Gotham City District Attorney's Office.
One in the morning. The entire building had all but fallen deathly silent. Only a crack beneath an office door at the end of the corridor still leaked a sickly white light.
"You're the lunatic prosecutor who lost seventeen cases in a row and still refuses to get the hell out of Gotham?"
James Gordon pushed open the half-closed frosted-glass door without even knocking.
Carrying the cold damp of the rain and the sour stench of a chemical plant, he hurled the question straight into the quiet office.
Behind the desk, Harvey Dent looked up from a mountain of case files.
His eyes were sunken, his tie hung loose, and his shirtsleeves were rolled to his elbows. Yet his eyes shone with startling intensity, like a lone wolf fixated on its prey in the dark.
"And you're the star detective from Chicago who, barely a month after transferring to Gotham, got beaten beyond recognition in a back alley by his partner and a bunch of his buddies?" Harvey shot back mercilessly.
His gaze swept over Gordon's badly swollen right eye and the scab at the corner of his mouth, and a mocking smile curled his lips.
"Looks like we're both pretty famous in each other's circles." Gordon wasn't angry.
He reached back to close the door, walked over to the desk, and pulled out a creaking wooden chair to sit down. From his trench coat pocket, he took a pack of cigarettes softened by the rain, slipped one out, and clenched it between his lips.
"Mind?"
"If you don't want to set off that neglected smoke alarm overhead and bring every security guard in the building running, you'd better not light it." Harvey put down his pen and leaned back in his chair.
Gordon paused