Page 42 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

HIM

W hat?

Max and Louisa, here? Inside? I wasn’t sure how or why. Only that I’d been milliseconds away from killing the one person I’d spent the past twelve hours killing myself trying to save.

In that fleeting moment of chaos, I aborted the kick. It became a fall instead, the chain on my neck jerking me down and back to collapse in a naked, mutilated heap at Resi’s feet. Smooth.

At the sound, still facing Obadiah, she froze and started to turn.

Prey. Predator. Play dead. Make yourself small. After all, there was still a tiny sliver of a chance she hadn’t noticed what I’d been trying to do.

Yeah, right. Like any predator, her instincts were razor-sharp. Her eyes locked onto my shift in focus, and in two swift strides, her hand latched onto my battered, broken, bandaged wrist.

“Watcha doing there, Starling?”

“Nothing, ma’am,” I lied, pulse thrumming.

Look, if Louisa was doomed to end up here no matter what, I was sure as hell going to selfishly try to live long enough to see her again, even if I had to watch her beautiful eyes as she inevitably found out what had just happened between me and Resi.

And then watch whatever Resi and the goons chose to do to her after that.

Some reunion. I was going to try for it anyway.

“Yeah? Nothing?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I swallowed. “Nothing.”

Over her shoulder, Obadiah was just standing there lumpily, watching the scene play out and waiting for the cue to burst into his wheezing laugh, as if the fact that we’d all been just seconds away from total annihilation were just too funny for words.

If even that blithering idiot had figured out what was going on, what were the chances that Resi hadn’t?

Zero, as it turned out.

With one quick, livid motion, she gouged the bottlecap off its notch on the gas valve angrily, shutting it down, and threw it across the room. Apparently, it had been a rhetorical question.

She spoke in a voice as light and hollow as synthetic jade. “You. Hurt. My. Feelings.”

What? Wait, was she serious? I almost laughed . In any case, her benevolent mistress act was officially curtains. Which meant my obedient slave act was, too, thank fucking God.

“Starling,” she said, stepping closer to where I, for lack of any other immediate options, still kneeled on the filth-covered floor. With one swift motion, she grabbed a lock of my hair and yanked it up by the roots, twisting my head up as I hissed sharply.

Then she exploded, kicking aside the metal bed we’d been lying on, clawing and ripping away the bandages on my hands and my bruised and bloodied torso and the wounds on the side of my head, her vanilla nails shredding to bits the delicate scabs and hooking into the weeping gashes, undoing in seconds the hours of care she’d spent on me out in the desert.

“Or should I say, boy . Slave. Dog. Pup. 77 ?—”

“—34966,” I finished for her, gasping. “That’s right. Keep ’em coming.”

Man, defiance felt good again. Even if it was about to get me killed.

“So you figured out the truth about the chip,” she said haughtily. “Between that and the bracelet, you probably think you’ve freed yourself.”

Huh? But the serum hadn’t worked. My chip was still in. That’s why—unless—my mind was off to the races again.

“But you’re not even close.”

“Well, I’m a hell of a lot closer,” I choked out.

“Shut up. You haven’t even earned the privilege of a name if you were about to do what I think you were about to do to me.”

“ And everybody else, remember,” I said.

She grabbed the chain from my neck and jerked it toward herself with more strength than I’d thought she had. “ Fuck everybody else.”

Whoa. The pain. The pain, old friend, as I became more and more unmoored from the life raft of the opioids, was raw and glaring and unadorned as she dug those vicious vanilla nails deeper into my hair and skin, sinking into my wounds like razor blades, revealing my crushed, bloody, impaled hands and wrists, hanging down like scraggly trees.

With a deep scratch across my cheekbone, she released me. I gritted my teeth to hold back a scream, sinking lower in my chains.

“Get me the grinder,” she said.

What?

Obadiah lumbered over to the shelf and pulled out a tool, one that indeed appeared to be an electric angle grinder with a spinning cutting disc, glinting in the wan fluorescence.

She fired it up, the blade giving off a high-pitched whine.

Then in one motion, she plunged it into my scalp like an ax, her perfect pink tongue poking out in a deranged smirk as she turned my world yet again on its axis.

Turned it into a blur of pain and vibration, of my barely stifled bleats of agony as chunks of my hair and flesh flew off and back onto Resi, leaving behind red trails dripping down my scalp and into my eyes, mixing with multicolored fluids from the old, shredded wounds.

Finally, the tool switched off, the whine still vibrating in my ears. Resi set it aside. I could still feel it, though nothing sounded in the room other than my slow, labored breathing—and hers.

Reaching to the floor, she bunched one of my severed, bloody golden locks between her fingers.

Her blue eyes were feral now, a rabid white wolf coated in the remains of the kill.

She stood there, blinking away the blown-back flecks of my blood and flesh, holding a hand to her face, watching the scarlet trails dripping down her fingers and pooling in her nailbeds.

We watched each other, shoulders heaving.

Blood, too, trickled down my forehead and chest, staining the dust on the concrete floor.

Hands crushed, wrists impaled, remnants of torn bandages dangling forlornly off them.

I trembled, and a chasm of pain rose up to engulf me.

Pain that I just fell into because what could I do?

Resi couldn’t just kill me right now, could she?

“We could have—” she began and didn’t finish. Just stood there, her voice impossibly small. “Why aren’t you—Why aren’t you like?—”

Oh. I could have kicked myself for not realizing it before. “You wanted to believe it, didn’t you?” I wheezed out through my blood-filled sinuses.

“What?”

Yep. I was right.

Without even knowing it, I’d drilled all the way down.

Down to fear. Fear for the power of the one thing she couldn’t twist, couldn’t mock, couldn’t crucify.

She’d tried. She’d tried with Max, she’d tried with the girls, and now she’d tried with me .

And somewhere along the line, she’d lost them all because she couldn’t destroy what she couldn’t understand.

“Deep down, somewhere,” I remarked thoughtfully, “you wanted to believe it.”

“Stop it,” she whined, almost to herself, her knees bending minutely. But that slight bend revealed a universe.

She was in pain. But not the same kind I was in. The bad kind of pain. And it was almost enough to make me feel sorry for her.

Almost.

Mostly, I just wished I’d realized it earlier. “It’s all right, Resi,” I continued.

“ Stop.” Her shoulders moved up and down.

I even tried to force a twisted smile. Showmanship, you know. “We all want something to believe in.”

“Muzzle him,” she screeched to Obadiah. “And get the acid.”

HER

“It should be here,” Max muttered, shoving aside a long-empty water cooler and a broken swivel chair, and kicked an old desk nameplate reading Gerald Langer into the wall with a certain amount of pent-up aggression.

We searched the cramped space, raising little clouds of dust that floated in the slivers of fluorescent light piercing the gloom.

Once the slumbering beast of the mine elevator had groaned to a halt at the bottom of the shaft with a cacophony of creaks and clunks, Max had immediately led me to a dilapidated shed at the mine’s base, its door hanging off one rusted hinge.

Inside, old office equipment lay corroded and scattered, file cabinets vomiting their moldy contents over the floor.

All the while, the smell of oxidizing copper coated my throat, hampering my breathing.

Yeah, I was definitely going to die down here. But God, just let me find him first. That was all I asked.

“What should be here?” I asked, resting my exhausted body against a warped desk chair, my voice echoing in the claustrophobic space. I was about to collapse, and I also knew every minute we wasted here was a minute we couldn’t waste. And that he couldn’t spare.

Max sensed it, undoubtedly. “Well, let me put it this way. Resi isn’t keeping your boy here through the subtle art of persuasion. She’s got him locked down somehow. So I was thinking?—”

“A master key.”

He nodded.

“And your dad told you that he kept it here ?”

He rifled through a pile of yellowed architectural renderings. “Well, that would have required him not to have been an unimaginable prick, so no, he did not. I was kind of just hoping.”

I sighed.

“Anyway, we don’t need it. We’re armed. What I do suspect is that our boy is likely in one of two places.”

“Go on.”

“One, the slave barracks, but I don’t know where they are.”

“What? But they’re right here on the blueprints,” I protested.

“These are the old blueprints.”

I groaned.

“Sorry. Two, my dad kept a safe room somewhere, in case the slaves ever rioted. He called it his ‘whisper room.’ But he didn’t tell me where that was, either, and for obvious reasons, he kept it off the blueprints. You know, in case they ever got a hold of them.”

“Did he ever have to use it?”

“He was starting to worry,” Max said with a heavy sigh.

“There was an economic slowdown and he was cutting corners everywhere. The slaves were basically being starved to death. They had nothing to lose, and at that point, some of them had managed to survive here long enough that they knew the layout of the mine intimately and taught the others. The plan got pretty far along. Until somebody tipped him off.”

“Oh, God.”