000.
Viperidae / Viper

Like all ambush predators, the viper knows its environment with every inch of its body.

When Jude takes a seat under God's roof on a Sunday morning, it is not for the sake of seeking out salvation, but on the promise of a job.

In the foraging cycle, ambush predators chose variants of the sit-and-wait strategy in place of active pursuit to capture their prey. Patience is the virtue that the viper knows well, coiled into her spine with the steel-boned discipline.

What was it that Aminta had said once, in the rosé drunk evening blush, toasting to yet another success and twenty million dollars to split between them—we do not chase, we attract?

In her hand, the burner phone is a blazing beacon, a smoking gun. There's something ironic about a professional thief being reverse-pickpocketed, but at least she'd noticed the additional weight in her pocket almost immediately after the phone had been slipped into the pocket of her leather jacket on the way to the bodega.

It'd only taken seconds for the exchange to happen, for Jude to pick up on the presence of the device, and for the text to come in. Unknown number. Two texts. One of them, a set of coordinates to a place within the city and a time. Very espionage-like. And the second, a simple message: Where's your heart, Viper?

And there it was: a red laser point, a sniper's mark, practically burning into the place right above her heart. Self-preservation kicked in, and Jude barely had time to wonder who could've put the target on her back before she was already moving, glancing around trying to locate the sniper, and pulling her hood over her head as she disappeared into the crowd of pedestrians.

What other choice had she been given?

Another irony is the church located in the heart of the most unholy city, a church that withstands the deceit and the darkness, a church that exists despite the crippled morality of Gotham.

Jude feels like an invasive species under these hallowed rafters and on these blessed grounds. She doesn't know the first thing about scripture, and her morals are a thing of speculation, the way the Mothman may or may not exist.

As the priest drones on, the first thought that strikes Jude is how easy it would be to rob this church blind. Every single person filling the pews of St Agnes' Church were money trees in a holy orchard waiting for their wallets to be cherry-picked. Stewing in the stench of goodwill and communion, Jude wonders if everyone here is made of the same stuff—the hopeless naivety, the unwitting trust in their neighbours' moral standings. If she wanted to, she could lift every single penny out of their pockets without them noticing. Did such impure thoughts mean that she was going to burn in hell? If God was omniscient and all-powerful, did that make him a dictator?

Keeping her gaze trained on the green beam of sunlight leaking in through the stained glass window, Jude figures she's better off keeping her mouth shut. Such questions would warrant her a second look, and, despite her attendance at today's mass, Jude didn't need to draw any attention to herself. It's why she'd slipped in through the double doors, undetected, just as mass began, and chose to seat herself at the back of the church. Jude was atheistic, and she had a feeling some of the Catholics had some sort of radar that sensed if there was a non-believer amongst them.

Just because she has a predilection for pathological lying and hoarding shiny objects that aren't hers doesn't mean St Agnes' Church would suddenly gain sentience and spit her back out onto the pavement the moment she set one foot onto the hallowed ground, even if she collected sins on her sticky fingers like trophies and medals.

"My brothers and sisters, today we rejoice in the Easter season," preaches the priest at his stand, the sunlight gilding his white robes in a halo, a dove amongst the pigeons, "let us continue to believe in the resurrection of Christ, the power of new life, despite our failings and difficulties that we face in life, let us allow the Lord to breathe his life and peace into our troubled lives."

Fingering the fleshy ridges of an old scar on her chin from an accident she barely remembers, Jude cocks her head, barely masking the boredom etched on her face with a carefully blank expression. Spirituality has never interested her. Biding time, the smell of ink on the copy of a blueprint, the pulse-thrilling click of a lock elicited from quick fingers, a ladder of plans unravelling into another ladder of plans branching out in strategic plays—that is Jude's religion.

Not mass on Sunday mornings or the cracked bible that the old lady sitting in the front pews closest to the altar holds between her gnarled and trembling fingers. And when the priest makes his request for everyone to put their hands together to pray, Jude gets down on her knees like everyone else, hating every second that she is forced to bow her head for a man she can't even see, and prays, but it is only for posture.

She stares up at the confession box in the corner of the church, just off to the side of the altar.

Before today, Jude has never set foot in a church before, and she's never entertained the delusion that she could save her soul by the compulsion of Christ. Granted, as some sort of sick power play that Jude has yet to understand, this is where she's meant to meet her handler, where she will be assigned a new mission of the underhanded, under-the-table sort. The line of work she's ascribed to is godless. There is no room for anything but the blood and the guts.

There was no God, only what you wanted.

"In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit, amen."

All along in the dark days, Jude Cross has to stop herself from wondering if the life she leads is really hers. Distractions come easy. Jobs surface every now and then, even though paying back the crippling debt she owes Gotham—where the tarmac seemed to cling to the soles of her combat boots like a ball and chain—sets her plans for escape back by years.

Even though both her and Scout are still living in the same crummy apartment they've been stuck in since Jude could afford rent, Jude tells herself to be grateful. Grateful that they're not like the other gutter-children still living out of a cardboard box at the mouth of a dumpster, or those pullet-thin kids with scars for faces churned through the foster system. Gotham was a prison, but they were free to roam the streets, free to pull wallets from pockets like a magician's hat trick, only, the show was private to themselves.

Despite the positive reinforcement, Jude can't quite excise the feeling that there should be more. That if the world could make natural coal mines spit out diamonds amidst the soot, it could grant her the lavish life she deserved. A life where they didn't have to get by, or stress over the rent and the bills. A life where they could get out of Gotham and its desperate skyscrapers and the shackles it'd put them in the second they'd been washed up on its filthy concrete shores.

Finally, Jude musters up the gall.

What do you want from me?

A beat passes, and then another, and another, and there's still no answer. Jude wonders if this is what it feels like, seeking refuge in and begging for miracles from a higher power. It's not the same situation, but it's a similar power distance.

She tries again.

What do I do now?

Thumbs hovering over the keyboard, Jude lets out a steady breath.

The phone buzzes.

You wait.

Jude resists the urge to scowl. Whoever's on the other end of the line must be watching her, a puppeteer playing her on strings. And so she acknowledges that they're in control now. But she will not grant them the satisfaction of cracking her composure.

So she leans back against her seat, and tips her head back, eyes glittering like she's holding the secret to the universe captive. And smiles. In the winding, twisting trajectory of her elusive and dishonest life, Jude has shed a thousand skins, each one more deadlier than the last. She has worn a thousand faces, not one more decipherable or truer than the last. She has bared her fangs and let the venom drip through. She knows how this goes, how a woman must be perceived as weak to be acknowledged as a woman, how one has to give a little before they can take. Let them take the higher ground. She'll take them for everything they've got. The Viper sits amidst the Sunday mass-goers, eyes attuned to the shadows.

She waits.

✷

I. EARLY LIFE

A baby girl is born on a train thundering down the tracks of a mountain range on the crest of Nevada just crossing into California to an audience of a tightrope walker, a trapeze artist acting as a midwife, their Ringmaster, and all the acrobats, musicians, jugglers and hoopers waiting with their hands clasped to their chests outside the Cross' carriage. When the baby lets loose a bellow loud enough to shatter glass, all Aline Cross can think when she sees her baby girl for the first time is, shit, how am I going to get in shape in time for Thursday's act?

Later, Aline would wonder if motherhood was the right choice. Every mother in the world would tell any anxious mother-to-be that the joy of holding their baby for the first time would numb the pain of childbirth, and nothing else would matter except for this life that she'd just created. If this tiny thing she held in her palms, this face she was staring at that was an unmistakable amalgamation of hers and some strange man's she'd met at the beginning of their tour that she'd never see again and whom her daughter would never meet, was so miraculous, how come the moment Mary Grayson handed her screaming daughter, the only thing numbing the exhaustion and the excruciating, white-hot pain ripping through her sweat-slicked body was anger. Anger and hatred. For this child had cost her months of performances, and this child had ruined her body. Aline had made the executive choice to keep the baby, sure, but she'd also been pumping with hormones and impulses and she hadn't exactly had time to think about how she was going to deal with a child, this new ball-and-chain shackled to her ankles.

And no matter what her troupe told her, no matter how many assurances that Mary, who had a baby boy of her own who was just a year older than Jude, gave her that she'd help her navigate motherhood, no matter how many times she'd been told that the circus would take care of her and her baby, the anger never ceased.

"A child is a wonderful blessing, and we circus folk love our blessings," Mary had said to her, smoothing her hair back, her blue eyes gleaming with tears. Jude would never know a father, but she would know Mary. And, later, she would know Mary's son. "Your daughter is going to be the best thing to happen to you."

And Aline wanted to ask, So when does the resentment stop?

Being born into the nomadic life, the train, a perpetual motion machine chugging tirelessly down the rails, means that Jude has never known which soil her unofficial birth certificate had been signed on except that she is a Haley's Circus baby, and her body belongs to the spotlight and performance is in the flesh and the blood.

And it wouldn't matter, for the most part, because Jude realises that, even though she has never set foot in the same place twice in a single year, she has always known stability in the family she travels with. A family that extended beyond the blood, beyond the tightrope walkers, a family that branched out into the technicolour mosaic of clowns, acrobats, trained animals, trapeze acts, musicians, dancers, hoopers, tightrope walkers, jugglers, magicians, unicyclists, as well as other object manipulation and stunt-oriented artists that made the circus. A family of many mothers and many fathers, of many sisters and brothers who would watch her back, who would clap during her first tightrope walk without guidance, who would worry when her mother finally took down the net and allowed her to walk the rope with nothing beneath to catch her except blind faith and sheer skill, and who would be there to ice the bruises on her cheek when her mother struck her.

Growing up a circus baby wasn't all bad. In retrospect, her upbringing had granted her the strength and the tools she'd needed to get by. In fact, discounting the days that her mother stopped taking her medication, life with the travelling circus wasn't terrible at all. But the silver linings were a little hard to find, and only when Jude dispelled all thought of her mother could she reach them. She loved the smell of popcorn on nights they blew up the striped tents and the way the ground always shook when the crowd roared with laughter and stamped their feet. She loved how it was always warm and how the crew always picked her up and hugged her. She loved the fireworks and the flames and the lights and all the flashing colours. Colours so vibrant they made her little heart tremble from the overwhelming incredibility of it all.

Most of all, she loved her family, and how they protected her every chance they got. A family like that only came by through luck. And for a little while, Jude considered herself lucky.

Jude's first memory is of the medication.

Not hers, but her mother's. A simple, plastic bottle, translucent orange and cylindrical, small enough to fit into the heart of her palm, and pills that rattled like tiny white teeth when she shook it. Pills that, when her mother swallowed, magically made her transform into someone else, like a veil that came down over her mother until she was no longer sharp, whetted by her resentment and callousness.

Back then, Jude hadn't known that her mother was sick. But she had known that her mother's love started as a warmth—fierce hugs and fleeting smiles and that ironclad belief that Jude could do anything—but only later would Jude realise, too late, that it was a forest fire sweeping down the hills of her childhood, and she was left choking on the smoke, desperately clawing for ground to avoid getting burned.

Back then, Jude hadn't known the word for it, but one moment, her mother could be crazy, talking so fast the words blended into each other, constantly moving, her eyes so dark Jude didn't think she wanted to know what was behind them, and the next, she could be staring out the window looking at the tracks like she wanted to throw herself under the wheels. Sometimes, she woke Jude up in the middle of the night and forced her into the military routine of physical conditioning like some sort of drill sergeant, and only when another troupe member came to snap her out of her madness would she relent. Those nights, there was a fog in her eyes, but not like a lack of focus that the medication smoothed over the sharp edges with, but a sort of mania, like she was possessed by something evil. Sometimes, she screamed so loud that Jude thought she would never stop, and sometimes, Jude caught her mother standing over her bunk like a ghost, just staring at her, but not like she was watching over Jude.

Sometimes Jude thinks her mother might kill her.

Jude is two when her mother starts her off on tightrope walking. She gets her own pair of shoes, and they are pink, just like her mother's, and her mother stands her onto a makeshift tightrope suspended a foot off the ground. Like a bad organ transplant, it doesn't take. Not immediately. There's no natural flair or talent in her clumsy steps, and Jude clings to her mother's hands so tight she'd left small half-moon craters in her mother's palm. Jude is two and she is a face full of tears and she is not fearless. Not like her mother, who walks backwards on a rope strung two hundred feet above the ground. Jude remembers watching from the wings, once, while her mother was performing, and she'd looked more comfortable up there, walking across a rope that looked so thin it was practically invisible from the ground, dancing in the sky like she was hanging up the stars, than she did with Jude in her arms.

Even though Jude is no good on the tightrope, she never stops toddling towards it. Her mother takes it as a sign that her daughter is going to follow in her footsteps, and never stops clinging to this dream.

Jude is three when her mother lets go of her hands and tells her to learn how to fall. She's still on the makeshift rope. Still learning to find her balance and her confidence. And when her mother shows her how to put her arms out and keep her head straight so she knows where she's going, Jude falls and bashes her chin against the floor. All she knows from then is the blood and the screaming, how her mother looked at her like Jude was some kind of monstrosity, like she didn't know what she'd done wrong, and how her mother had panicked and seized Jude by the shoulders and started shaking her so hard Jude would've dislocated her neck if Mary hadn't intervened.

Jude is four when Dick Grayson becomes her best friend. Dick is kind and trusting, all bounce and animated hands gestures when he talks. His dark hair was always messy, even when his mother tried running a brush through it, and his eyes were pools of blue, permanently gleaming with something akin to mischief. His smile was her favourite; one side of his mouth went higher than the other, and she thought he always looked kind of funny.

They'd met before, when Mary had to take Jude out of Aline's hands while Aline was too manic or too catatonic to care for Jude. And when Jude's mother got irritable and started throwing things, Mary would make blanket forts in Dick's bunk and Dick would play with her until her sobs turned into sporadic sniffles that eventually turned into laughter. Dick liked to talk, and Jude liked to listen. Sometimes, she watched him practice with his family. The Flying Graysons were a crowd favourite, and Dick looked so happy on the trapeze, just a body rubber-banding through the air. And on days where her mother is particularly unbearable, when Jude comes to him bruised and battered from falls, Dick would hold her hand until she stopped crying.

Being the daughter of a mad woman is difficult, and even more difficult is being the sole ward and apprentice of an artist who treated her like her existence was an inconvenience, like her birth meant the death and destruction of her career. But it's difficult not because of the pain and the harsh tutelage or the parts of her mother that terrified her, but because Jude knows that her mother can't help it. Can't help that she'd run away from her family (who Jude never knew, but the one time she asked, Jude's mother said that they were all crazy, like Jude could picture a collective insanity worse than the one that'd birthed her) to join the circus when she was sixteen to become a tightrope walker.

Jude is five and they are watching the sunset through the window as the train crosses into Vegas when Scout is born, another child fathered by a faceless man whom neither daughter will meet, another child whom aline would foster a secondary hatred for. Jude is five when she sees the look on her mother's face when Scout is presented, wrapped in a soft blanket the colour of milk. It scares Jude. While everyone else coos and gushes over Scout, her mother's face is blank and her eyes are black flames burning through the night.

Months later, her mother puts her on the real rope and she is still afraid, but she knows that if she cries, her mother would not be so forgiving. And there's Scout to protect. Scout, who is just a baby, sitting like a pearl in her arms at night when their mother is shaking from the withdrawal of her medication. And so, Jude focuses on the net. When she falls, again and again, Jude doesn't scream. Even when she gets it right, even when she makes her first successful walk across the tightrope with the help of a wooden beam to correct her balance, she can hear her heart beating against her skin for the rest of the night.

One good thing about Scout's birth, however, is that it'd heralded a new beginning for her mother. She'd started taking her medication regularly, and never missed a dosage. She'd started treating Jude kinder, and though she was awkward with Scout, though she sometimes let someone else hold Scout for hours so she could disappear for hours, sequestered in her tent where she would pace back and forth on her tightrope, looking like she could breathe for the first time in years, there was no mistaking the shift. Their mother wasn't happy, but for a good year and a half, their mother didn't scream or try to put her head through the window or make them run laps up and down the corridor until the sun came up. For awhile, things were okay.

Jude is six when she starts performing with her mother. She's good, now. Not as good as her mother who can do every trick on the rope without even wobbling once, but good enough to be a new addition to the circus act. They become the Skywalking Crosses, the first mother-daughter duo to defy gravity together. And the crowd eats it up.

Jude is seven when she gets it. When she becomes the girl who walks the tightrope with her eyes closed. It hadn't been her idea. Jude never considered herself adventurous, but her mother had big dreams, and, that same night, even though Jude had only mastered one successful walk across the rope with a blindfold on, she'd been made to perform with her . And Jude had begun to notice the changes in her mother. When they stop in towns for days, she's gone for hours, and nobody can find her until she comes back to the campsite looking roughed up and delirious. Sometimes she has that wild look in her eyes, like she's seen freedom and found divinity within it. Once, while Jude had been practicing tightrope walking, her mother had raised the rope an extra six feet. It took awhile for Jude to adjust to the new height, but she'd gotten it quickly enough that her mother would move onto the next physics-defying trick. Jude would come to regret trying to make her mother happy.

Because the next trick is unorthodox and so dangerous that Mr Haley had forbidden it in practice, and yet, her mother still went ahead to tie knives to the ends of Jude's new walking slippers and forced her onto the ropes. After, Jude runs to Dick, and while she shakes hard enough to make her teeth chatter, he holds her and kisses her hair and hums in her ear like his mother does to him each time he gets a bad dream.

(Sometimes, Dick wonders if Jude's mother does the same when Jude gets a nightmare.)

In a month's time, Jude would become the girl who walked on the edge of knives, suspended hundreds of feet above the ground, and her mother would become the first tightrope walker to perform without a net.

Scout is three when their mother snaps over Scout's refusal to eat her carrots. When her mother raised her hand to strike Scout, Jude was already moving, and she'd thrown herself over Scout's quaking body just in time to take the hit. A hand, a flash, a reckoning, and there was the pain that blasted through Jude's body. And no matter how much her mother threatened, no matter how hysterical she sounded, no matter how scared Jude was, Jude wouldn't budge. And, okay, fine, be that way. That night, Jude took the beating instead. From then on, for years until she is nine, Jude takes every one of Scout's beatings until her skin no longer bruised like peaches, until she no longer cried.

When Jude is eight, she commits her first sin.

Gotham City sticks out like a decaying cavity, an unholy tooth in need of extraction. Whenever they stop in this city, Mr. Haley never lets any of the children out of the central tents. There's always at least three crew members with them, and Jude holds onto Scout a little tighter, and Dick never lets go of her hand when they're not performing or at rehearsals.

Perhaps it is the uncleanliness of Gotham, this nefarious miasma the city can't shake that reminds Jude of something spoiled and rotting, that infects her with an insidious malice. One that not even her mother is capable of. Over the years, Jude had grown some kind of skin, one that covered up all her soft parts until she no longer recognised herself, until she no longer bled each time she brushed up against the sharp edges of the world. Jude had stopped crying when her mother struck her. Instead, she learned to pretend that she was elsewhere, that her skin wasn't really her skin, and her mind was somewhere else, until she became a voyeur of her own body, watching her tempest of a mother bear down on her with a rage that should've made her come unravelling at the seams, a mess of tears and screaming until her throat was scraped raw. She saw the evil in her mother. She saw the sickness, too.

The night before the final performance, Jude packs her bags and hides them in a corner of the performing tent, and when Dick finishes his act and comes up to her grinning so wide Jude wanted to cry, she gives him a hug so tight Dick chokes. The night of the final performance before they'd leave Gotham for New York, Jude leaves a note for Dick to find, later, when everyone's back on the train. A parting note that read: "see you down the road." Even though she had no intention of seeing her best friend ever again. Because "goodbye" was bad luck, and circus performers loved their superstitions, and Jude never wanted anything bad to happen to Dick.

Jude is eight when she cuts her mother's tightrope.

When she falls, her scream is the only thing Jude can hear as she takes Scout and steals away into the night. And when she turns her back on the ring, Jude barely hears the thud of her mother's body hitting the ground and her bones breaking over the crowd's horror. But, no matter how fast Jude runs, it is her scream that haunts Jude all the way into the city.

Bad luck, Jude tells herself, as she slips away with Scout on her hip and a backpack full of her possessions hitched over her shoulders. Bad luck happens when you turn away from the performing ring. Every circus performer clings onto this superstition with a tenacity like no other. Bad luck was what got their mother killed.

Jude is eight when she sees it in the paper, as she's squatting in an alleyway that next morning, and a loose page had fluttered by like tumbleweed in the gust of wind that sent documents flying and pulled hats from heads of pedestrians. It lands by Jude's feet in some kind of poetic justice. And when she reads the headlines that tell of the tragedy of Aline Cross, and her two-hundred-foot fall from grace, Jude feels nothing.

Then, she sees it. The headline beneath it: The Fall of the Flying Graysons. And her heart stops. Panic seizes her as she combs the article— John and Mary Grayson took a tumble to their deaths, leaving behind their son, Dick Grayson, and though Jude feels her the pain claw at her chest for Mary was like the mother she never had and John had always been nothing but kind and funny, the relief is instant. Dick was alive.

Somehow, though, she feels like it's all her fault. She'd turned her back on the ring. She'd damned them all.

Jude is eight when she learns that guilt is a wound inflicted by a ricocheting memory that never stops eating at you, one year at a time.

✷

II. CRIMES BEGIN

Night falls like a tightening noose.

Gotham is not a kind city. Even in the day, the sun turns its back on the streets, and the city is more of a stain on the map, a stain on the soul, a stain that you can't scrub no matter how hard you try. Nothing stays clean in a city like this, and, already, Jude has blood on her hands. Everyone is capable of horrible things, and under enough pressure, even a worm would turn. Gotham taints everything she touches, and she sucks the life out of the marrow, taps hopes dry. What hope did two little girls have against a city where dreams come to die? Only time would tell. She robs the unsuspecting and the naive blind, devouring self-respect, mutilating morals. But while Gotham takes and takes and takes, she also gives, and that is why she has always felt more like a mother than Aline Cross.

For years until Jude is eleven, it is just herself and Scout against the world. Against the freezing winters and the rainy days where the water chokes the gutters with trash and dead vermin, against the bad men and their weapons and the way their seedy eyes seem to dissect Jude's tawny body, against the city and its festering evils. The first time Jude steals, she does so without finesse. It is not an act of greed, rather, a measure of desperation. You can go days without food, Jude knows this, but the longer you are without it, the weaker you get, and this city eats the weak for breakfast. And Scout—she's just a baby, just a child who has to live with the consequences of Jude's irrational choices, which had been a necessary evil at the time, but a choice still born from malice.

For years until Jude is eleven, they almost die so many times Jude isn't sure if she's survived by the skin of her teeth or if hell looks just like a city with no discernible horizon.

At first Jude is confident that they'll make it, that they'll find some place safe and live on peanut butter and chocolate for the rest of their days. High on the adrenaline pumping through her body, electrifying every frayed nerve, making her feel invincible and ready to conquer the world, Jude holds tight to her things and Scout and the belief that there's nothing that could possibly take from them. Now that they'd defeated the sole evil in their life, what could they possibly not overcome? But, that's just it. A feeling. Fleeting and fickle and faltering within that first night in the city when Jude finds an alleyway, temporary shelter to let her rest her weary feet and calm her thundering heart. By then, the bravado's begun to sputter and die and Jude knows she's riding on the coattails of something that'd been set into motion that couldn't be stopped. This was where the plan ended and Jude's options were running out.

In the city, the smog is so thick that they choke on it, and the layer of grime becomes a second skin, and the amount of soot they breathe in makes their eyes water and their lungs feel like they're on fire. Scout starts coughing and doesn't stop. At night, Jude shushes her, eyes streaming with involuntary tears, desperation and fear clawing her heart raw as she watches their surroundings in periphery. Every sound they made was a gunshot ricocheting against the walls, drawing the attention of every bad thing in the city. And Jude could do nothing but clutch her little sister tight, press them into the walls and into the space behind the garbage bins, and pray.

They spend a year on the streets, living on trash and blankets in dingy alleyways behind diners where the kinder waitresses would sneak them some food every night. Until Jude learns not to count on the mercy of miracles and that living on the charity of strangers makes them a bigger target, and so she learns to take.

Gotham is a harsh tutor, but Jude is a quick student.

She starts off small. Every now and then, she'd steal enough fruit from nearby grocers, cramming apples, oranges, anything she can get her hands on, down her shirt and sprinting as fast as her little legs can carry her back to where she'd left Scout under the cardboard box they lived out of.

Sometimes, Jude thinks about Dick Grayson, about how she used to shake so hard after a long fall or a blind slip that she thought her limbs might come unhinged at the joints and he would do nothing but hold her together and kiss her hair and hum songs they heard on the radio. From time to time, Jude feels the pangs in her heart, feels them echo in her bones how much she misses him. It starts to feel like a reminder that she's alone now. Alone and shipwrecked with a child who is less company and more burden (though she'd never tell Scout this), in a world of tall shadows and air that seems to stick to her skin and dirt that wouldn't come off no matter how hard she scrubs. 

Despite the brave face she puts on, the hunger that makes her sharp, beneath all that Jude is scared all the time. And some shameful part of her wishes she hadn't cut the rope, hadn't turned her back on the ring.

Maybe she'd still be in pain, bruised by her mother's perennially oscillating moods, but there was no fear in Haley's Circus. And she wasn't alone. And she wasn't starving. And Scout wasn't sick all the time.

Jude is nine when she witnesses the first con, learns about deceit, which she now knows is small-fry. Just a get-rich-quick and cash-out-fast scheme. But she takes note of the way the man stumbles into the moving car, clutching his bleeding head, where a gash has appeared, pouring blood down his face. There's a flash of something silver in his palm before he secrets the razor away. Nobody else catches it, but Jude does. She'd seen the whole thing from the alleyway she'd been sitting in, peeling an orange with dirt-caked fingers. Scout has her hand jammed inside her slobbering mouth, and gurgles a little laugh when the man writhes on the ground, groaning in feigned pain. And when the driver hands him a thick wad of cash, and drives away, fear scrawled over her face, Jude catches the man's eye. He throws her a wink and kisses the cash.

When Jude turns eleven, she has acquired herself a weapon, a steak knife stolen from a diner, and she's used it on anyone who dared to take Scout from her. At eleven, Jude is a feral thing, a girl who snarls and struggles, a girl whose hair is knotted and whose skin is streaked with grime. At the time, Jude only cared for survival, and when the night came, she made Scout a bed out of her cardboard box and stashed her behind the big garbage bins.

It is with that knife that she threatens the life of a messenger boy on his way to work. She remembers the wait—she'd memorised his route, having watched him pass by the alleyway she'd been squatting in for weeks—and then the pounce, knocking him from his bike, sending them both to the ground in a catastrophic crash. She remembered the way her knee burned from scraping it on the pavement, and how his skin and shirt had torn against the rough concrete, and how his blood stained the ground. Jude had pinned him down, by sheer willpower, whetted by hunger and desperation, alone, and he could see it in her eyes, the mania that made her sharp as she snarled at him. She remembers the way the edge of the blade pricks the delicate dermis of his neck and draws a bead of blood with utmost clarity.

Torture has never interested Jude, and she never really had a lust for spilling blood, or enacting violence, but where its application is necessary, and where it yields results, Jude would commit. And after he hands over his wallet and phone, Jude kisses the money and throws him a wink before disappearing down the street.

✷

III. CRIMES CONTINUE

Selina Kyle was a swift and pervasive presence in Jude's life, puncturing the daily, like a wound that Jude couldn't look away from as she bled out.

This was around the era where Jude had learnt that the fire-escapes attached to the sides of apartment buildings led somewhere, and if you were smart enough, you'd never have to spend a day without a roof over your head ever again. By the time the nights in Gotham grew darker with the blood running in the streets and the sounds of gunfire answered the pounding of Jude's heart and Scout had stopped crying every time a new threat lurked in their alleyway, offering a syringe and a rotten smile with blackened teeth, Jude had wizened up. Two and a half years on the streets had led Jude to the conclusion that Gotham sought to weed out the weak, and the two Cross sisters were sitting ducks waiting for the culling. A wall at their back wouldn't keep them safe, and they couldn't sleep on the streets forever.

The third house that Jude had broken into and started squatting in belonged to a reporter whose residency was a seasonal event, and when he was away on business for months at a time, chasing stories in the torrid war zones of the Middle East, Jude returned to the apartment with the faulty lock on the study window.

At first, Jude slept with her shoes on, Scout in her arms and the backpack still slung over her shoulders—all her possessions on her person in the case that she needed to make a quick getaway—and every glare of headlights strobing the room through the blinds was the man's car pulling up to park on the street, and every creak of the floorboards or metallic clink of keys whenever someone in the next apartment over entered and left their own place was him coming home. After awhile, Jude clocked into the rhythm, and learnt to trust the routine. Still, she never let her guard down. That was how you survived Gotham.

A month into her second round of squatting in apartment 8C, Jude began to relax into the atmosphere.

During the summer when the air clung to their skin and the humidity made the wallpaper peel, Jude would sit in the hallway stairs, Scout by her side, and watch the neighbours pass them by through the railings. Throughout her time here, Jude had spent an inordinate amount of time watching people; it's the only thing you can do when you're homeless, and the only entertainment available is what's out there, the streets a tableaux of action. It's better than TV, because in real life, you get to watch what happens when things actually happen, watch the consequences unfold from the actions, and Jude's gleaned a lot of valuable information from the street beyond her alleyway.

The first time Jude spots Selina, someone loses their wallet.

It's Skeezy James from 8A, the apartment down the hallway at the end of the corridor. Jude doesn't know anything about him except that he smells like cheap beer and vomit all the time, and his mouth is permanently curled into a leering grin, and he walks in that lurching gait, like he's about to keel over and die or attack you at any moment.

That day, Jude and Scout had found some orange lollies in the back of the reporter's freezer, and had treated themselves to their spoils. For the first time in months, Scout wasn't sick and weak and her skin had maintained its lively flush. For the first time in months, they were clean and the beds of their nails weren't caked black in grease and grime.

Skeezy James was stumbling along the hallway, trudging up and down with footfalls so heavy Jude thought the ground might shake and the walls were trembling. He was singing, off-key and tone-deaf, slurring his words so much Jude couldn't tell if he was singing in English or some other language that lacked hard sounds. When he passed them, Jude put a hand in front of Scout, like he might try to snatch Scout from her, but James barely slanted them a glance and kept pacing, the bottle of beer in his hand swinging like a club.

And there she was: the most stunning woman Jude had ever seen. She wore a black leather jacket and tight black jeans and heeled boots, but Jude never heard her coming up the stairs. She came up soundlessly, not like a mouse, but something more predatory. Jude didn't recognise her. But when she stopped at the door right beside the reporter's apartment, Jude ascertained that there was something strange about her. In the few months that Jude had squatted in 8C, Jude lived like a mouse in a hole in the wall, cautious to the point of timid and skittish. She knew everyone on this floor. She knew their personalities through the walls. She'd observed and studied their routines like clockwork, like the back of her hand, and knew when it was safe for her to come outside. Until now, Jude had assumed apartment 8D had been unoccupied.

(Jude knew better than to stay in unoccupied homes; it was too risky, considering people always came in and out after viewing the place. Plus, the hot water never worked.)

Most people standing at their doors with intention of unlocking it always fumbled clumsily with the small keys that the landlord had bestowed upon them, but the woman's fingers were deft and nimble, picking out the right key with efficiency and slotting it into the lock. But before she could enter, Skeezy James sauntered past her, brushing up against her with abrasive force, even though there was more than ample room in the corridor for them to not even touch.

The woman looked up, her gaze cool but sharp as a razor's edge and her almond-shaped eyes narrowing fractionally, and Skeezy James stared back, grinning wide and sick and wicked. When he came up to her on his next lap of the corridor, the woman's lips pulled up in a chilling smile. It happened so quickly that Jude almost missed it. By then, he had her against the door, cornered, an animal about to devour its prey, and Jude rose to her feet, fear icing her veins, wanting to scream: why aren't you fighting? The door is at your back, open it and leave him in the heat!

In a blink, Jude saw the woman's hand slip into his pockets, fish out his wallet, and disappear it into the folds of her own jacket. And he hadn't once noticed the one-sided exchange. 

Jude's jaw went slack. It was like witnessing a magic trick. Back at the circus, there were magicians and their tricks, and Jude knew an illusion when she saw one. This was one of those sleight-of-hand tricks, one that rendered one person victim and the other criminal. And it was just as fascinating.

Each time the woman passed someone in the hallway, Jude watched her pick their pockets, not even a shift in her otherwise cool expression.

Selina was a lesson in contradictions. She was dark all over, from her leathery clothes that seemed to mould to her supple body, to her night-black lipstick and coal-smudged eyelids, and eyes that gleamed like burnt gold, but her voice was silken and light, and where Jude expected coarseness, there was nothing but an artless elegance, and where Jude expected tender softness, there was that smile that Selina gave every neighbour who talked too much, that jagged, skeletal upward slash of her lips where her pearly teeth gleamed like a blade. And there was the way she always came and went but was never heard, never seen. Just a shadow slinking along the hallways.

Months pass and Jude vacates and comes back to the apartment 8C when the reporter returns from his trip and is then whisked away once again. December brings a blanket of sleet and Scout catches a cold again. Jude does her best, but this time, it feels different. Scout gets weaker and weaker, and the cold eats at her with a frightening ferocity. Scout's always had trouble breathing, but each time she coughed, Jude could feel every bone in her body pressing against her skin like she was holding a shivering bird in her palm. And it sounded like her lungs were filling with water. When Scout's breathing turns from laborious to desperate, Jude panics.

And then Scout, clawing at her throat, gasps, "I can't breathe. Jude, I can't breathe. I can't breathe—"

Fear electrocutes Jude into motion, lashing down her spine as she hoists Scout out from under the blanket and drags her out into the hallway as her body convulses. Jude thinks she screams. There's a flurry of confusion, doors opening and heads poking out, people staring until they spot the two strange girls in the middle of the hallway. Chest heaving, Scout writhing in her arms, pale as death, her ragged breaths dragging nothing into her concave chest, Jude sobs and begs and shrieks: Help her! She's going to die! Help me! Please! Everything else from there becomes a blur. Someone shouts: Call 911!

Lights in her eyes. Hands moving her. The squeal of tires against the tarmac as they pull into a parking lot. And then: someone grabbing her arm and shaking her, calm down, calm down, can you listen? She's going to be alright, the doctors have her now, can you tell me your name? Where are your parents? All these questions and words flying over Jude's head and none of them making any sense in the moment and all she could answer with was I don't know, I don't know, she's dying, she can't breathe, just help us!

And then: the waiting room in the hospital. The air smells sterile and stings Jude's eyes. Under her legs the plastic chair is sticky and uncomfortable and Jude draws her knees up to her chest and hugs her legs close to her body. There's a woman with her—not the one Jude saw that day with Skeezy James, but an older woman, with three kids of her own and whom reminds her of Mary Grayson when she holds Jude's hand and strokes the back of it with a thumb while they wait for Scout to come out.

Scout is eight years old and the bearded man in the white coat holding the clipboard says to the woman, whose name Jude thinks is Hannah, that Scout has cystic fibrosis. Which means, there's water in her lungs sometimes and it's drowning her from the inside.

After that, Jude feels the world fold around her. They have nothing. There's the hospital stay, the bills that she can't pay, the probability that they're facing separation for good. Scout's going away, and so is Jude. Child Services are coming to get Jude in the morning, and she'll be put into the foster system. Jude doesn't know what that means, but she knows that she cannot afford to lose Scout. And then the reality hits her like a ton of bricks: if they're coming to get her, then they'll know what she did, and then she'll be in big trouble. Panic spears through her chest, and Jude knows she must disappear before they can get her.

They let Jude see Scout when she's stabilised and when Jude sees Scout lying there, so small and so fragile in that big cot, all those wires attached to her body, her heart breaks. She never realised how small Scout was, how skinny she'd gotten. She'd always known that Scout would never survive on her own, but the reality of it was that they'd been lucky.

"Hey, bao*," Jude says, her voice soft and cracking, her bottom lip trembling. "I'm glad you're okay."

At the sound of the old nickname their mother used to call her, Scout smiled weakly. She couldn't speak, but she curled her little fingers around Jude's index finger when she reached out.

"They're going to take me away in the morning," Jude sniffs, and her head throbs, and Scout can only blink at her, concern pinching her expression. "I'm not going. I have to... they'll find out what I did, they'll find out that I'm a bad person, and they're going to lock me up. They're going to take you away, too, but I want you to go with them."

A glimmer of fear flashes in Scout's eyes.

"You'll be safer with them. They can take care of you," Jude says, her voice just barely a whisper. "I can't. I have to go. I'm sorry, I can't protect you anymore, but I promise I'll come back for you. I'll be older and I'll have money, and we'll be together again, I swear it, okay? I'll see you down the road."

Scout's nostrils flared, and the oxygen mask over her nose fogged up as she clung to Jude tighter, eyes wide with terror at the thought of being left behind. Jude swallowed down the lump in her throat and steeled herself as she let go and pulled away. Scout kept clinging, kept fighting, her chest heaving and her eyes misting with silent tears as Jude finally slipped free and turned away. The last thing she saw when she slipped out the door was Scout's hand, still outstretched, reaching, reaching, reaching—

And then Jude was gone.

That night, the skies lit with lightning and clapped thunder, and down poured the rain like an angered god as Jude snuck into apartment 8D through the window she'd jimmied open from the fire escape. As she sprinted back to the building, splashing along the pavement, blinded by the rain, a plan began to take shape in her head. The first of many. And the first thing she needed to do was to learn everything she could from the woman in this apartment.

(There is a piece that bridges the disconnect between the arrival of Jude into Selina's life, a piece that sticks with Jude for the rest of her life and will follow her to the grave, but the first rule among thieves is that you never disclose the full picture, and you never reveal the whole plan, and you never give up your associates, and for all intents and purposes, Selina has to remain a mystery.)

From time to time, Selina disappears on long trips, leaving Jude in the apartment, but when she returns, there's cash and the occasional diamond necklace. You take what you want, Selina said to her, once, the world is an orchard and every shiny thing is yours if you have the guts.

Selina is an enigma, that much, Jude can vouch for even after their first year together as mentor and mentee. She is elusive and evasive, and Jude sees why they call her Catwoman, and it's not just the ears and the mask, but the fluid movement of the money and the way she always lands back on her feet even after free-falling from twenty storeys up. In the dawn of their relationship, it's difficult, figuring out the roles, but Jude picks things up quickly and Selina can see the value in having a partner—one who is young enough to still be cute and knows how to prey on vulnerabilities—to pull small heists with. It's an added bonus that Jude's good with heights and can walk a thin rope connecting the rooftops of two buildings without the insurance of a net beneath her.

Jude earns her title of the Viper when she steals vials of venom from a warehouse belonging to a biotech company. At first, she doesn't understand what it's supposed to do, but a run-in with unwanted company quickly schools Jude in the language of toxins. Anyone who makes the mistake of getting in her way will only know paralysing, excruciating pain for hours. She coats her knives in neurotoxins, the blades flicking like tongues, gleaming like fangs. In some cases, when push comes to shove, she uses the hemotoxins. She never stays long enough to stomach the consequences, but she knows what she's leaving behind. Blood poisoning and cell death, if not a crippled nervous system.

She took the tank of venomous snakes, too. Over the years, the vipers have become her companions. Her only constants.

When Jude is fifteen, Selina starts treating her less like an asset and more like a partner, and they begin to split their spoils evenly. Jude saves her cut and puts it towards locating Scout. By then, Jude's learned every trick in the book, and Selina's imparted all these skills Jude had snapped up with that hunger inside her that twists deep like the roots of a forest. It isn't until Jude is eighteen and has lost count of how many museums she's robbed blind, and how many vigilantes have begun to pick up on their heightened activity, that they finally part ways for the sake of saving themselves from getting caught, and Jude pulls the best heist of all: stealing Scout from right under her foster family's nose. She's got the money, and she's here to fulfil the promise.

And when she finally sees Scout for the first time in years, they're standing on opposite sides of a crosswalk. Scout is walking home from school, and she is older and taller and her face has filled in and she looks different. Healthier. But Jude knows it's Scout, through and through. She looks just like their mother. There are breathing tubes attached to her face, connecting her to the grey oxygen tank she was lugging around on wheels. In that moment, Jude wants to grab hold of Scout and never let go, to run back through time and shed the layers of the missing years like coats. To take it all to the beginning and be girls again. When their eyes meet, Scout doesn't recognise Jude immediately, and would've walked right past her if Jude hadn't called her name, stopping her in her tracks. It's been years, and the relief on Scout's face pinches at Jude's chest until Scout punches Jude in the gut for leaving her behind, not a single word from her for so long.

I'll see you down the road had been parred down to: Found you.

When Jude is twenty-one, Scout gets kicked out of her first year at college for hacking into the systems and deleting years' worth of student records. She says it was a mistake, but Jude knows that her sister has grown a skin, just like Jude had, a decade ago. And as much as Scout played the role of the sweet, soft-spoken ingenue who blushed beet red every time she had to ask for ketchup at the counter, Jude knew she was made of the same stuff. That there was a darkness inside her that resided in every survivor.

✷

The burner phone in her hand vibrates, the screen lighting up with another message.

Any sins you want to confess, Viper? reads the newest text from the unknown number. Better do it now.

By now, it has been forty minutes and the church has emptied, and Jude is convinced that whoever's seeking her out must've wanted to torture her with agonising boredom.

Without further prompt, Jude steps into the confession box, and wonders what she might say, if she intended to confess. Perhaps she might start with an appeal, surrender the truth that she is a creature come crawling out of the tar-black abyss of her own shame. Regardless, all she has ever wanted, she wanted without remorse. She will not talk about the misgivings. She will not bring them to light. Instead, she lets them sit inside her in all the dark places where the holes in her chest breathe like a stupid mistake, she lets them fester and rot, and, eventually, she will let them kill her. All in sure time, of course, but she never speaks about them.

Weaned on cruelty, shaped by its calloused hand, drenched head-to-toe in its DNA, Jude wonders if it was surprising that she turned out this way, or if it was possible she could've been more than this or if she should be repenting. Doesn't Jesus loves his sinners?

Maybe for her, life like this wasn't a choice. Maybe it never has been.

"I have nothing to own up to," Jude says, settling into her seat.

"That's where you're wrong, Viper," a deep voice, heavy with an accent distinctive to one face of Gotham, drawls from the other side of the wall, and Jude's pulse quickens.

At the heart of Gotham, the rot takes root, a black rot that infects Gotham's underbelly with its darkness, black, not like the night, but black in the way that the darkest shade of red turns when the river of blood soaks through. It is a nexus, an infection of spores, spreading through Gotham like a death-touch. The Falcone crime family has helmed this dark since the dawn of its time, has built their empire upon its favour. Upon the throne sits Carmine Falcone, and at his feet are the bones of the bodies he's fed to the rot, a Caravaggio in the flesh. In turn, the rot sustains his family, protects it, and nothing has touched him since.

In all the years Jude has made a living off of crossing Gotham's wealthy and elite, even if they have never seen her face, she's been counting down the days she'd find herself staring down the barrel of her own demise. She just never thought it'd be this soon.

"Carmine Falcone." Jude draws out the syllables of the name like she'd hacked them to pieces and strung them up on her tongue, lips pulling into a small smile as she fights to keep her voice stable. Fights to keep the panic from bursting out of the floorboards of the perfectly composed house she has built the foundations of her self on. Jude touches a hand to the cuffs around her wrists. She flicks the catch and a thin, sharp blade slides out in a flash of metal. It's coated in a neurotoxin, naked to the eye, but deadly to the touch, a hell unleashed upon the nervous system. One little nick of the flesh induces a searing agony that could paralyse a grown man in seconds. It's cruel, but it's effective. It's the way of the Viper. Nature meets adversary without mercy. Jude releases the catch and the blade retracts.

"In the flesh."

It isn't uncommon for people in their line of business to cross paths from time to time, but from the moment Jude had lifted Modigliani's Nu Couché out of the museum, knowing fully well who it belonged to, she'd painted a target on her back.

"What do you want from me?"

"Well, first off, I'd like to finally acquaint myself with the woman who robbed the most tightly secured museum in the world and walked out scot-free and millions richer. I'd like to meet the only woman—the only person—who has ever stolen from me. I can't tell if that was extremely stupid or extremely brave of you. Either way, kudos to you, Miss Cross. I hate to say this, but I'm impressed. So, I thought I'd return the favour. You'll be first thief to rob me and get away with it, and, in turn, I'll be the first one to pin you down."

Jude smirked. "Are you accusing me of something, Mr Falcone?"

"You and I both know it was you who stole my painting," Falcone deadpanned, "as well as your associates, but I thought coming to the mastermind behind the whole... ordeal would be more effective."

"You can't prove it."

Falcone hums in agreement. "You're right. I can't connect you to the crime, but I can certainly make you suffer. After all, you're nothing but a thief, and I'm a very powerful man. But I won't, on the condition that you recompense my losses by doing me a favour."

"What are you saying?"

"You owe me a debt, Cross. So you're going to steal something for me. It's a very delicate job, and discretion is required."

A cool look smoothing over her expression, Jude crosses her arms over her chest. "Not interested."

"Payout's big." Through the screen, Jude hears the sound of a lighter flick, the flame hissing to life. Soon, cigar smoke billows through the little gaps, permeating into her side of the confessional, a swift and pervasive invasion. "You art thieves make, what, three-to-ten percent of the going rate? You pull this job for me, you make more than the peanuts you made off my property, and you'd also be the first person to rob the Justice League and get away with it."

Very few criminals in history have stolen from as many as ten museums—and the vast majority of art thieves, even if they aren't caught, only attempt a museum crime once. The reason for this, as many before Jude have learnt the hard way, is that even after you thwart a museum's security systems, unlatch displays, circumvent guards, and sneak the art out, your headaches have only begun. A unique and traceable piece, whose image will likely appear on the news, is a burden. And trying to monetise such an item is often more perilous than stealing it.

"I'm not looking to get tangled up in whatever business you have with the Justice League. I don't do dirty work for anyone."

"Didn't know snakes have morals."

"Not so much morals," Jude corrected. "More like a code. Keeps me out of prison."

"That's right. You only fish big for yourself. Alright, I can respect that. By the way, how's your sister doing?"

Jude grits her teeth, but maintains her unfazed countenance. "She's fine."

Scout's cystic fibrosis had developed from years of living on the streets, breathing in all that soot and city chemicals. Her lungs had been threatening to give out ever since, and although Jude had the money, there were no lungs that were available for Scout's surgery.

"Really? Last I heard, new lungs are pretty expensive, but I'm sure you're all covered, aren't you? Unless you're saving up for something bigger. Which is why you haven't let her go through with any kind of surgery other than the temporary treatments. Time's ticking, Viper. You can't keep draining liquid from her lungs. I bet you're also haemorrhaging more than you can afford to at this rate. Medical bills just bleed you dry in this country, don't they?"

"What's your point, Falcone?"

"All I'm saying is, you take the job, your sister gets the new lungs she needs, and I can guarantee you both safe passage out of the country and enough for a brand new start in comfort. You have my word."

Jude scoffs. "This is Gotham. Your word means nothing to me. I'll need insurance."

"Of course."

Jude hears the door on the other side creak open. She assumes Falcone had stepped out, and she does the same, only taking a second to check her composure. The moment she steps out, however, she notices the sniper's mark trained on her again, a red laser dot nicely settled over her heart. But Jude's expression doesn't even shift.

"Insurance," Falcone explains, simply.

She catches the scent of his cologne first, perfuming the space like an attack, filling up every crevice as if to edge her out, to make her small. A hint of elemi and drunken vanilla at the heart, the citrine sting of bergamot and cinnamon an overwhelming deluge upon the senses. You're on my turf now, kid, it means to say. It takes Jude by the neck, a vice-like stranglehold like the one he's caught Gotham in.

Much like Jude, Carmine Falcone has worn many skins in his life, has borne many names. The Don, father of his syndicate empire. The Godfather, worshipped by death and dynasty. The Roman, for the Caligula cruelty, capricious in his bloodlust, the hand of his that knows the language of violence intimately.

(Although, if history retains in its memory the fate of Rome, Jude has half a mind to remind the don of the crippling prophecy his primary alias contained.)

When Jude sets her sights on the man himself, sitting on the first row of the pews, she feels nothing but pure, unadulterated rage. Despite his progeny and the familial structure of his business, there is nothing paternal about Carmine Falcone, his dark hair shot through with salt and pepper, slicked back in the way of a raven's crown, his hawk-like eyes assessing, the neat lines of his angular face converging with a startling sharpness. His black suit and shiny watch speak to an excessive wealth, but the hands folded upon the cane propped between his knees are dirty with half the city's blood. Jude eyes the way his fingers flex around the cane's golden head, can recognise the threat bristling in the air.

As if sensing Jude's hostility, Carmine smiles and holds up two passports, tosses them at her feet, cigar smoke coiling around them in thick, curdling tendrils. "This should get you clear at immigration. But you'll need money. You can collect your payment once you've delivered the packages to me."

With an iron grip on her dignity, Jude doesn't crouch down to pick up the passports. Doesn't even spare them a single glance. She will not give him the satisfaction.

"I'm gonna need more information than that. What, exactly, am I stealing?"

Carmine's smile grew teeth. "Just one item from WayneTech."

Amused, Jude lifts a brow. "You want me to steal from Bruce Wayne?"

"You're saying you can't?"

Jude's eyes flash, a subtle gleam, the venom stirring. "I'm saying it's a big request."

"Then there shouldn't be an issue." Procuring a flash-drive from his pocket, Carmine carries on, the blade of her words glancing off him like marble. He set the flash-drive down on the bench right next to the passports. "This should contain all information about those items. If you have any questions, you know how to reach me."

"Now, hold on a second—"

A flash, a reckoning. White-hot pain blasts through the side of Jude's face, sending her reeling. She catches herself against the door of the confessional, blinking the sticky film of tears from her eyes. The cane clicks like a gunshot against the wooden floorboards, the sharp reverb sending a recoil of shock through her.

He'd struck her.

Jude puts a hand to her aching jaw, the bruise already forming, tender and throbbing under her touch. Rage, molten rage, bubbles within her, searing against her insides, turning her vision black with its tenacity. But she doesn't react. She holds her position. She'd stolen from him, an insult to his name and to his notoriety, and here he was, standing over her, holding the crime over her head. He could do worse with that cane. He could've taken her head off if he'd swung it up an inch higher.

She sees this for what it is: a warning shot, a dry bite.

Vipers can extend their fangs and bite without injecting venom. Dry bites enable vipers to conserve their previous venom, which can run out and takes a while to replenish.

Alright, Carmine, Jude thinks, turning her lips up into a gleaming smile, the toxins at the tip of her fingers lust for a taste of don blood. Let's play.

"Do not forget, Viper. If you screw me again, your sister dies."

But Carmine has gotten up and turned his back to her, and was already striding away, throwing a wave over his shoulder, no longer interested in anything she had left to say. The most infuriating part of this was that he'd won. He'd walked away knowing that she would take the bait.

Only when the door slams shut behind him, does Jude unclench her hands, feeling a wetness slick her palms. When she looks down at her hands, where her fingernails had dug crescent moon craters into the heel of her palm, hard enough to drawing blood, Jude lets out the shaky breath she'd been holding.

"Shit," Jude spits, glowering at the double doors, and lets out a quaking breath.

*bao: written 宝 in mandarin, short for 宝贝, meaning precious one.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.
baby dick and jude 🥺🤍 LIKE OKAY???? ONE HOT BEST FRIENDS TO ENEMIES TO RELUCTANT ALLIES TO "I GUESS I STILL CARE ABOUT YOU / I NEVER STOPPED" TO BEST FRIENDS TO LOVERS COMING RIIIIGHT UP. also cannot wait for the dramatic un-masking of both of them in the future hehehehehe

ANYWHOREEEE this took so frickin long and it's 10k words and jesus i could cry