Page 39 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

HER

“ W hy’d you let him go?” I asked. I threw open the door and sucked in a lungful of warm, dry air. I might as well get out of this rattletrap piece of shit. It was as dead as we were about to be.

Max scanned the horizon, his jaw setting firmer by the second. “Because at this point, we’re better off without him.”

“But—”

“Even he’s not dumb enough to commit suicide out there. He knows where he’s going. And so do I now.”

“Where?”

“The old Cebolla Canyon copper mine.” His jaw tightened further.

“Why—oh, shit. The one with the uprising. Your father owned it,” I said in horror. Erica Muller’s syllabus had struck again.

He nodded. “Hell, I think I still own it, technically.” His voice grated with a weariness that was utterly new from him, at least in the brief time in which we’d interacted.

“He used to take me there when I was a kid so I could watch the slaves be worked to death. And sometimes tortured, if he really wanted to pull out all the stops for his number one son.”

Revulsion twisted my stomach. I stared at him, Resi’s half-brother. For fuck’s sake, this family. “Other kids get taken to ballgames,” I said. “The park. The zoo.”

“So I hear. Come on. Grab the water.”

“What about the ice packs? The?—”

“Take only what you know you can carry. I’ve got flashlights. Knives. Tools. Guns.”

“Guns, plural?” I didn’t like the sound of that. “How far is it?”

He pointed southwest. “About eight miles that way.”

“Eight miles ?” I demanded. “I don’t have any faith in my ability to go eight feet.”

“Neither do I. Remember, I had to carry you to the car. And don’t forget, thanks to our departed traveling companion, Resi will most likely be ready and waiting to kill you when we arrive.”

“Thanks for that.”

“No problem. Let’s go.”

I grabbed the water bottle from the back seat, took a quick swig, and handed it to him. He did the same, capped it, and started walking.

Sand dunes rose and fell like waves. The occasional howl of a coyote or hoot of an owl echoed as my feet sank into the sand with each step, my legs weighed down by lead. I’d brought no ice, no salve. Take only what you know you can carry.

Water. That kept me alive, so that was all I took.

A lizard skittered across a stone, the only other sign of life.

The moon cast long shadows, illuminating the sharp edges of rocks and the occasional valiant patch of mesquite.

Other than that, it had been drained dry of life, Max explained, leached out of it by runoff from the mine.

In other words, his family legacy had basically killed everything and everyone it ever touched.

“And that’s why I’m in therapy,” he concluded.

Max walked a few paces ahead, scanning the horizon. His hand rested on his gun.

My gaze swept the patchy dunes and arroyos beyond. Were Noam and Obadiah out there, waiting to ambush us? I shuddered, imagining Noam’s cold black eyes set in his dome of a head, peering at us through a rifle scope. I shivered again, feeling impossibly vulnerable in the gloomy expanse of sand.

It took only minutes for the dusty air to start rasping against my skin, sticking to my clothes and clinging to my throat.

It only took a few more for grains of sand to start swirling around my feet, scratching and burning my exposed skin, the rough terrain causing every muscle in my legs to ache and protest and my throat to feel raw and dry as if I was swallowing sand with each breath.

Soon, I was uncapping our last water bottle, tipping it back for a small sip that barely moistened my parched lips.

For lack of anything else to do, I crinkled the bottle, loud in the silence.

This was it. Either we reached the mine soon, or we would die.

How long had he been out here?

“Max,” I rasped. “Maybe we should turn?—”

“There it is.”

As we crested a particularly vicious dune, my heart skipped. The mine’s gaping maw seemed to swallow all light into its depths, sucking it into darkness sinister by moonlight, casting eerie shadows across the barbed wire barricades and the blood-red entrance sign.

Sure, it was basically the worst place on earth. But why did it have to look like it?

“Welcome to hell,” Max remarked. “Still available for lease at a low monthly rate. See my agent for details.”

I stood, alternately shivering and sweating in the desert night, the barbed wire casting twisted shadows on both our faces as Max’s fingers moved over the aged keypad, the beeps punctuating the stillness. A green light flickered, and with a groan of protest, the massive metal doors rumbled to life.

“How did you know the code?”

“Because I set it. It was just a guess that Resi didn’t change it. But it makes sense since she’s never had any reason to keep me out before.”

Before we went any further, Max offered me a sheathed knife, then reached down and unstrapped the holster from his leg, complete with pistol—larger and thicker-barreled than the one he’d been using, probably a Colt .45—and handed it to me.

“Ever fired one of these?” he asked.

“Surprisingly, yes.”

“Oh, thank fuck,” he said, turning away in relief. “I was getting tired of being the only one with any tactical knowledge around here.”

“My grandfather thought I should learn. I hated it, of course. At first, I was crying so hard I couldn’t even see the target.”

“But you did learn.”

“I did learn.”

“Here. Have fun.”

I checked the safety and strapped it around my waist without another thought. It felt solid. Weird, but solid.

I shuddered as the gates slammed shut behind me, knowing that sound didn’t mean half as much to me as it did to Max, and it didn’t mean half as much to Max as it did to him , trapped down below.

I’d been wondering this whole time why Resi would choose to bring him here, and now I knew. It was because she wanted to remind him that no matter what he did, he was still a slave.

Her slave now, even though he wasn’t. He was my father’s, I realized with the kind of surreal revelation I hadn’t had since high school, smoking a bowl and looking at my own hands as if for the first time.

My father owned the boy who had just disrupted slavery in a way no one ever had before or since, and it was likely that neither of them knew it yet.

It seemed like the brighter he shone, the more darkness it took to extinguish him.

Was he hatching some new plan, even now?

Trying to escape? To fight his way out? And why imagine what he was doing now, what he was thinking now, or what his face would look like when, and if, he finally saw me again?

Did it matter? I couldn’t fathom it, anyway.

I’d take him. In any way, in any shape, in any form he cared to take, I’d take him.

And to do that, I would do whatever it took. Just like he would do for me.

Whatever it took.

HIM

I kept tugging. Maybe I couldn’t feign the desire to do it, but I thought I was doing okay at feigning the desire to get it over with.

Breathlessly, subtly, I guided her toward one of the metal cots nearest the chains, its stained mattress torn into by about a thousand generations of rats.

For a moment, my heart hammered, a faint drumbeat urging me to resist, to turn back, to let her kill me, if that was what it took.

I couldn’t act my way out of this. I couldn’t play a role in my own mind.

But I had to keep playing it. Sucking in a whimper, I watched as she attached the end of my chain to a solid leaden ring on the wall, checked it twice, three times, securing it with enough give so I could just settle myself on the narrow metal cot.

She reached for the hem of the stupid shirt that was getting exactly what it deserved, revealing the defaced wreck of the body my old masters had started and Noam had helped along.

My trousers were next, the once-luxurious suit material I’d been so impressed with sliding down my legs, a mere blood-soaked rag. I stepped out, laid bare. I quaked, trying to keep my face impassive, while she bounced on her heels, eyes glinting with delight as she stepped away.

I drew in a sharp breath as she kicked some of the chains aside with her tall boot, the sound echoing like the moans of those who had worn them. But her attention, to my relief, was elsewhere.

I sat, the mattress creaking under my weight. The room was still, save for our breathing. Hers excited and uneven. Mine measured. I hoped.

Her hand pressed against my bad shoulder.

I lay back, heart hammering, spine rigid against the thin fabric as her hands explored curiously across my chest, fingertips forming depressions in my scarred skin and tracing the contours of my muscles.

They dug deeper, nails grazing the wounds on my face and collarbone, the ones Noam had ripped open and she had carefully treated.

Maybe I could do this. Maybe if it only got this far.

No chance of that. She’d take everything. And until I could get out, I’d have to let her. In the meantime, since I couldn’t act, I’d have to leave. My mind would, anyway. Maybe if I closed?—

“Oh, and keep your eyes open, Starling.” She smiled.

“Why, ma’am?” I breathed. “So I don’t think of her?”

“No.” She sighed delicately into my ear. “I know you will anyway.” She leaned even closer, her tongue delicately flicking the outer corner of my eye. “I’ve just always wanted to see what golden tears look like.”

Then, like the strike of a match, she raised her head and threw one leg over my waist to straddle me, painfully grabbing my mostly useless arms and pinning my limp wrists above my head on the metal bedframe as she shimmied silkily out of her flowing blouse, revealing a half-moon of pale skin, lightning flashes of white scars.

“Eyes open, remember.”

I was already squeezing them shut, but I popped them open again as she gripped my wrists tighter, lifted herself, and mashed herself down again on my face, squeezing our bodies together, nearly gagging me on the salty dew that had formed between her legs.