Page 57 of Never Lost

“A free person?”

But I could tell by Labrecque’s smug little smile that she knew damn well that it wasn’t, and it was almost enough to send me lunging for her neck. “No.”

“Then I’m afraid we can’t help you.”

“Agent Wheatley.” I turned desperately to the cop Erica trusted.

To his credit, he was already on it. “Amy, we need to make an exception in this case,” he told his partner. “You know we do.”

Labrecque’s face seemed to pinch in on itself. “Exceptions can only be handled by the field office,” she recited. “And it still takes five to seven business days after the form is filed to unfreeze the chip. I’m sorry. Now, sir, if?—”

“Oh, come on!” I interjected. “Do you want to get to the bottom of this or not? Do you want to track down theactualculprit? Do you want to prevent innocent people from dying? Do you want to finally do something meaningful for once in your rote, meaningless, laughably undistinguished career, or doyou just want to sit at your goddamn desk for the next twenty years stamping papers, regurgitating statutes, and running interference for the abusive power structures that underlie every aspect of this shitty, corrupt, oppressive society we live in?”

I gasped for air, expecting my father to break in any time andforceme upstairs. Being rude, to him or any authority figure, was the first deadly sin in his house—a worse sin, perhaps, than whatever message was being delivered. But he barely moved, just sat there, hollow-eyed and staring at nothing as if a switch had been flipped off inside him. And then:

“I knew, Loulou,” he said. “About Ethan.”

“What?Youknew?”

“Well, I didn’tknow.” His voice was thin, hollow, reedy. A complete absence of gravitas. “But I had my suspicions. I didn’t investigate any further, or tell you or your mother because?—”

“Because you were in denial. Not just about him. About everything. About?—”

About his slave, too. About a sonless father who wouldn’t allow himself to acknowledge the fatherless son when the boy had been kneeling right in front of him.

But that might be a conversation for later.

Now, my father just closed his eyes and sighed the sigh of a man who was watching his entire carefully constructed world blow down like a house of straw and was now standing where it had been, shivering and frightened and dying of exposure.

But hey, if that’s what it took.

Wheatley broke in one more time. “I’ll tell you what, Miss Wainwright-Phillips,” he said. “You look like you could use some rest. When we’re finished here, I’ll drive you to the field office, we’ll fill out that paperwork, and you can tell me anything else you feel is relevant in a relaxed, private space.”

He met my eyes with an intense, pointed expression, one clearly meant for me and only me. I couldn’t fully read it, but part of it was definitely,trust me.

Sorry, my dude. Can’t do that yet.Atmost, I was starting to like him, sort of. But I trusted Erica, andEricatrusted him. That was enough for now.

I’d also had so little sleep that I felt my eyes growing heavy even as I stood.

The last thing I glimpsed as I let myself be led upstairs was my father sitting motionless in his chair, his head buried in his hand.

Good.

“You’ll bring Master Ethan home?” the housekeeper asked softly but anxiously as she spread cooling aloe balm over my searing, weeping blisters, which drank it in like water, quelling the pain briefly.

“I will. I promise,” I said through a yawn, already only half-conscious. “But I can only do one at a time, okay?”

HIM

“You done over there?”

Noam chuckled again as if he were sitting on a sofa watching some brainless streaming reality show instead of someone struggling to live. Idly, I wondered if this stupid motherfucker had ever been a slave. His tone and posture bore no traces of it, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. I’d come to understand, quite recently, that nothing about anybody necessarily meant anything.

I watched Noam warily as he stepped behind me to look at where my hands hung: numb, seared by the sun, bloody, useless, lifeless. Barely able to even interlace my fingers.

“So I’m actually here to do two things. One, to make sure this wire’s still on good and tight. She made me put it on ya once and it cut me up pretty bad. I don’t wanna hafta do it again.”

Without warning, he raised one massive, heavy boot and brought it down hard on the wire, crushing my hands into pieces and driving what felt like a hundred shards of jagged metal into his flesh simultaneously.