“Is it obvious?” Madeleine lifted her head up at that and gave him a wry look. Then she put her head down on the bed again and sighed. “Don’t tell Draccon you know,” she said. “I’d like her to keep thinking I’m difficult.”
“I’m sorry,” Bruce said. And to his surprise, he actually was. Whoever had gripped her arm had done it roughly, hardly the work of trained professionals. A rush of anger welled up in his chest at that. He thought of the inmate James had shoved against the wall on Bruce’s first day. The inmate had attacked him, sure, but the warden also didn’t seem to have a problem with treating the prisoners roughly. Bruce hadn’t thought they’d do it to someone as young as Madeleine. Did Draccon not know about this?
“It’s not your fault,” Madeleine muttered. She leaned over and dangled her legs over the side of the bed. Then she looked at him. “You asked me why I decided to tell you about the underground room.”
Bruce nodded quietly, waiting for her to continue.
“After your parents died, how did you cope?”
A weight hit Bruce. Be careful. “What does that have to do with anything?”
She brought her shoulders in until she looked even smaller. “People always expect you to move on so quickly after you experience loss, don’t they?” Madeleine looked away. “For the first few months, the sympathy pours on you. Then, gradually, it dwindles down, and one day you find yourself standing alone at the grave site, wondering why everyone else has moved on to caring about something else while you still stay right here, silently carrying the same hurt. People get bored with your grief. They want something new to talk about. So you stop bringing it up, because you don’t want to bore anyone.”
Bruce felt himself nod. And then the words came. He heard himself recount the days before and the days after the theater. Every word infused with anger directed toward her, toward any criminal who killed the innocent and left others to pick up the pieces.
When he finished, he half expected her to be smiling, taunting him again, gloating in getting this information out of him. But she had turned on the bed to face him directly, her dark eyes grave.
Why had he said all that? Did he want her to understand the pain she’d inflicted on others? Or because he wanted to hear her pain, to try to understand her?
“My mother was sent to prison for killing someone,” she replied after a while. “She did it out of love for my brother.”
This was a surprise. Bruce hadn’t known why her mother was jailed, nor anything else about her family. “Your brother?” he asked.
Madeleine nodded. “I had an older brother. When he was young, a rare bacteria attacked his joints and made him violently sick. He suffered extraordinary pain as the infection ate away at him.” She paused, her brows furrowing deeply at the memory. Bruce had never seen her look like this—her face dark with an expression that reminded him of his first months as an orphan. “My mother poured all of her energy into trying to save him—taking him from one clinic to another, being turned down at all of them. She was a professor, but she wasn’t rich by any means. Our insurance was a joke. It didn’t even come close to covering it. My mother worked extra jobs.” She took a deep breath. Bruce felt a twinge of guilt at the reminder of his own fortune, and others’ lack of it. “Finally, she found a doctor willing to take my brother on. We were thrilled.”
As she spoke, Bruce could picture the scenes playing out before him—a woman sitting by her son’s bedside, head in her hands. One run after another to various clinics, each time more desperate. “What happened?”
“My brother died under that doctor’s watch. She claimed that there’d been nothing she could do, that it was his time and that he had finally succumbed to the disease. But my mother didn’t believe her. Something seemed wrong. So she broke into the office one evening, sifted through the papers, and found out that the doctor hadn’t been caring for my brother at all. She’d just been taking our money and feeding him placebos and sugar water.” Madeleine looked back up at Bruce. “The doctor walked in while my mother was still there. My mother didn’t even hit her hard—just hard enough to kill her. It was an accident.”
Madeleine stopped, and the silence suddenly seemed overwhelming. “I’m sorry,” Bruce managed to say. What words could he offer other than those? What other words had anyone else offered him when his own parents had died?
“She died in prison. No one can tell me exactly what happened to her, although I’ve seen how they treat their prisoners.” Madeleine shrugged as if she were wholly accustomed to living with this information. Bruce’s eyes went back to her own bruises. “During her time here, I watched the rich waltz out of jail. I hacked the prison system, and it turns out they always got released on house arrest. Meanwhile, I watched my mother rot away. We had no money. I was ten years old at the time.”
Ten. The number hit Bruce hard, and suddenly he saw himself at that age, walking alone for the first time to school, facing every afternoon knowing that Alfred—not his mother or father—would pick him up from the academy. What had Madeleine looked like? A small, delicately framed child with long hair and grave eyes? Had she walked alone, too? Where did she go, with no guardian or money to protect her? How had she ended up here, another murderer, taking her mother’s crime to the next level?
Did Draccon know all of this about Madeleine? Bruce doubted it—she was stern, but she wasn’t cruel.
“You once asked me why I committed those murders,” she finished. “Tell me, Bruce Wayne, do you think of me as the same cold-blooded criminal who killed your parents? Do you think I deserve to rot in hell, to die with poison injected into my arm?” She sneered. “You’re a billionaire. What do you really know about me? Would someone like you ever understand desperation?”
Trust nothing, suspect everything. His thoughts grew muddled, the images of his parents lying on wet pavement contrasted with the image of a lonely little girl, lost without her mother and brother. Bruce shook his head and frowned. “If Draccon knew this was happening to you, she wouldn’t approve of it. I don’t even think Dr. James would.”
Madeleine made a disgusted sound in her throat. She rose from the bed and walked over to the window, until Bruce was separated from her by inches and a glass barrier. “Still so trusting. No one cares what happens to me,” she said. “They just want the information I can offer them. They’ll probably stop allowing you down here.” She hesitated, then continued, “I don’t want to see Gotham City burning. But I’d rather die before giving up what I know directly to them.”
Madeleine’s eyes had turned soft now, and Bruce could see that they weren’t fully dark after all—now and then, when the light hit right, there were slashes of hazel and chestnut brown. If they weren’t separated by glass, if she weren’t being held in a facility like this, he would find their nearness awkward, even intimate.