Her screams finally trailed off into silence.

“The child’s guardian showed the others that this innocence was their redemption. To be prized.” The European shook his head mournfully. “The mother was not so lucky.”

The blind doctor shouted from his cell. Bruce’s caretaker nodded in understanding.

“This is Bane’s prison now,” he said. “Bane would not want his story told.”

He knotted the rope securely beneath Bruce’s arms, and then hurled the end over the open door of the cell, running around to take hold of it. Tugging on the rope, he pulled Bruce upright against the bard.

Bruce screamed as if he was being tortured upon the rack.

Which—in a sense—he was.

The pain was like nothing he had ever known. Worse than the time the Scarecrow had set him on fire, or when the Joker had stabbed him in the side. Worse than the time he had hauled Ducard up over the edge of that cliff with just one arm.

He convulsed in torment, praying to pass out. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could endure it, even after everything he had already been through. Oblivion would have been a mercy.

But there was no such luck.

The European tied the rope to the metals bars of the door. His fingers explored Bruce’s spine, which only increased the torture. Razor-sharp spasms of pain rocketed up and down his brutalized body. He bit down on his lip as his caretaker located the source of the pain.

Bruce tasted blood.

“You have a protruding vertebra,” the man said. “I’m going to force it back.”

“How?” he asked, and he braced himself.

Without warning, the man punched him in the back, hard enough to rattle the door’s rusty hinges. Bruce howled like a damned soul, suffering the most excruciating torment of hell, before finally sagging against the iron bars. Only the unforgiving rope, digging into his armpits, kept him from collapsing onto the floor. He hung limply.

“You stay like this,” the other prisoner said. “Until you stand.”

Bruce finally lost consciousness from the pain.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Days and nights blurred together as Bruce hung within the cell, drifting in and out of delirium. Noises came and went from the pit outside. The tantalizing light of hope retreated and returned, over and over again. Only the pain in his back was constant, giving him no relief.

The ghosts of his past tormented him.

“Did you not think I’d return, Bruce?”

He looked up to see Rā’s al Ghūl standing before him. His long-dead mentor appeared just as he had the last time Bruce had seen him. He was a tall, bearded man wearing a stern expression and a severe black suit. Bruce had originally known him as “Henri Ducard,” and had only later realized that Ducard was merely a convenient alias for the true master of the League of Shadows.

Icy blue eyes regarded Bruce with wry amusement.

“I told you I was immortal,” he said.