Page 40 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

Of course the last thing I wanted was to profane Louisa by taking her here.

Putting her here, even theoretically, would be a sacrilege.

I had been made for this place. Louisa hadn’t.

Louisa was citrus perfume and pink velvet chairs and Paris art prints and soft golden lighting, and all the things they hadn’t allowed me to touch then, and I wouldn’t allow myself to touch now.

But my breath hitched and I closed my eyes tightly, thinking maybe if I could reduce her to elements—a flyaway curl, a bare shoulder, a tiny mole, an outline of a girl I no longer dared to fill in completely—I could selfishly have her with me, still. Because I’d never needed her more.

Resi’s weight ground more heavily down on me, her breath hot and ragged.

Meanwhile, she twisted behind her to latch her fingers onto my dick, which was betraying me.

Fucking weak, the way all men were weak, and it stood rigid, a faithless column of straight-up fuck-you to my heart.

Resi curled her long fingers around it, her laughter muffled in my neck as she rocked hard, roping her fingers in my bloody, coagulated strands of hair and shoving me still further up, sending some kind of sickly lavender scent up my nostrils in place of the equally horrid stench of the mine.

“Good boy.” The tendons in her neck stood out like cords as she strained against me, unaware or uncaring that I wasn’t moving of my own accord. The rattling of chains and the slapping of our bodies filled the room and echoed in the empty spaces of our tawdry crypt.

Her vanilla nails etched the vaguest traces along the curves and lines of my muscles, just enough to make my nerves twitch, to break past the numbing effect of the opioids, which I suspected would wear off in a matter of minutes.

All I could see were the shadows along the ceiling, on the flickers of light from the greasy yellow tubes overhead. On darkness. On nothing.

Look, even while being used and exploited, I’d always prided myself on finding ways to enjoy sex. But now she was even fucking stealing that, breaking it down into a pile of rotting, twisted trash, like everything else in my life she’d ever got her hands on.

My muscles trembled, trying so hard to remain still and impassive, to feel nothing. Her hand slid down my chest, fingers tracing the V of my abdomen before dipping lower. I gasped, gulping for the toxic, chemical air of the mine. Because at least it wasn’t her.

Resi chuckled darkly. “Thinking of her yet?”

I swallowed and blinked, vision a wet blur, focusing my face on the moldy ceiling, and let out a mewl, all the more pathetic for how I tried to shove it down.

“Still so quiet. Okay, how about this? Let me tell you a story. A story of a brave girl out in the desert, fighting her way back to you. No food, little water. The dust gathers in her hair and eyes, digging agonizingly into the raw burns covering her body. Thirst grips her throat, hinting at death. A girl who grew up in luxury, who wasn’t made to endure such things. But she presses on, for you.”

Where the fuck was she going with this?

“And what does she think you’re doing right now?

” Resi continued, sliding wetly up my thigh again to straddle my midsection fully, leaning down until our noses touched in a parody of cuteness.

“She’s thinking you’re fighting for her.

That all those cute little gears in your head are turning.

That you’ve got a plan. A plan to get back to her.

” She hummed and giggled. “Come on now, help me out. Keep it going. What do you think she’d say if she saw what you’re really doing?

Saw you like this ?” She giggled ecstatically, wriggling her hips on my dick.

“If she saw how hard you are for me? Would her heart break? Would she scream? Would she cry ?” Her voice grew more and more excited, relishing as my whimpers grew more and more strangled, desperately trying to suck in every emotion I’d ever felt.

But it was no use. “No shit. She always cries. The question is, will . You ?” She punctuated each word by scraping her sopping pussy violently up and down my shaft, that for all its wetness felt hard and abrasive as any wound.

From my eye and down my cheek, it slipped. Then another and another. Fuck me, after all that, I was crying because of her, just like she wanted, and hungrily, she lapped them all up like a kitten with her little pink poison pill of a tongue.

“ Are you?”

A groan ripped from deep within my chest—pain, pleasure. Who cared?

“ Are you?” she repeated. “Speak, now.”

It was all worthless now.

I vomited out the words. “Yes, ma’am.”

Holy fuck, this bitch deserved to die. Why didn’t I just fucking kill her already?

My hands were free, after all, though broken, and surely I could summon enough strength to hurl her off the bed and onto the concrete floor using only my body weight, use my one functioning leg to smash that smirk on her face and pound it into a bloody death grin, leave her bleeding out onto the pile of chains where she belonged.

But oh, she’d fucking love that. Because it would mean she’d turned me into her . And then Noam would arrive, and see to it that my body was soon lying broken and twisted on top of hers, just one more rotting corpse in the charnel house.

Yeah, I was already turning into her, and I was going to die anyway. But if my only choice left was how I would go, it sure wouldn’t be like that.

So my mind reached out into the dark, groping toward memories untainted, for places I had been that weren’t torture chambers. Goddammit, there’d been so few. And they weren’t places. They were people. Louisa. Maeve. My mother.

That was it. And I couldn’t bear to bring any of them here.

Blocking out my eyes from the starved shape her lips made and my ears from the series of moans escaping her mouth as she whetted her nails on my chest, gouging my skin past the scarred white, into the red, where it hurt, it fucking hurt , and all I could do in that moment was bite back my moan and pull a thin, dark veil of nothing clumsily over my mind as I shuddered and spasmed into her—hating every fucking second of it.

A few seconds later, she finished with a cry like a strangled songbird, collapsing onto my chest, heart pounding as if our arteries had been cut and spliced. She inhaled deeply as if she could sense more tears forming even now behind my squeezed-shut eyelids.

Yes, but no. No more for her tonight. Please. She’d taken enough.

She left a sticky slick of moisture between us as her weight shifted and she propped herself up on her elbows and pulled away from our locked hips.

For a few seconds, she just lay there with her cheek propped on her hand, staring at me in my horror, like an infatuated teenager on a lacy pink pillow.

And I lay still, afraid to move. Unable to move.

“Starling.” Her tongue purred around the made-up “name” she’d decided was mine.

“So bright. So lofty. So pure, while you’re lying there in chains.

Thing is, you still”—she giggled—“you still think you’re made for something better than this.

For something purer. For her . And I just—I can’t help but think—shouldn’t someone have beaten that out of you long ago?

Oh, God, you poor, sweet, vain, delusional little slave boy.

What are we going to do with you?” She jabbed a manicured nail toward the area between my legs where she had just been, eyes like blue-hot blazes in the greasy yellow light.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter because I know better.

You know better. You aren’t above me. You are me.

After all,” she said as she rolled off me, her long finger delicately trailing a streak of blood- and pus-tinged tears down my cheek, thieving another kiss. “You chose this.”

I wept for Louisa, but it was Resi who had lapped up my tears. How fucking unfair was that?

At last, she pulled away, a single arm still draped across my chest like yet another shackle. She nestled into the curve of my body, and there we lay, mistress and slave, a lovers’ travesty, two bloody angels on a metal slab.

What had I done? What was there to do now ?

Well, die, probably. It was what I deserved.

But instead, as Resi’s breathing slowly but surely evened out, I began to look around.

The lamp sat on the floor near the bed, near the pile of chains, just out of reach of my hands.

But I didn’t need my hands. Once more, I glanced at Resi, her hair spilling over the bed like hay, each rise and fall of her chest beating away the time.

I let out a slow exhale. Otherwise, the room was silent, the air hung thick with the musk of a place where everything was a waste: Spent tailings.

Spilled seed. Crushed bones. Shattered lives.

Resi’s arm draped over me, heavy for a woman so light. Her fingers twitched in her sleep, which was as restless as one might expect given the living spectral horror she was.

The opioids would wear off soon. I could already feel my full capacity for reason coming back, flowing through me, and I welcomed it back like an old friend.

My pain, however, was an old enemy. But I couldn’t stop because I’d led Resi to this slab—endured that —for a reason.

I screamed at myself, wishing I had a prod to electrocute myself into moving.

Get up, you pathetic, weak bastard. You can die after you kill her.