline rush brought on by her nightmare pushing her forward. A familiar sensation that had often brought her to the training beach on Themyscira, although for entirely different reasons. Funny how some things never changed. At the front door, she slid her feet into a pair of running shoes and grabbed her keys from the bowl on the table.
She took the elevator to the ground floor and walked past the empty concierge desk. Diana could hear the TV working in the small room behind it, but neither the whirr of the cables, nor the quiet ding of the elevator doors sliding open had disturbed Andre, the stately man in his 60s who often worked the night shift, for which she was grateful. She was not up for exchanging customary pleasantries when she felt so out of sorts.
She headed past the desk and towards the door at the back of the main foyer leading to the residential gym, the soles of her shoes squeaking quietly on the marble floors.
The gym was dark and empty at this time of day and would remain so for another hour, at least. Enough for her to find her peace of mind once more, for however long it would last.
She closed the door behind her and turned on the light.
There had been a time when Diana would have scoffed at the idea of one day missing Antiope’s gruelling routines that would rouse her and her sisters before dawn and chase them out of their beds and into the cool morning. Muscles aching and lungs burning, they would fight their way into a new day, their pride over belonging to something great not stopping them from sharing teasing comments about Antiope and Phillipus trying to run them into their graves.
These days, Diana would have gladly given up her immortality for another morning on that beach, the fog hanging close over the sea. For another day on the training ground, the smell of grass permeating her senses and the sound of a demanding voice rising above them: “Again! Do it again!”
This room was nothing like that, of course. It smelled of rubber mats and metal and that peculiar scent of recycled air pushed through the vents, not of sea and grass and sun-bleached rock. But the physical exertion was enough to switch off her mind, put the demands of her body first until the balance was restored and she no longer had to breathe around the longing sitting on her chest like a stone. One that she knew could never be sated.
In her days of close involvement with the Justice League a couple of years ago, when she had stayed in Bruce’s house when her presence in Gotham had been required, Diana would run around the lake, taking the path that snaked between the old trees. She preferred that; the soft ground beneath her feet, an obstacle course of rocks and roots sticking from the ground and sharp turns where nature wouldn’t allow for a straight passage.
It was nothing like Themyscira, but in odd ways, be it the early morning fog, or the peace that could only be found away from the hustle and bustle of a big city, or the proximity of water, it reminded her of home anyway. In that particular regard, Paris had never quite felt the same.
But those days were gone, that partnership which had been born out of desperation having long unravelled. She had not set her foot in Gotham in over six months now, and though Barry texted her several times a week and she spoke with Clark and Lois regularly, it was not the same.
Part of her wasn’t sure if she wanted it to be. Diana wondered sometimes if it falling apart had anything to do with what had happened between her and Bruce, or if maybe the Justice League was merely never meant to last, to begin with. She would return to help them if they needed her, and she knew that they knew that. Just like she knew they would look for an excuse not to call her.
By the time the gym door opened again, this time to let a young woman in a pink top in, Diana was breathless and panting, a film of sweat clinging to her skin and her mind clear, her equilibrium restored.
She gave the small customary smile of acknowledgement when the woman’s eyes skated over her as she headed towards the door.
“You’re an early bird, Mademoiselle Prince,” the concierge smiled at her when Diana passed his desk.
She smiled back and inquired about his health. Small moments that reminded her that she was part of this world, connected to other people in small, intangible ways.
The elevator arrived and Diana stepped inside. She checked her phone, not surprised to find a few messages already waiting for her attention. One from a curator in Milan, inquiring about some items to be sent to the Louvre and the logistics of the process. Diana forwarded it to her assistant, making a mental note to follow up on it later. Two more were from an archaeologist in Cairo doing some work for the museum. Not her department but she requested to be in the loop, and they had no reason to refuse though she knew it had to have raised some curious eyebrows.
She skimmed over the attached document, intrigued by the finds but disappointed that they had nothing to do with the reason behind her involvement. A personal one that she was aware would be frowned upon if it was to become known. She would respond later, thank them, ask them to keep her posted as they proceeded. Maybe it wasn’t going to be a dead-end, after all.
The last message was from Barry, a dancing cat image—someone had put a sad-looking cat face on a person wearing a Batsuit. Maybe even an actual photograph of Bruce snatched by a curious onlooker while he was on patrol. Something that Barry had explained to her with great seriousness a couple of years back was called a meme.
It made Diana smile, despite everything. Despite even the pang of longing that seeing his name had brought on.
She stepped out of the elevator onto her floor and unlocked her apartment door, placing the keys back in the bowl.
She would call him later today, Diana decided. He always seemed to welcome it. Of them all, Barry was, perhaps, the one who missed their time as a team the most, and because it was her decision to walk away that had nearly ended the League, Diana felt partly responsible over having taken it from him, even if at the time, she hadn’t seen any other way.
She put the kettle on, leaving the phone on the kitchen counter, and headed to the shower. By the time she stepped out of the bathroom, the sun had begun its slow ascent over the rooftops stretching all the way to the horizon outside the small balcony in her bedroom. Whatever aftertaste of the dream that had been still lingering in her head even after an hour at the gym seemed to be gone, at last. And like the many other times it happened in the past, she chose not to dwell on it.
Your mind will always play tricks on you, Diana, her mother used to say when Diana was little, as a way of explaining dreams as well as nightmares. But as long as you remember who you are, they can’t hurt you.
She had taken consolation from those words, when she was little. Now, each time she remembered them, there seemed to be an ominous tint to them that she couldn’t quite see past.
After what had happened in 1984, she could no longer trust her mind at all. But that was done now, the spell broken, the truth restored. Maxwell Lord had died seven years ago, a heart attack that had caught him by surprise in the middle of a dinner that he had never gotten to finish. She didn’t like to acknowledge it, but the news had brought her a jolt of satisfaction. Knowing that that man could never try to bend the world to his will again had settled something inside of her, though it hardly felt like closure. Not yet.
By the time she returned to the kitchen, dressed for work, there were three more messages waiting for her. From Celeste, her assistant, this time, who seemed to have had as early a start today as Diana.
Diana made herself a cup of tea and sent Celeste a quick text, promising that she was on her way and that they would sort it all out shortly. If only she could say the same about her restless mind, but Diana kept that thought to herself.
The rest of the day was a blur of phone calls and reports and sorting out a collection that had arrived the previous evening so it could be put on display and opened for the public. There were questions to be answered and shipments to be arranged. She asked Celeste to book her a ticket to Rome and to pick up their lunches afterwards, revelling in the hectic pace that no one would suspect a museum, of all places, of maintaining.
The call from Bruce came that same evening, when the lights in the main galleries were dimmed and most of the staff had left for the night.
Diana was in her office catching up on cataloguing, a cup of coffee from the coffee shop across the street sitting by her laptop when her phone chimed.
She paused at the sight of Bruce’s name on the screen, surprised. They kept in touch, in a way. Often through brief texts when he wanted to alert her about something happening on her side of the ocean, whenever someone needed help and he was way too far to be of real assistance. A lot of the time, it was not necessary—Diana had her own ways of staying informed, but she never had the heart to tell him that.
Once or twice, she suspected that there was something else behind it all. That maybe he had other motives behind wanting to speak with her. But he had never veered off-topic, ending their conversations as soon as they ran their course and never bringing up anything personal.
In the end, she decided that that was it—a flimsy sort of bond that extended to nothing else but their secret lives.
Yet, try as she might, she couldn’t recall him ever calling her. Couldn’t imagine why he would want to do it now.
Briefly, Diana contemplated letting it go to voicemail, but it could be an emergency. The thought made her reach for her phone.
“Bruce,” she said, trying to keep her voice level.
“Hey,” he echoed on the other end of the line. “Is this a good time?”
For what?
She leaned back away from the desk, a half-filled form describing a 1500-year-old vase on the screen before her. He didn’t sound alarmed, much to her relief. Her heartbeat settled some.
“Yes, of course.”
There was a pause hanging on the line for a few moments, reminding her why they were not into calls, to begin with. You couldn’t notice those moments filled with uncertainty in text messages. When Bruce spoke again, it was not what she had been expecting, either, throwing her off once more.
“I found something you’ve been looking for,” he said.
Diana raised an eyebrow, though she knew he couldn’t see it, surprised that he would know what she was after when half the time she didn’t know it herself.
“How do you know what I’m looking for?” she asked.
He let out a small chuckle. Even from across thousands of miles, she could feel him relax.
“Small world. And ours is smaller still.”
“And full of ears, it seems,” she murmured. “What is it?”
“A pendant,” he said. “With a stone that is rumoured to have something trapped inside of it. I’m sure you know the details better than I do, I’m just a… delivery boy, if you please.”
Diana froze, her heart slamming against her ribs once, twice, three times. It could be the wrong one, a small voice in the back of her mind told her. She had been wrong before, and though disappointment had a bitter taste to it, she’d prefer to keep her hopes down for the time being.
Still, this was not the description that could apply to many things, she knew that.
“How did you find it?” Diana asked, straining to hear his answer past the roar of blood in her ears.
“Asked around,” Bruce replied, succinct as per usual. She could oh so clearly imagine him shrugging, as though to ask—how else? “It appeared that John Constantine was in possession of something just like it.”
His tone flattened some.
“And he just gave it to you?”
“Well, I had to ask nicely and attach a check to my request, but he didn’t put up much of a fight.”
Now there was amusement in his tone that made the corner of Diana’s mouth quirk a little.
“I mailed it to you, express courier should be arriving tonight,” he continued. She could hear him moving about, and imagined him pacing the Batcave, restless and unable to keep still. “I’m assuming you’re still at work?”
Diana glanced at her laptop, then at her coffee that had probably gone cold.
“What if I wasn’t?”
“It would be a shame. He would have to come back tomorrow.”
She didn’t like it. That someone would know what she was after felt intrusive somehow. That it had reached Bruce’s ears made her feel like she had slipped though she knew it was not her fault. Bruce Wayne had his own ways of knowing things, ways that she couldn’t and didn’t want to control.
Diana thought of the last—and only—thing that he had sent to her. Her eyes drifted to the safe in the wall on a will of their own. It had been a while since she managed to bring herself to take out the suitcase and look at the glass plate of a photograph inside. Each time she did that, it had made her feel raw and aching, so she had stopped, choosing to hold on to her memories of Steve instead.
And now this.
She wondered if Bruce knew why she had spent the past year looking for that pendant, but she knew that asking that was pointless. He either didn’t know, or he would lie, and without seeing his face, she wouldn’t be able to know which one it was.
“How much did you pay?” Diana asked, her voice practical.
“Don’t,” he breathed. “I didn’t do it for that.”
“You didn’t buy it for yourself.”
“You don’t owe me anything, Diana. It’s a favour, we don’t bill for those, remember?” A pause. “It should be arriving within the next hour. I just wanted to tell you it was coming.”
She stayed quiet, trying to convince herself she didn’t hear the hurt in his tone that he had fought hard to mask. It made her own frustration ebb. Bruce had his methods that she didn’t always agree with but Diana didn’t doubt that whatever he had done, he had good intentions behind it.
(Again, she was reminded of having never asked how he had found the photograph. And now here was something else that would make her feel indebted to him even if he would never accept her attempt to make them even.)
“Thank you,” she said, softly.
The pause hung between them, unsaid words and the conversation they had never had but probably should have. She doubted this was the right time to bring it up, though.
She wanted to ask him how he was doing, if he was sleeping enough, if he worked as much as she remembered and whether he was careful in the streets of Gotham. But it was neither her place nor her right to do so. So she pressed her lips together as the silence stretched between them.
“Sure,” he said, after another moment.
“Good night, Bruce.”
After the call was over, Diana leaned back in her chair. She let out a slow breath and rubbed her eyes as she tried to put her thoughts in order.
Thirty-four years ago, in 1984, the Dreamstone, the wishing stone that Maxwell Lord had used to send half of the world into utter chaos, had not been the thing behind Barbara Ann’s transformation into Cheetah. Not entirely. When the spell brought on by the stone had been broken, shattering the illusion of Steve’s return and reversing everything it had affected to the way it used to be, it had not reversed the creature that Barbara Ann had become back into her real self. She had fled, never to be heard from or seen again, the curse that had turned her into Cheetah keeping her hidden away from prying eyes.
To date, Diana had failed to track her down though she had made numerous attempts, at first in anger, hurt by the betrayal of someone whom she had considered a friend. Later, out of a sense of duty, blaming herself for what had happened to Barbara Ann and desperate to stop any pain that Cheetah’s thirst for blood was sure to inflict on the innocent.
We can’t save everyone, Steve had told her once. Diana had proven him wrong, that day, only to watch Veld be wiped out of existence less than 24 hours later, powerless to stop it. Had there been some game of fate at play there, taunting her?
Diana had thought of that day a lot, in the years and decades that had followed. Every what-if had run its course through her mind on an endless loop, from the orange smoke snaking around her legs as she walked through the dead village to the brightness of the explosions high up in the sky mere hours later that had managed to rip open her heart and leave it bleeding out on the concrete airfield. Of the many regrets she carried in her heart, that was the one she didn’t seem to be able to let go of. If she were to give up on Barbara Ann and stop looking for the answers that had set them both on that path, would anyone else care to find them?
And now the amulet that, she had learned through a long grapevine, was meant to help track what was lost—and Diana hoped that this included people who didn’t wish to be found—had finally made its way into her hands.
Well, it would, soon enough.
The thought made her heart constrict and she pushed the nervous flurry of anticipation away.
She had been wrong before. She had run into the proverbial brick walls half a dozen times over the past three decades, having to double back and start from the beginning. Bruce wouldn’t have sent anything to her if he didn’t know for a fact that it was authentic. But Bruce knew nothing about magic, and John Constantine had no qualms with playing a trick on Batman, given a chance.
Once again, she wondered how much Bruce knew. About her, about everything.
After his courier had delivered the suitcase with the photograph from Veld the year before, he hadn’t asked anything and she hadn’t volunteered any information past the brief Thank you for bringing him back to me, feeling fiercely protective of something that private. Both of them had chosen, by an unspoken agreement, to pretend that it had never happened at all instead.
Diana knew he had looked. Though she had been careful to keep as much of her presence in man’s world over the past century hidden away from prying eyes as possible — and had long grown quite adept at that — the fallout of the events in 1984 had been loud and scandalous enough to make it easy for just about anyone to connect the dots and put her on the map. Diana suspected that this was when A.R.G.U.S. and the likes of Lex Luthor might have taken notice of her.
She didn’t like that thought but it was too late to be concerned about it now. She didn’t care much for A.R.G.U.S., and Lex Luthor was merely a footnote in the book of her life. He was not likely to walk out of the Arkham Asylum a free man ever again.
Cheetah, on the other hand, belonged to a chapter that Diana couldn’t quite flip past without seeing it through properly first. And, all things considered, it was right about time that she finally put that story to rest.
The package arrived sometimes after 9 PM.
The night guard signed for it and summoned Diana to pick it up from the after-hours delivery area.
She took it to her office, a padded plastic envelope with the “express” markings and her name and address written in Bruce's blocky handwriting. That her three decades of search could end tonight still felt like an impossibility, and she didn't want to think too hard about it yet.
Inside the envelope, Diana found a small wooden jewellery box adorned with uncomplicated carvings. Something one could find at a flea market any day of the week. For all intents and purposes, it looked nothing like what Diana had expected something holding a powerful artifact to look like.
She set the envelope on her desk, her fingers trembling a little when she lifted the lid of the box.
The stone inside looked like amber — although she knew that it wasn't — and it winked at her when it caught the light of an overhead lamp. It sat on top of a thin silver chain that pooled beneath it.
Diana reached for it, pulling at the chain until she had the pendant hanging before her eyes. And maybe it was the light, or the exhaustion of a long day, or maybe even her wild hope to finally bring this journey to an end, but she could have sworn that she saw something move within it. Like water. Or smoke.
Constantine wouldn't have dared mess with Bruce on this if he knew who Bruce was buying the pendant for. But Bruce preferred to keep his personal affairs close to his chest. If the stone went up in flames in her hands like a Roman candle, she was going to have a few words with the sorcerer, Diana thought grimly.
Her phone chimed on the desk.
Got it? she read the text from Bruce that lit up the home screen.
She set the box down and picked up the phone, still holding the pendant by the chain in her other hand. Got it, thank you, she typed back before tucking her phone into the back pocket of her pants.
She was going to figure out how to use it, she mused absently, her fingers brushing against the stone as she turned it towards the light. Merely finding it was one half of what—
The lights in her office flickered, blinking in and out once, and then twice. At almost the same moment, the security alarm started to blare somewhere above her, triggered by the power surge, a piercing sound that slashed across Diana’s senses, making her grimace.
Something occurred to her then, making her swear under her breath and drop the stone back into the box on the desk as she yanked the door open and hurried into the dimly lit hallway. If the fire sprinklers came on as well, they would ruin numerous pieces of art not protected by glass casings. Not to mention the parquet floors.
The mental image was chased by another one—what if someone had broken into the museum? What if none of this had been about faulty wiring?
Diana dashed upstairs, passing the elevator that should have been deactivated the second the alarm came to life, and hurried towards the main entrance concourse. There were supposed to be half a dozen night guards on duty, but she didn’t know where they were, or if they were hurt.
The alarm cut off then, just as suddenly as it had come on, plunging the centuries-old building into such utter silence that it made her ears ring.
There was no water coming from the ceiling, much to Diana's relief, though the only lights were the emergency ones still, the system waiting to be rebooted.
She slowed down as she reached the final step leading into the concourse area, which would normally be bustling with life but was eerily quiet and dark at this hour. Her hand reached for the Lasso at her hip. She would have to make sure that everything was alright, that whatever had happened, the night guards had it under control, before she could go home.
The railing of the bannister was cool and smooth beneath her palm, polished by the millions of hands that had touched it over the years.
There was someone standing beneath the glass pyramid, pale moonlight slanting over them through sixteen hundred glass panels. A man in a thick overcoat, from what Diana could see. His back was to her and he was looking wildly around.
He didn’t look like a burglar, if she had to venture a guess.
For a second, Diana assumed he was a tourist who had somehow managed to get stuck inside after closing and was just as startled by the wailing of the alarm as she had been. It had happened before, once. A woman from Argentina had lost her way in the labyrinth of hallways and had been frantic when she was discovered, certain she would be locked in for the night.
At the sound of her heels on the marble floor, the man whipped around, his face pale and his mouth a little slack, opening and closing without a sound.
Diana stopped, the world tilting and sliding off its axis around her when their eyes met.
She watched a faint frown appear between the man's brows.
"Diana ?"