Page 21 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

“Oh, come the fuck on. Do I seriously have to spell out that the bastard fucking owned you? And he wasn’t even a good owner!

He knew how brilliant you are and he still treated you worse than his goddamn dog.

Not only did he have you whipped and chained and forced you to work in the dirt, he ripped you away from the girl you love after you saved her.

Someone who does that is irredeemable. You know it.

I know it. So for the love of all that’s holy, why are you still wasting even a single ounce of sympathy on him? ”

“Because it’s not about him !” I exploded.

Langer groaned. He’d known this was coming, too, clearly. “Kid, she left you. She ran away . What does that tell you?”

“It tells me there’s more to the story,” I insisted, wishing I had a better answer. “It tells me I need to think more critically. It tells me she thinks I have a plan.” I didn’t, but that was beside the point, right?

“Okay. Let’s be real. Say you decide to play the role of the hopeless romantic idiot, ignore my sage advice, and go after her,” Langer shouted.

“What then? You’re still chipped. You’ll get maybe an hour together before the police show up, drag you away, and lock you up, probably for good.

Call me crazy, but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of critical thinking involved in that decision. ”

“No,” I replied, turning away for a second. “But there is another option. One that might work if I could get more time.” I swiped some of my own hopelessly windblown hair out of my eyes and raised my eyes to the massive rotor blades still chopping up the atmosphere.

Langer didn’t miss a beat. “Kid, you know I’d take her with us in a second. But to do that, you’d have to find her. And right now, finding her is the dumbest, most dangerous thing you could possibly do.”

“Then I’ll go straight to Keith,” I countered. “I’ll figure out what to say. I have a plan.” A plan I was making up on the spot, but I figured Max probably knew that.

“Right,” he replied. “Except Resi’s goons are still on your tail, so assuming you don’t get killed, which you will, and assuming you do figure out some kind of plan, which you won’t, what the fuck do you think Keith is going to say?

‘Oh, yeah, no, sorry, my bad, I guess you’re a person after all?

Here’s my blessing to date my daughter?’ Are we even talking about the same fucking guy? ”

I gritted my teeth, fingers weakly digging into the crumpled piece of paper in my pocket, the echoes of every conversation I’d ever had with Langer burying me all at once.

Conversations where the guy had proven that he always knew the exact spot to thrust in the spear to make all of my armor fall off.

Langer continued patiently, waving off the pilot yet again, talking loudly over the noise.

“Okay, for a trial balloon, let’s say a miracle happens.

What are you envisioning with this girl?

Dating? A real relationship? Marriage? The white picket fence?

Garden parties, family reunions, Christmas?

You’ll have no money, no home, no degree, no job, no credit rating, in a world that’s fucking hostile to all of that.

And even if you find a way around it, what about her career?

Do you think she’s going to take you to med school with her?

To her residency? To bougie cocktail parties with her surgical colleagues?

If you think Corey was bad, you haven’t seen shit.

Medicine is a conservative field, and it’s absolutely infested with guys like him.

Sure, you’re a good actor, so you might be able to blend in for a while, and she’ll have your back, but sooner or later, it’s going to come out, and she’ll be a pariah.

Her career will suffer. She’ll suffer. And if she suffers, you’ll suffer.

But the relationship will suffer the most.”

“Louisa’s different.” I knew how naive I sounded. The kind of naivety that just a few months ago, I would have laughed at because of course I was smarter and savvier and more cynical than that. Hell, I’d been more like Max then than I was now.

“I agree.”

I looked back at him with shock.

Max clarified. “I mean, I don’t know her at all, but from what I’ve gathered, she is different.

So I’ll give you that. But she’s still her father’s daughter, and she’s just a kid, and so are you, and neither one of you has a goddamn clue what you’re up against. And I’d say don’t ask me how I know this, but I know how I know.

The legacy of slavery, even once you’re free, is like a virus that hides in your cells long after the disease has passed.

And it keeps making you sick, and it always will.

At least as long as I stay in the fucking toxic miasma that gave it to me.

And if I stay here, I’ll always be in it. Choking on it. Dying.

I didn’t even attempt to argue with that, and anyway, I knew Langer wasn’t finished.

“Kid, I’ll tell you something else. You already know it, but hear me out anyway.

Hardly anyone, slave or free, has your gifts.

Hell, I certainly don’t, and I’d give anything to have them, but the next best thing is to have you .

And I know you’ve always known, on some level, that you were destined for so much more than what you were given.

Since before that pompous lush of a professor plucked you out of that cage, since before you could even add or recite the alphabet, you knew it. You knew it.”

Of course I had. I was just too polite to ever say it.

“But what you might not realize is, not only do you deserve more than slavery, you deserve more than the stigma of having been a slave. I don’t know what’s in store for us down there, but I do know that it’s the best place I can think of to get not only real freedom but a real life .

Or at least, I’ll try my damnedest to make sure you get a shot at one.

Maeve, too. Because as much as I fucked up with Resi and with White Cedar, I’m going to make it up to you and your sister. ”

“I—” I spun around just in time to see the locked metal door to the roof bounce on its hinges, very much like a heavy boot slamming into it. “That door is reinforced, right?” I asked warily.

“It better be. I sure paid enough for it. Anyway, I told you this before, but I don’t think it quite sank in. And it’s that in this world when you break the rules, they’ll put you back in your place every time. Breaking the rules isn’t enough. You have to make the rules.”

I stood frozen, almost literally caught between heaven and earth.

Langer tried one last stratagem. “If you could somehow ask her, right now, what do you think she would say?”

Well. She’d tell me she loved me. She’d tell me to take my chances while I had chances to take.

She’d tell me I needed to be with Maeve, and that she, Louisa, could take care of herself, even if it meant suffering, the kind of suffering she in no way deserved and that her life hadn’t prepared her for.

And she’d tell me I was brave. And all of it would be true.

But then, there were things that I had told her , too.

But all I finally said was: “She’d tell me to go.”

Langer just nodded. It was the nod, I realized with a swallow.

The one that signaled he knew my choice had been made.

And it had to be made. Because that door wouldn’t hold much longer, and the giant metal insect was descending, right in front of our eyes, and the wind and the swirling pastel kaleidoscope of lights were coming to a gentle, precise stop on the yellow circle.

And with one Italian leather shoe perched on one of the thick metal skids, the multimillionaire tech mogul held out his hand.

And at once, everything slowed—the shouting and waving of the pilot, the whirring of the rotors, the bright dots making up the city below breaking into a million drunken, swirling pieces of light.

Making me forget, almost, the pain, the joy, and everything in between.

“The jet’s already waiting at the municipal airport,” Langer shouted.

“We’ve gotta leave before sunrise to give ourselves the best chance.

And the sunrise over the gulf, well, like I said, it’s not to be missed.

And not to put too fine a point on it—” He paused as if searching for the right words to say to me.

Like anybody—except for one person—had ever worried about the right words to say to me.

“I know you didn’t get much of a view from the last plane you were on.

And,” he added, “you deserve that, too.” And then he mounted the helicopter.

The impatient pilot reached down to hand him a headset, but he paused again, and the other man huffed a sigh.

I raised my good hand, but the rest of me still stood frozen on the spot.

“Come on, kid. Let’s go.”

Slaves hardly ever got to make decisions, and when they did, they were agonizing. You chose something horrible so you wouldn’t be forced to accept something even worse, for either your loved ones or yourself. And I wasn’t so naive as to think that freedom would put an end to those decisions.

But I had thought, nonetheless, back when Langer had first proposed his deal all those weeks ago, how remarkable it felt to be treated, for once, like a free man.

Like a man at all . Yet I hadn’t understood what that meant.

Not really. Not until now did I understand that freedom didn’t ever come free.

Well, shit. I really should have figured that out already.

The damp, crumpled paper weighed in my hand, the total extent of my brilliant plan. The last of my brilliant plans.

“Max?” I shouted over the roar.

“Yeah?”

“That day you came to see me, you asked me if I thought I was going to get lucky again.”

He glanced up and nodded. “I guess we know the answer now.”

It all still felt like slow motion as the door to the roof burst open, revealing Noam’s bald, massive, sweaty frame silhouetted in the harsh light of the staircase.

As he thundered toward us, drawing a nine-millimeter pistol from inside his jacket, I gritted my teeth and grabbed hold of the metal frame of the copter with my one good arm, hoisting myself up on the skid, ducking, and swinging into the seat behind Langer, who was already setting himself beside the pilot, headset over his ears.

Well. Time to run away for the last time. Except—except I’d been running away my entire life. From love, from attachments, from guilt, from failure, from shame. Other than Maeve, I’d never had anything or anyone to run toward.

And for once, that might be nice.

“Yeah.” Noam’s aim was just good enough to put one bullet hole in the fuselage, but it must not have been anywhere critical, since the pilot barely noticed as Langer signaled to him to take hold of the collective lever and lift us up and to the left, the copter already well off on its solo trajectory over the city.

And maybe it was the hum of the engine, or maybe my hand really was shaking as, just before closing the door, I took the paper out of my pocket and let it fly, letting the rotor blades—so I didn’t have to—shred it to ribbons.

“I guess we do.”