Page 41 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

I stirred a finger, then an arm, pawing weakly to get the bottlecap—the same one I’d found in the sand earlier that day—loose from where I’d awkwardly palmed it under my bandages while Resi had been gazing up at the stars.

Using the last two fingers of my right hand—the only ones even half-functional, I’d discovered after a methodical test of all of them—I scraped the jagged edge against the cinderblock wall a few times, then managed to push it against the rusty valve of the canister of acetylene gas that had been propped behind the pile of chains.

The cap levered the valve open just enough to leak the gas—and maybe, if I was lucky, undo the lock on my collar, or the other end of the chain. But that would be the hard part.

All in all, there were two outcomes. One was that it would slowly infuse the chamber, killing Resi and hopefully Noam, too, whenever he came to check on her.

But only if my theory was correct and they couldn’t smell it under the acrid, coppery aroma that infused the mine.

In the meantime, it would give me a sliver of time to get myself free somehow.

Or, if I couldn’t get myself free—far likelier—it would kill me, too.

Just like every other plan I’d enacted recently.

Anyway, staying alive wasn’t the point. The point was making sure Louisa couldn’t get here, or at least ensuring there would be no one here to greet her when she did.

The gas set, and I edged gingerly back over to the bed. But the rusty springs I lay on creaked like a gunshot in a tomb, and Resi’s eyelashes fluttered. I went rigid, stilling my breath, and her hand retreated.

I had only seconds. Heart pounding, I used my good leg to kick the chains over the canister, then camouflage them with the dirt and debris littering the floor.

Ripping a few strips of filthy fabric off the bedding with my teeth, I settled myself back down on the cot, clumsily wrapping myself in as many layers as I could to filter the air for as long as I could while I worked on my collar and chain.

Preparing to die. It seemed like I’d been doing that a lot lately.

Ah, who was I kidding? I’d been fucked since the day I was born.

Case in point, before I could position myself to start looking for tools to work on the chain, the door swung open, followed by Resi’s eyes. Alighting on the new arrival, she practically pushed me, naked, off the bed.

“Mistress—I mean boss,” Obadiah stammered, eyes darting from one nude form to the other.

Fuck. This must feel like Christmas morning for the old perv.

“We got?—”

“What are you doing?” Resi demanded.

I might have been tempted to say the old gardener looked like shit, but that would be redundant.

His security uniform was rumpled and ragged, coated in sweat and dust, but characteristically, he just stood in the door, leering and cackling at Resi as she angrily dove for her clothes and threw them on in a fluster.

She clearly hadn’t planned for this, having become far too accustomed to humiliating others and forgetting what it felt like to be humiliated.

If it was the last thing I ever saw, maybe the prayer had worked after all.

“Where the hell have you been, looking like that? I thought I told you to?—”

“It’s the girl.”

“What?” Resi’s eyes flashed, surprise and annoyance she couldn’t hide. Just like that, the tables were turning. “What about her? You were supposed to?—”

“I tried.”

Fuck. I should have known all along. Resi had lied to me, of course, but it was worse.

She hadn’t even considered Louisa worth luring here.

Instead, all along, she’d planned to send this motherfucker to rape her, slit her throat, and dump her body in a canal or something before she ever got close.

For some reason, this made me want to murder Resi more than anything she’d done to me .

“Maybe try calling off your batshit brother who’s been waving his goddamned gun in my fucking face for the past three hours.”

Brother? That didn’t make sense at all. Because Max Langer was gone. He was in Rio Dulce, with Maeve, and?—

“They’re on their way here, aren’t they?” Resi demanded. “Max and the girl?”

To my surprise, for the first time since we’d met, her deceptively angelic blue eyes looked slightly feral.

This clearly wasn’t part of her plan, either.

Problem was, if she ended up with Louisa on her hands despite her best attempts to dispose of her, I had no doubt she wouldn’t hesitate to lie in wait and give the girl who’d just leveled up to serious thorn-in-side status everything she’d threatened and more. And I would have a front-row seat.

And Obadiah’s face gave away the answer. I jerked against my chains, eyes flying frantically to the rigged gas valve.

Because there was also a third outcome, one I’d really hoped I wouldn’t have to use.

But since I hadn’t figured out the microchips and we were all as good as dead anyway, I could at least do the world one favor and bury this fucking place under ten tons of rubble, so that not only Louisa but no one would ever have to look at it.

Meanwhile, Obadiah had dropped all pretensions of respect for Resi. His frustration with her was popping out all over his bloated purple grotesquerie of a face.

“Will ya shut your big yap, woman?” he demanded, just as I went for it. I made one last desperate leap forward, my good leg poised to kick over the lamp whose spark, when it reacted with the acetylene, would blow this whole goddamn mine to kingdom come.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to say. They’re already inside .”