Page 30 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

I’d be lying if I said the sight of it so close didn’t make me shudder, but if I was sure of anything, it was that Resi’s henchman wouldn’t shoot me dead before she arrived to join the fun.

Other than that, all bets were off.

“So here’s the stray,” Noam announced. “All chained up, waiting for your bone.”

Great, the dog analogies again. Corey had loved those. But this asshole was no Corey. For one thing, he looked like he could actually win a fight. IQ was probably about the same, though.

From the trunk, Noam produced a small plastic water bottle, dripping condensation and comically small in his hand. Still, I desperately jerked my head toward it in an almost Pavlovian response.

With his teeth, he unscrewed the plastic cap and spat it aside, then held the bottle up to his own mouth, letting the cold water run down his sweaty cheeks and chin and dropping in dark drops on the sand.

I strained against the chains almost involuntarily as if I could dive and catch them before they expired.

Noam’s laughter. A sound I really didn’t ever care to hear again. “Go fetch.”

I gasped as I watched the strangely crystal-hued bottle arc in the sun, spraying whatever was left of its contents every which way, and feeling any pride I had left melting away in the heat as I dove for it, straining against the chain.

The most I could do, though, was kick it toward myself and tilt my head down toward it, try to figure out some conveyance to get it past the muzzle and shake out even a drop.

The best I could pull off, though, was poke my tongue a little bit past the bit that kept it pinned down, enough to touch the very top of the bottle, though the slight moisture I felt there could very well be my fevered imagination.

In the end, I just slumped back down into the dust on my knees, limp against the chain, wishing Resi had covered my ears, too, if only to block out the sound of Noam’s wheezy laughter.

Dully, I stared down at the dark spots on the dirt where the spilled water was already disappearing, slowly, hopelessly, blinking grit and detritus out of my inflamed eyes.

But no tears. Not yet.

Her

“You heard me. Track it. Now.” I spoke with precision again. Like cut glass. No hesitance. No doubt.

“Loulou, you heard what the agent said,” my father protested with a sigh. “There’s no point. They’re gone. Even the plane is off the radar.”

“Daddy, he wasn’t on the plane. In fact, he’s probably still somewhere very nearby, in serious danger that he put himself in at least partly on your behalf, and if we don’t find him now, we might be dead soon, too. And we might not be the only ones.”

“How do you know this?”

I leaped out of my chair again and gestured to the length of my burned body. “For fuck’s sake, Daddy, do you think I did this to myself ? Oh, and by the way? I know what happened to Ethan.”

His face, as I’d expected, went pale. A mix of shock, horror, anger, and something I couldn’t even name. Complete and utter denial, maybe. “What in God’s name are you talking about? What does that have to do with?—”

“Everything,” I said. “It has everything to do with it.”

“I don’t—” He looked at the agents and then back at me. “Where? Where is he?” His eyes had gone from exhausted to wild, those of a desperate father clinging to hope.

“Track. The. Chip,” I said. “And I’ll tell you.”

Robotically, he removed his phone from his pocket, again, and began swiping.

It was a simple app, the tracker chip. Once someone bought a slave, ownership was electronically transferred and the records updated, with the new slave linked to the owner in the app.

From then on, it took only seconds to pinpoint their location and summon the police if needed.

At least that was how it was supposed to work.

“I can’t,” my father said. “It isn’t working.” He looked bewildered. “This has never?—”

“I’m afraid you no longer have that privilege, Mr. Wainwright-Phillips,” Labrecque broke in, her voice booming with glee. “Your slaves—along with all your other assets—have been frozen indefinitely, pending the outcome of the investigation.”

“This is bullshit!”

Every head spun toward me.

“Miss Wainwright-Phillips, you’re completely out of line,” Labrecque hissed, her voice dripping with condescension. “We have protocols to follow in these situations for a reason. It’s for your safety and that of the slaves.”

I scoffed audibly.

“Now, if there were some kind of emergency situation, for instance, if someone were in imminent danger?—”

“Someone is in danger!”

“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 the actual culprit? 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 do you 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 and force me 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? You knew?”

“Well, I didn’t know .” 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. At most , I was starting to like him, sort of. But I trusted Erica, and Erica trusted 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.

“There. That oughta hold. And second,” he said as I writhed silently on the end of the chain, whimpering into the muzzle, “she told me to torture you, as she put it, ‘slowly, carefully, and methodically, with a thousand cuts.’”

Okay. Sure. Fine. I was praying for death now. Happy? Between this and that , instant death would be an absolute day at the goddamn beach.

“But,” Noam said, “I’ll level with ya. I don’t know what the fuck that means. It’s hot as a rattlesnake’s gooch out here, and I don’t got the patience for a thousand anything. Plus, I get paid either way. So I’ll throw ya another bone, mutt.”

He casually raised the pistol, racked the slide, and shoved its barrel under my chin.

Well, shit.

My first thought: Of all the times to be wrong. My second, for some reason: Where’s Obadiah?

HER

After an hour of sleep and no more, I reluctantly opened the door to an unmarked black leather passenger seat of a brand-new, unmarked, gleaming black Ford SUV to find Wheatley—changed from the windbreaker into an expensive-looking black turtleneck under a suit jacket—behind the wheel waiting for me, his eyes behind dark, luxurious shades as shiny as the vehicle’s exterior.

He raised them as I got in, wondering what the cop would think of the three-inch blade shoved in the waistband of my black leggings.

“Miss Wainwright-Phillips?—”

“Louisa, and save it.” The new Louisa. The old Louisa—drilled in manners and propriety by my father—would have driven herself into a blind panic to speak to an authority figure this way.

But there was kind of no going back now.

“I’m thankful for everything you’ve done for us so far, assuming it’s for the right reasons, but I’m not setting foot inside this vehicle until you tell me two things. ”

He paused but nodded seriously.

“One, I want to know if Erica, Ivy, Alma, and the kids are safe.”

He didn’t miss a beat answering. “They are. Whoever their visitor was, once he saw the squad car, he wasn’t keen to come back. And if he does, we’ll move them.”

I nodded. “And two, I want Maeve and Sloane un-detained.”

“Who?”

I rolled my eyes. Okay, so he wasn’t quite all the way there yet.

He was still further than I’d ever expected a cop to be.

“The two slaves. From Resi’s. Maeve was supposed to have been on the plane, but since he wasn’t, I can only assume she wasn’t either, and that both girls are still in the detention center.

I understand the safety concerns,” I continued.

“Erica explained them to me. But I want to see the wheels in motion.”

“I’ll get them in motion,” he said sincerely.

“Thank you,” I said. “Now how far is the field office?”

“Well, that brings us to what I was going to tell you when you got in,” he said patiently as I hoisted myself up and back down into the dealership-scented leather seat.

“Don’t tell Labrecque, but we’re not going to the field office.

” He turned and caught my eye, ever so slightly. “We’re going to find 773496S6.”

My stomach lurched, half from shock, half from being jerked forward when he released the brake and stepped on the gas pedal, and the SUV’s engine kicked up with a roar, speeding me away from my neighborhood, again. Back to the boy I’d now been ripped apart from forever, twice.

In whatever condition he was now in.

From a compartment near his seat, Wheatley handed me an unlocked phone displaying a GPS tracking app.

With trembling hands, I zoomed in on coordinates in a regional park near Lake Pleasant, about half an hour north of the city, one I’d visited often as a child on picnics.

And what he was doing there, I had no idea, but it was a good bet it wasn’t a goddamn picnic.

I glanced back at Wheatley. “But Labrecque said the only way to unfreeze the chip is if you can prove a person is in immediate danger,” I said, adding darkly, “A free person.”

“True.”

“Then how?—”

He depressed the gas pedal further and guided the SUV out onto the freeway, smoothly merging us into northbound traffic.

“I lied.”

Oh, I did like this guy. I liked him a lot.