Page 36 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

HER

W hen it came to my top ten list of bizarro happenings, I might have included zooming south toward the border, lying crumpled beneath the contents of an entire box of instant ice packs in the back seat of a cramped, rusty Datsun redolent of fast-food hamburgers, with one of the West’s richest tech moguls riding shotgun and a gardener, who couldn’t actually drive, at the wheel with a pistol jammed between his ribs in a spot pretty far up the list. It moved even higher when we picked up a hitchhiker underneath the faded sign of a sleepy tire shop in a rapidly depopulating neighborhood south of town.

The kind of neighborhood my father had grown up in, full of formerly working-class families whose jobs had been stolen by slave labor and were likely only a breath away from becoming slaves themselves, either by debt or conviction.

That hitchhiker turning out to be Erica Muller bumped it highest of all.

“How’s this for living proof I’m a mensch?” Max asked before turning to Erica. “By the way, I’m sorry to hear about?—”

“She’s a fighter. Drive,” Erica cut him off, sliding into the back seat next to me and slamming the door.

“You heard her,” Max told Obadiah, who’d been grumbling unspeakable things under his breath nonstop since we got in the car. Max was treating him like a slave, of course, but for the first time in a while, I didn’t care. He’d earned it.

“Is this because you’re supposed to be dead?” I asked Erica.

“That, and because I’d rather not be spotted getting into a car with Max Langer.”

“You do know that most people brag about knowing me, right?”

“Max and I have mutual friends in the abolitionist community,” Erica explained, ignoring him and turning to me, my legs curled up against her thigh on the tiny back seat.

“But we’d rarely interacted, and frankly, when I found out you suspected him in Maeve’s disappearance, it didn’t surprise me in the slightest.”

“Translation: I’m rich, so I deserve to be eaten.”

Erica pressed her lips into a firm line that, if it was hiding a smile, none of us would ever be the wiser. “Anyway—” Her eyes shifted over to Obadiah warily.

“Stop the car, get out, and wait there until I let you back in,” Max said, turning to our reluctant driver. “Try to run and I put a bullet through the windshield and into your ass. In this neighborhood, I doubt anyone would notice another body on the sidewalk.”

Once he’d obeyed, Erica went on. “Max called some of those friends, and they directed him to me. As a result, both Maeve and Sloane showed up at Ivy’s house in an armored SUV about an hour or so ago. Sloane’s been freed, but she has nowhere to go, of course. And Maeve, well?—”

I remembered the conversation in the SUV. “Wheatley said that someone with an offshore?—”

“It was me,” interrupted Max.

“Oh.”

“Once again proving that the rich play by a different set of rules,” sniffed Erica.

Max groaned. “You see what I mean? Hell, I could strap on a breastplate and a sword and start calling myself Spartacus and it still wouldn’t be enough for your esteemed professor to stop sharpening the guillotine.”

“Well, I suppose I am glad none of us was able to kill the sale,” Erica admitted. “Or Maeve would still be stuck in detention. But if she isn’t officially freed ASAP, you can bet I will see that you’re eaten. With a knife and fork, if necessary.”

“Fair enough. Although buying a slave is hard enough to do through a shell company. Freeing one is even harder. They seem to tighten the laws every time I turn around. Now there’s a requirement for the owner to appear in person.”

“Can I see her?” I asked suddenly. “I trust you. I really do. But I want to see her, in case?—”

In case he asks. I want to be able to say I saw her safe, with my own eyes. And that I explained everything.

Erica seemed to understand. A second later, she had dialed Ivy.

And there on the camera was Maeve, cuddled into the same sofa and blanket in Ivy’s filigreed garden room.

She looked like, well, someone who had just spent two nights in jail—a jail where the guards were free to abuse the inmates with no repercussions whatsoever. Hunted, hollow, haunted. Hurt.

But alive. And her arm appeared to have been properly treated, at last, whether thanks to Ivy or someone else.

I closed my eyes. “?a va, Maeve?” I asked, trying not to make a big deal about it.

“Oui,” Maeve replied softly. “?a va.” Finally, she screwed up her face into some kind of a smile.

But it soon dimmed again, her eyes searching for something behind my right shoulder. Someone.

My heart broke. Shit.

“We’re on our way to your brother, Maeve,” I continued in halting French. “I promise.”

And we’d goddamn well better be because if I didn’t find him, well, that was my heartbreak alone.

But I’d never forgive myself for breaking his sister’s heart, too.

After all, he’d done his part. Crossed an ocean.

Done the impossible for anyone under any circumstances, let alone those . It was up to me now.

And Maeve had been through enough.

“And I promise you’re safe,” I continued in French.

“They—they told me I’ve been sold. To whom?”

I swallowed and took a deep breath. “The man who bought you is here with me… and he’s a friend,” I finished, with a quick glance at Max, who shook his head and frantically waved away the camera.

“Of your brother’s. And of mine. And—and of Erica’s,” I added, glancing quickly at my unsmiling professor, from whose direction I could practically hear crickets chirping.

“You’ll meet him soon,” I explained. “Anyway, he bought you to free you. And he will.”

Max nodded seriously.

“Louisa?”

“Huh?”

“I am sorry,” Maeve said in English. “Lemaya said— elle m’a dit —” She switched to French again, flustered.

And that’s when I remembered my own face was as fucked up as Maeve’s was, maybe more. And Maeve had been looking at it this entire time. But oh, no. No sorries. It had only been thanks to Maeve that the girls had escaped at all.

“No, Maeve. Don’t apologize, ever. You were brave. Just like your brother.”

“Don’t worry, Louisa,” Maeve replied in English, much to my surprise. “It’s just another part of the story,” she continued in French. “And it isn’t always one we want. But—you can make up your own story, one that’s much happier. And then no one can take it away from you.”

“If it’s up to me, you won’t have to make up your happy ending, Maeve. You’ll have a real one.”

When the call ended, Max peered at me through the rearview mirror, and I removed the crumpled envelope from inside my hoodie.

I’d made a cursory glimpse into the rest of its contents, which, aside from the chip and the money, I didn’t fully understand.

But if he’d gone through this much effort to get them to me, they were undoubtedly important.

“I can confidently say I think you’re the only one besides me that he’d trust with this,” I said, handing it to my professor, who tucked it safely in the backpack she carried and instructed us to let Obadiah back in, then let her off at a gas station down the block.

“Wait. What about everyone at Ivy’s? Wheatley?—”

“He’s managed to keep a protective unit at Ivy’s, with the help of a friend on the city police.

But to no one’s surprise, the director suspended him,” said Erica, holding up the envelope.

“But if my suspicions are correct, whatever’s in here may help undo that.

And I don’t want to make any guarantees, but it might help your father, too. ”

I nodded. That’s what I’d hoped all along was part of his plan.

“And as for the person who left me that envelope? Has he earned your trust?” I asked, remembering what Erica had insinuated earlier.

Erica smiled.

But before she could respond, Max broke in.

“Much as I’d like to, I’m afraid I won’t be sticking around to wait for the cops to figure out just who they’re going to arrest. Which is why I’ll be headed south of the border as soon as we finish this job.

Assuming I can find a plane to borrow, since mine’s indisposed. ”

I gasped. “But what about us? You can’t just?—”

“Hold on a second. Fuck me, you really are his girl, aren’t you? What I was going to say is that it’s an open invitation. There’ll be four of us.”

“Four of us?”

“Me. And Maeve,” he said. “And once we find him, your boy… our boy.” He paused and looked at me seriously from behind those glacier-colored eyes, every trace of irreverence out of his voice. “And you.”

What he was proposing, of course, to me, was everything. My heart soared, then dropped as if someone had replaced a feather with a cold, heavy stone. “I’d never be able to come back.”

“Well, not until slavery’s abolished, probably. But you’d be with him. And he’d be with his sister. And I’d be there to take care of all of you. Don’t worry, not all the time,” he clarified. “I mean, you are adults and all.”

Seize it, my instincts said. Seize it while you can.

But what about my dreams? What about my parents, and med school, and my career, and Erica and Milagros, and Ethan? I might never see him again.

You didn’t get a choice, any more than I did.

My boy had been right about that. Those weren’t my dreams, and that wasn’t my life.

Until recently, the only dreams I’d ever chosen were the ones already on offer in my gilded cage, and that wasn’t a choice at all.

In fact, the only real choice I’d ever made was to break out.

He’d shown me the path. It was the hardest path, and he hadn’t made me take it. He hadn’t expected me to take it.

But I had. And there was already no going back. Except?—

“No,” I mumbled.

Max raised an eyebrow. “No?”

“Not four of us,” I said. “Five.”

HIM