Page 19 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

HIM

“ I didn’t know about the dead girl,” Langer said before I had the heavy door to the roof all the way open.

He turned away from the edge, where he’d been standing in a semicircle of whatever fluorescent light source existed there. The glow reflected off the bare cement, casting a bright yellow ring around him. Beyond it, the city grid unfurled in a sprawl of light, swallowed by desert on three sides.

My boss was stripped down to a light blue dress shirt and suit pants, his usually sculpted, gravity-defying hair hanging in dark, loose strands around the faint lines of his face.

He looked simultaneously older and younger—human, instead of the levitating forcefield of pure neodymium I’d first perceived him to be.

I hadn’t known there was a helicopter landing pad up here. Then again, I’d never asked.

Suddenly unsure where to stand, what to do with my hands, I walked to the edge and gazed down at the mostly empty parking lot below.

Mostly empty except for a dark, nondescript Japanese-made sedan.

I’d watched it in the rearview mirror the entire still-one-handed drive here. I knew who was inside: Noam.

If Resi thought I was stupid enough to let my guard down, she was even stupider. But I wasn’t. And she wasn’t.

“Holy shit, kid, what did they do to you?” Langer asked, apparently finally getting a good look at me.

I hadn’t checked a mirror, but I knew. The flashy, peacocking tech bro I’d pretended to be when I left? Gone. In his place: a throbbing, bruised, bedraggled, abraded, barely upright disaster—though probably still, for once, in better shape than Louisa, wherever she was.

The roof hadn’t been my first stop when I got back. I’d made a few others, the last to the break room fridge for an ice pack, which I’d ripped off my hideous-looking wrist in frustration after less than a minute. I hadn’t even attempted to deal with my shoulder. No time for comfort. Not for me.

I’d closed my eyes and pressed my forehead against my glass office door, trying for the millionth time not to 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 Louisa wouldn’t assume 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 out of fear, then, I hoped, out of trust. And the weight of what it meant for me to 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 was her . Of course it had to be her.

To protect the one person who had ever treated me like 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 she always did, 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 I didn’t have 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 spotted The Law of Sympathy at the top of one file.

A file I’d skipped over earlier because I’d been certain—knowing Corey and Resi—that it couldn’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. I let her do it. And I justified all of it to myself because all I saw when I looked at her—all I ever saw—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 grope them .”

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

“You know it was only by pure chance that she didn’t kill Maeve and dump her out there,” I said, thrusting my good arm toward the vast, sand-covered waste out somewhere behind the mountains. “Would you have justified that, too?”

“Not after I learned she was your sister,” Langer replied quietly.

“Oh, like that’s supposed to make me feel better?” I stepped farther away from the edge. “They were all someone’s sister, or daughter, or friend. But I guess that doesn’t matter if it serves the greater good.”

“Look, kid, I don’t mean to sound callous or uncaring here, but what we were trying to do was beyond the greater good. It was beyond her, or me, or you. It was beyond any of us.”

I crossed my arms, suddenly realizing the desert night breeze was cold. “And you thought I’d be okay with that.”

“Hell, you were okay with that. You and I both know you were. That’s the whole reason I brought you here.

Remember the guy who wanted to play by his own rules?

Remember the guy who aimed to serve only science, only logic, only truth, with none of those messy emotional and spiritual ties to fuck it all up? What happened to him?”

I stared down at the cement as I listened to my own stupid, arrogant, childish philosophies get shot back at me like bullets. Of course I remembered.

But things had changed.

Hell, they’d changed just tonight .

“You know, Max, I’d take this opportunity to say you’re just as bad as Resi, but I won’t because you’re not.” I raised my head, blinking evenly at him. “You’re worse because she can’t care. You can , and you choose not to.”

To my surprise, Langer’s response came immediately. “I don’t choose not to.”

“What?” I was afraid I’d heard wrong. And if I hadn’t, well, this was new.

In fact, as I peered at him closer, I thought the look on his face indicated he couldn’t believe what he’d just said.

“I don’t,” he repeated, swallowing. “Choose not to.”

“Are you saying?—”

“Fuck me, kid, you know what I’m saying.”

Another look into Max’s eyes—at those icy blue irises that maybe weren’t as cold as I’d always assumed—and I knew.

Though he was talking about me, he was also talking about himself.

Max Langer. The man who had scars. Who knew pain.

Who’d endured suffering and been forced to watch others suffer in turn.

Who understood what his sister didn’t, and who knew that when you were lucky enough to have the brains and the charisma and the money and the power to afford it, how much fucking easier it always was to just stop caring.

Hell, he and I had both tried to stop caring. And we’d both failed because despite it all, no matter what we told ourselves, we still cared so goddamn much.

Langer coughed, embarrassed enough not to demand to know what revelation had just crash-landed into my brain.

“Anyway, it should be pretty fucking self-evident,” he continued, regaining a bit of his poise.

“Given that I’m standing here waiting for you when I could already be eight miles high over the Gulf, on my way to Rio Dulce. ”

“Rio Dulce?”