Page 18 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

Problem was, I didn’t want any part of this girl’s ideas.

She might be sort of a nurse, she might be Ethan’s old friend, she might be nice, but none of it mattered.

If she owned a slave, she couldn’t be trusted, period.

There was no telling how she’d take it when the first person I asked her to call was known abolitionist radical Erica Muller.

But what choice did I have?

Ivy wasn’t waiting, anyway. She turned to murmur something to her apparent slave, and a second later, I heard their footsteps pounding away.

In the meantime, Ivy’s hands gently examined my body, careful not to put pressure on the burns.

“Shit. These look like second-degree. Which I know doesn’t sound like good news, but it is. Here, do you think you can drink this?”

The sound of a plastic water bottle uncapping, then a hand holding my head up.

My lips felt too weak to close around the bottle to ingest much, but even the sensation of cool, fresh water reminded me that dehydration was probably closer to killing me than the burns.

I was still trying to gulp the water when a whirring noise approached, and before I could struggle or protest, Ivy and the slave kid each took an arm and laid me down awkwardly across the back seat of an electric golf cart—the same kind my father seemed to spend half his life zooming around in.

But the breeze on my face felt oddly nice as we sputtered off the grass and over the pavement at all of five miles an hour, the engine humming and jouncing gently beneath me. Ivy and the slave talked to each other, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. As if they didn’t want me to.

But that was nothing I had the energy to worry about.

For now, it was enough to feel Thalia’s wet, cold nose on me from where she panted and snuffled from the floor of the cart, and to smell her faint canine musk.

“Thalia’s being so good back there,” Ivy remarked.

“She hardly ever tries to jump out of the cart anymore!” the kid spoke up excitedly, clearly for my benefit.

The remark received a gentle shush from Ivy, but I got the sense that it was entirely for my benefit. In any case, it sounded cautious, not angry. Odd.

I wished I could see where and how Ivy lived, and who else lived with her. But I could only be dragged along blindly as the two others managed to haul me out of the cart and into a house.

“I’m putting you in a cool bath now, okay?” Ivy explained, her voice echoing as we entered what must be a high-ceilinged bathroom, already ringing with the sound of flowing water scented with herbs.

With no further warning, Ivy plunged me into it, and it was a revelation.

The cool evaporated the heat, erasing the pain on contact, at least temporarily.

The musk of grit and sand and charred flesh that had filled my nostrils for the past hour was at last replaced by lilies and hyacinths, and the echoes of rushing water filled my ears and drowned out all my other senses.

I inhaled deeply as Ivy’s hands stroked my hair and soaped the detritus off my body; the bubbles indistinguishable from the tears I knew were falling again for reasons I couldn’t even explain.

And then, for a few minutes, Ivy left me alone.

The swelling and pain near my eyes lessened.

I blinked away the soapy water and opened them, revealing a typically cavernous bathroom tiled in blue-and-white swirls.

Droplets glistened like diamonds as they fell from my eyelashes, catching the light of the candle resting on the ledge of the claw-foot tub I floated in.

And in the corner, setting a pile of fluffy towels on a chair, was the slave.

They couldn’t have been more than thirteen, with creamy, unmarred skin, freckles, and dark, wavy hair falling across their face.

They were dressed in a T-shirt with a brand logo and shorts—clean, well-fitting, even expensive-looking.

Except for the bracelet—a chain that looked too tight, as if they were growing out of it—they looked…

normal. Healthy. Nourished. Not quaking in fear or covered in bruises.

They startled when they saw my eyes open. They gently stroked Thalia, who’d come to them after lying protectively at the foot of the tub.

“Oh, I’m sorry, miss, I thought you were?—”

“Call me Lou,” I managed to get out. And then, ridiculously: “Are you okay?”

They didn’t have time to answer. A second later, Ivy—long, straight, auburn hair, peachy skin, full lips, and thin eyebrows penciled in high—entered the bathroom.

The kid looked from one to the other. And I didn’t know how or if I could explain that they needn’t be afraid. I wasn’t one of them .

Not like I was doing all that well at proving it.

After all, what about Maeve? What about Erica? What about my father?

“Why are you helping me?” I finally blurted out. “I don’t even deserve it.”

“In a world as shit as this one, I can say almost definitively that that’s not true,” Ivy said. “Now who do you need me to call? There’s obviously someone.”

I tried to shake my head, but it probably came off as a twitch of pain. I couldn’t say the name. What if it resulted in me being thrown out wet and naked on the lawn, or worse?

“I know you don’t trust me, and it’s not surprising if someone did that to you,” Ivy said, hands on her hips. “But I know there’s a story here, even if you won’t tell me what it is. And I know there must be someone who can do something about it.”

I took the deepest breath I could muster. “Erica Muller.”

Ivy didn’t even hesitate. She took out her phone but first turned to the kid.

“You’re awesome for helping me, as usual, kiddo. It’s way past your bedtime, though.”

Then, to my surprise, Ivy leaned down and kissed the kid’s forehead tenderly. It was as if the name Erica Muller had been the secret password that allowed her to demonstrate her true feelings.

“Can I play video games first?” they asked.

“I’d rather you read a book,” she replied. “And I need you to let Thalia out one more time. But sure. Only for ten minutes, though. And I will be up to check.”

In a daze, I watched the dog eagerly follow the kid out of the room, and Ivy nonchalantly crossed her legs, settled herself on the throw rug, and made the call. And one to Milagros, too, which was the only other number, besides my dad’s, that I had memorized. No answer at either. No surprise there.

Ivy set down the phone. “Do you trust me to send a friend to go to their house?”

I nodded. Based on what I’d just seen, I’d trust Ivy to do anything. Now that I realized the only reason that mistress and slave had been acting oddly was because, given my background, they weren’t sure if they could trust me .

Ivy seemed to follow my thoughts. “They’ve got a little brother, too,” she said.

“He’s asleep upstairs. We have to be careful, and they know that, especially in my parents’ social set.

Sometimes someone will see me treating them like people, and it’s just like this rage bomb goes off for some reason.

It’s awful. It’s why I don’t have anyone over anymore, and we don’t really go out during the day.

And it’s safer for me, too. I’m less likely to relapse.

In the meantime, I’m homeschooling them and doing this correspondence course for nursing, which I’m shit at, but thankfully, with the trust my dad set up for me and my mom, I don’t need a job for now, and we’ve got each other.

” She gazed back at the door, shaking her head in awe.

“I got clean for them. They’re the one and only reason.

If it weren’t for them, I’d be dead. No doubt in my mind. They saved me.”

I laid my head back on the porcelain and stared at the vaulted ceiling, speechless. “But why?—”

“They aren’t technically mine,” Ivy explained.

“They’re my mom’s. She owned their mom, who died years ago.

And my mom has dementia, a really virulent kind.

She’s probably only got a few years left, and then they’re both free according to the will, and I’ll get the house, too.

Nothing I can do until then.” Her expression changed to one of determination.

“But no one has ever hurt them, and as long as I’m around, no one ever will. ”

“I-I understand.” I should just say it. Just tell her story, our story—mine and his. But I didn’t have ten hours, or a voice, or a way to keep from crying through it all. “Someone saved me, too.”

Ivy’s serene smile at that was enough for me to believe, just for a second, that if I had been saved, maybe we all could be saved.

“It’s not my place to give them names, by the way. The younger one wants a different one every day, and the older one, well, they’re still thinking it over.”

I smiled.

“There’s a bed waiting for you upstairs when you’re ready. But we’re going to have to put something on these burns,” she said. “Do you think you can?—”

The cold water had turned warmer and formed a blissful cocoon around my body. The body whose wounds, for now, I didn’t have to think about or look at or remember.

“Okay. Take as long as you need,” she said, getting the picture. “By the way,” Ivy said tentatively, trailing her finger in the water, “I was so sorry to hear about Ethan.”

“Thanks. Me too.” I’d heard that before. People meant well, but…

“Have you seen him?” Ivy continued. “I mean, do they let you see him? I don’t really know how it works.”

From the other side of the door came a tentative knock. Ivy tilted her ear slightly, but she turned back when I sat straight up in the tub, water streaming off my shoulders.

“What’s the matter?”

“Does who let us see him?”

Ivy still looked confused as the knock grew more insistent. And from somewhere else in the house came Thalia’s alarm bark.

What was going on?

“Whoever bought him.”

“What?”

“Ivy! Ivy!”

“You’re supposed to be in bed, kiddo!” Ivy called back.

“I know, but you have to hear this!”

“Hear what?”

Though I didn’t know why, my heart began to pound as the kid threw open the door, waving a phone wildly. They clicked “play” on a news video and turned up the volume.

“…An apparent road rage incident this afternoon has left two dead and one in critical condition after a car was run off I-10 and Ventana and into a wash by a vehicle that then fled the scene.”

The newsreader continued, but a second later, even that voice had been drowned out by Thalia’s frantic barking, which was thundering ever closer to the bathroom.

Then the door flung open wider, revealing not only the collie but Erica Muller herself, holding the hand of a saucer-eyed teen girl with glossy dark brown skin and a jumble of skinny black braids dangling over a bloody bandage on her back in desperate need of changing.

“Louisa, what happened to you?” Erica demanded.

“What do you mean, what happened to me ?” I exploded back through my parched throat. “Are you listening to this?”

“The two dead were later identified as recently suspended social sciences professor Erica Muller and Alma Mensah, a nineteen-year-old woman from San Diego who was reported missing last year.”

Though my eyelids were open, I could barely see. My fight-or-flight had taken over, my heart beating out of my chest, my throat closing up.

Dead.

“Breathe, Louisa,” said my very-not-dead professor. “You can see with your own eyes that the report is wrong. It’s all wrong.”

But I couldn’t breathe. It was just that word, dead , ringing in my ears. Dead, dead, dead.

“But what about Maeve, and Milagros, and—” I gasped.

“Louisa.”

Erica’s face barely changed, but it did change. Still, she spoke with a miraculous level of calm as she settled who had to be the also very-not-dead Alma on the chair with the towels.

Meanwhile, Ivy leaped up and grabbed the medical kit she had taken out earlier, rapidly unrolling a spool of gauze.

“I’ll explain everything,” Erica said. “But you need to get your anxiety under control first. Because it would be dangerous for me to tell you anything else until you do.”