Nine Lives

Once upon a time, they say, a cat is given nine lives. Selina Kyle had spent a great many of hers climbing the rooftops and buildings of Gotham City, but on one particular stormy night, she was about to risk one of them for something far more important than gold.

Selina had cracked a hundred safes in her life, maybe more. But the safe hidden inside Carmine Falcone's penthouse on Grant Avenue was different from all the rest. Falcone was Gotham City's most dangerous crime boss, and word moving quietly through the East End said that his safe held something worth far more than money. It held the deeds to a dozen apartment buildings — buildings full of families, full of children, full of the very same alley cats Selina had fed for years. Falcone planned to tear every one of those buildings down and build a glittering shopping plaza in their place, leaving hundreds of families with nowhere left to go.

That was not a heist Selina Kyle could simply walk past.

She scaled the outside of the penthouse in the middle of a roaring thunderstorm, rain hammering the stone, thunder rolling low across the city skyline. Her clawed gloves found grip on the slick, wet stone one careful handhold at a time, and her whip stayed coiled and ready at her hip the whole way up. Falcone kept guards posted on every floor of that penthouse, but not a single one of them thought to watch the windows. Nobody in Gotham City ever expected trouble to come from outside, thirty stories up in a storm.

Selina slipped through a gap in the building's security grid, one that Falcone's men had never bothered to fix, and found the safe exactly where a quiet tip had promised it would be — tucked behind a large painting, guarded by nothing more than an old-fashioned combination lock. She turned the dial slowly, listening for the smallest click, the way she had taught herself to listen years earlier on rooftops far from here.

The safe swung open. The deeds were right there inside, resting beside neat stacks of cash that Selina left completely untouched. This job, from the very beginning, had never been about the money.

She had the deeds tucked safely against her chest and was halfway out the window when Falcone's men finally spotted her. For one long, heart-pounding moment, it looked as though Selina Kyle's nine lives might just run out on the thirtieth floor of a mob boss's penthouse, in the middle of a storm, far from any rooftop she could call her own.

But then the window beside her shattered inward, and Batman appeared out of the rain and the dark. He had been quietly tailing Falcone's operation for weeks, gathering evidence of his own, and his sudden arrival gave Selina exactly the opening she needed. She vaulted clear across the rooftop, whip cracking out to catch a ledge, and vanished into the storm before Falcone's men could take a single step toward her.

By morning, as grey light crept slowly over Gotham City, the deeds were sitting on Commissioner Gordon's desk, an anonymous tip attached in neat, careful handwriting. Falcone's whole demolition plan collapsed within days, buried under a mountain of sudden legal trouble he could not explain away. The families of the East End never learned exactly who had saved their homes that night.

Selina preferred it that way. She always had.

"You could take credit," Batman told her later, finding her sitting quietly on a rooftop that overlooked the very neighborhood she had just protected. Below them, warm lights glowed in windows that would still be standing come winter.

"Credit's not the point," Selina said softly, watching those lights flicker on, one by one, like a whole constellation returning safely home. "The apartments are. Some things are worth more than nine lives, Bruce."

She had never called him that before. Not once, in all their nights of chases and rooftop conversations and quiet understandings that never needed to be spoken aloud.

Neither of them said another word about it. But high above the rain-washed streets of Gotham City, with the East End glowing safe and warm below them, neither of them forgot it either.

And somewhere down in those saved apartment buildings, a family turned off their lights and went peacefully to sleep, never knowing how close they had come to losing everything — or who exactly had made sure they never would.