that Batwing, along with a few others, was barely holding back the tide of lowlifes seeking to take advantage of that absence.
She snorted softly. What ridiculous names they gave themselves, these vigilantes.
Selina lifted her gaze from the river to the shining metropolis approaching with every heartbeat. To the darker, shorter buildings of the East End smudging the horizon.
Home. Or it had been. She hadn’t let herself consider it her home in a long while. Refused to contemplate where home might be, if such a thing could ever exist for her now.
The brutal training at the League of Assassins had taught her many, many things. Had killed that street-raised, desperate girl, leaving her somewhere at the bottom of a ravine in the Dolomites. Had drained that girl away into nothing, along with the blood of the men who Nyssa and the others had taught her how to bring down—how to punish.
You will bring empires to their knees, Nyssa had once sworn to her after a particularly grueling demonstration on how to get men to talk. A kernel of promise while she’d puked her guts up afterward.
No, home did not exist anymore. But it was worth it. She’d come here to make sure it had all been worth it—the training, the unspeakable cost. She would not fail. Not this most vital mission.
So Selina loosed a settling breath and beheld the sparkling city as she reclined in the cushioned seat of the car.
And finally, at long last, she allowed herself a little smile.
Let Gotham City enjoy its final days of summer.
The nightmare was always the same.
Blinding sun, heat so dry it choked the air out of his lungs, and a flat plain of sand and scrub spreading to the horizon.
And then the roar. The screaming. The exploding sand and metal.
The blood and chaos. Gunfire.
A world away—a different world, different life. A different hell.
Because for Luke Fox, hell wasn’t fire and brimstone. It was friends he’d laughed with in the morning at the canteen winding up in body bags by lunch.
Night after night: this dream, this moment.
A year had passed since he’d returned to Gotham City, and Luke was still crawling back toward who he’d been before.
Whoever that person had been. Whoever had been ripped apart that day, along with the flesh of his ribs, where the Kevlar hadn’t been covering him. As if the enemy they’d been dispatched to put down had known precisely where to strike with the IED that went off beneath the tank lumbering ahead, sending shrapnel tearing through the air.
Through him—and his soldiers.
Had it been worth it? The grueling training and the three years in the Marine Corps. Had he made a difference?
They were the questions he asked himself over and over. That haunted every step, every breath. The questions that drove him each night into the streets of Gotham City.
Luke blew out a breath, his muscled chest rising and falling as moonlight leaked in through the windows, highlighting the jagged line along his ribs, the scar stark against his brown skin. He scanned the sky, his penthouse apartment offering an unobstructed view of downtown Gotham City.
No bat-shaped sigil lighting up the night.
Luke couldn’t decide if he was disappointed or not.
He glanced at the clock beside his bed. Only two hours ago, he’d crept back into his apartment after a quiet night of patrolling. Apparently, the August heat had made even the worst of Gotham City decide to stay indoors.
Luke snorted, imagining some of the usual suspects opting to seek out an air-conditioned movie theater instead of terrorizing the streets.
At least he still had his sense of humor. Sort of.
Bruce Wayne didn’t have one. Or hadn’t revealed one in the months Luke had been training with him.
It had been his dad’s idea. Right after the family’s annual Fourth of July fireworks barbecue at the beach house last summer. After the Incident.
Luke had been standing among the crowd gathered on the back lawn, beer in hand, when the fireworks had exploded over their private beach, as they’d done every summer that he could remember. But unlike all those summers before, as those initial fireworks bloomed and boomed in the dark sky, his body had gone absolutely haywire, as if it had been programmed like one of his gadgets. He’d been unable to get a breath down, to control the undiluted terror that swept through him. Pushed in on him, as if the ground were about to swallow him up, as if he were again in that blood-soaked desert,