Page 35 of Never Lost

I’d closed my eyes and pressed my forehead against my glass office door, trying for the millionth timenotto conjure up her skin burning, her screams muffled, her?—

I’d shut the door angrily.Stop ruminating and do something, you idiot. Fix this. She thinks you fucked her mouth without her consent. She thinks you hate her. She thinks you plotted to destroy her. She thinks?—

She thinks you have a plan.

Fuck.

Standing in the middle of my dim, silent office, it hit me. How could I have been so stupid as to think Louisawouldn’tassume I was being smart?

It hadn’t been all acting, of course.

Fuck, the way she’d looked up at me, chained, helpless, laid out the way someone like her was never supposed to be in front of someone like me. That moment when she went still—first outof fear, then, I hoped, out of trust. And the weight of what it meant formeto choose what happened next.

Part of me had wanted it all. Not because I wanted to hurt her—but because some raw, buried part of me finally wanted to know what it felt like to hold someone down and not be the one begging. After a lifetime of being chained, ordered, punished, having everything taken from me… to take. And it washer. Of course it had to be her. To protect the one person who had ever treatedmelike a person, I had to pretend to break her.

I just prayed it wouldn’t, couldn’t break her. Or break us.

And of course she thought I had a plan. She was giving me the benefit of the doubt, because shealwaysdid, even when I didn’t deserve it. I’d once gotten in trouble for not giving her the same. It had almost wrecked us.

So it was time to atone, once and for all.

The only problem was that Ididn’thave a plan. I had the barest seed of an idea based on a tossed-off remark from Resi and one file among thousands I thought I’d seen earlier, but that didn’t amount to a plan.

So I’d have to make one.

Both shaken and reassured, I had soon covered both of my LCD monitors with files—mostly lab reports about Resi’s experiments and folders of related financial data that Corey had lamely attempted to hide inside puzzles of poorly written code. My heart thundered with each click of the mouse, jumping at even the tiniest movement outside. If Noam wasn’t in here murdering me now, it only meant he thought I was doing exactly what I’d said I’d do. And that he’d be all the angrier when he found out that I wasn’t.

I had only the tiniest seed of an idea of what I was looking for, but my hands still trembled when I spottedThe Law of Sympathyat the top of one file. A file I’d skipped over earlier because I’d been certain—knowing Corey and Resi—that itcouldn’t possibly contain anything of actual scientific value. But Resi, in the midst of her other evil gloating, had mentioned a formula.

She shouldn’t have.

But as it turned out, they’d made a good team: Resi had been smart enough to produce at least one breakthrough, and Corey had been dumb enough to slip up and reveal it.

So after I’d scoured each line, reading it over and over until the letters and numbers were burned into my neurons, I’d written it out on a sticky note. It hadn’t taken long.

And then, with two clicks, I’d deleted it forever and gone upstairs, for better or worse, to face my boss.

“By ‘they,’ you mean your sister, right?” I bit back in response to Langer’s question. “And don’t fucking lie and tell me you didn’t know all along what she was capable of.”

Langer paused, clearly realizing the time for prevaricating had long passed. “Yeah. I knew.”

“Then why?—”

“I didn’t believe it.”

I spun around. “Max, she fucking raped and murdered other people, too. She tortured Louisa. She killed Lemaya’s owner and your?—”

“You don’t think I fucking know that?” he exploded. “I watched her do it. Ilether do it. And I justified all of it to myself because all I saw when I looked at her—all Ieversaw—were those eyes. Those blue eyes. That innocent, helpless creature, crying and begging me to help her. And me, fucking failing to, over and over again. And I figured, what are a few old, worthless lives in the face of everything she endured, of everything we all endured, if it means we can finally fucking make it right? I couldn’t hurt my sister any easier than you could hurt yours.”

“But you could have stopped her.”

“No.” He sighed. “I couldn’t have. Not without hurting her.”

“But you could have helped her,” I insisted. “Got her therapy. Got her?—”

“I tried, kid. For years. She got thrown out of two different therapists’ offices for trying to gropethem.”

I didn’t want to understand it. But I did.