Page 44 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

HIM

I t didn’t surprise me that whatever sicko architect had happily accepted a check to design this place had done it with torture in mind.

And given that, it also didn’t surprise me when Obadiah dragged me like a bloody ragdoll toward some previously unseen shadowy recess of the barracks, where no doubt Resi kept the control center of her ghastly little funhouse.

At least I wasn’t naked anymore. At some point, she’d ordered a whining Obadiah to button me into what may have been an old slave uniform before it became a tattered, filthy rag.

Okay, so the rape part was over, then? Come on, I had to take comfort in something .

And as much as I wanted that thing to be Louisa’s imminent arrival, I was more concerned now with what she’d find when she arrived. Chains, guns, monsters waiting to rape and/or torture her—and a bloody, maimed boy kneeling on the floor with another woman’s sickly lavender perfume all over him.

Obadiah was approaching, his every step jolting through my frame, muscles tensing and flexing, the pain rolling back in thick, unbearable waves.

The cold metal bit into my wrist once more as he immobilized it on another slab jutting from the wall.

I could barely move my hand anyway, but for this operation, even barely was too much.

“You know, for maximum efficiency, you probably want to secure the other wrist,” I managed to spit out without retching. “Come to think of it, I don’t think you have the qualifications to be a lab assist?—”

A blow to the skull cut me off, the long-suffering wall behind me rewarded with another splatter of my blood to add to its collection.

I decided to stop talking.

But sure enough, here was another old friend, bit strapped tight over my raw lips and tongue, the metal cage pressing into the flesh of my cheeks.

My blood smeared against my teeth, warm and coppery, flowing down over my blackened, bruised chest and mangled hands and enlarging the pool already beneath me on the floor.

I gagged on the taste, my world blurring once more, the edges of my vision beginning to darken.

Obadiah snorted and joined Resi, who stood by a table cluttered with instruments and substances gleaming in the buzzing fluorescent light. I cataloged all of it, watching as her fingers twirled artfully over a row of glassware.

She rolled a vial back and forth, the liquid inside catching the sparse light. I was proud of my ability not to flinch when she uncapped the sulfuric acid, though its inimitable tang was so instantly overwhelming that it left my nasal passages watering and my throat constricting.

My body knew what was coming. I’d seen it.

An accident, in the university lab in Heidelberg, with a postgraduate researcher—sadly, involving one of the ones who had treated me like something resembling a colleague and not one of the countless pompous dipshits who couldn’t stand the fact that I was even there.

But all that guy got in return for his tiny bit of compassion was a melted, hardened yellow-black crater where one side of his face had been, just another horror the young slave working next to him couldn’t ever unsee.

Because this shit wasn’t fire. It didn’t stop when you took the source away. It had to be chemically neutralized, and until it was, it was a slobbering, gluttonous beast, consuming your flesh from the outside in.

So. Now sure would be a good time to figure out a way out of these chains. However, having mostly concentrated so far on blowing everyone to bits, I hadn’t had much time to brainstorm anything else.

And it was too late, anyway. Resi’s hands now moved in careful, deliberate strokes as she used baking soda to apply a chemical-resistant stencil on my broken wrist, just below the bandages—pretty ingenious, really, and oddly fascinating to the nerdiest part of my brain, even knowing the carnage in store for me.

I didn’t have to look. As my heart pumped blood, despite all my attempts to slow it down, I could feel the distinct serifs of each digit being carefully traced, one after another. Digits I used to wear. Digits I wasn’t allowed to forget. Hell, I used to have to recite them every goddamn morning.

And Resi, chillingly, was gentle.

Sweat rolled down my body now, turning my skin into a hot, bloody slurry, and my heart kept pounding in my ears.

Meanwhile, her damp, sticky halo of blond hair had turned piebald, reddened by flecks of flesh and blood, yellowed by the bulbs’ sickly film.

I swallowed, one last time, and the last thing I saw before she tipped the vial was my own blood delicately colonizing all the grooves in her fingers.

“You thought you could free yourself, boy,” she hissed angrily in my ear. “Like any of us will ever be free.”

HER

I jolted.

“Did you just fucking shoot me?” Noam roared in my ear, grabbing the gun from my hands before I could react.

“How the hell am I supposed to know with a bag over my head?” I bit back, despite the fabric muffling my words. “Do you have a bullet-shaped hole in your body with blood gushing out of it? There’s your answer.”

I went for the whistle, trying in vain to latch onto it with my teeth from inside the bag, but he tore it painfully off my neck. “Little brat, how are you still alive, anyway?” he snarled.

“Good question.”

He grabbed my arms and wrenched them unnaturally behind my back, and I screamed. Loud. High-pitched. Because why not? I had no reason to stay quiet anymore. He scooped me up and started loping away, not nearly as fast as he probably would have liked.

I had shot him. A shivery little thrill passed through me. Probably grazed his leg, if I had to guess.

And it hadn’t helped me at all. I was no doubt on my way to Resi, anyway, for further torture.

Which could be useful. But my options for mounting a rescue were dwindling by the second.

The gun and whistle were gone. The knife?

Undetermined. I couldn’t feel its weight, but I also hadn’t felt him take it.

At any rate, my hands were useless, though not, as far as I could tell, restrained with anything besides his hulking arms.

But he had been shot. That had to be worth something.

I jerked against his welded grip, testing it out as he, moaning painfully to himself, dragged me somewhere far from anywhere I’d seen or had time to examine.

The stale air from the nylon bag filled my nostrils, tainted with metallic copper and musty earth and gunpowder.

I squeezed my fists, resisting the urge to thrash wildly. What would he do? What would he tell me if he could?

Wait. Plan. Don’t die.

Well, I hadn’t yet. My record was perfect.

I wriggled, stretching my fingertips, feeling for the knife. It had to still be there. I sighed, breath catching against the inside of the bag, and focused on Noam’s labored breathing and slow, limping steps. The wound was slowing him down; he wouldn’t be able to keep this pace for long.

He grumbled something under his breath as we rounded a bend, my shoulder scraping roughly against the cavern wall. I clenched my jaw against the pain, swallowing down a yelp. No. Keep quiet. Wait.

Suddenly, he paused. Were we here? I sensed him shift, then grunt as he eased me down. My back hit first, then my head, and a little cry of pain escaped before I could stop it.

All at once, the bag ripped open, stale air rushing out, replaced by an acrid coppery tang that stung my dry eyes. Copper. Blood. Fear.

“Oh hey, Louisa,” Resi’s voice cooed, lazy and dripping in mockery. “Good timing.”

I squinted, adjusting to the sudden flood of greasy light. To Resi—her sickly sweet giggle echoing off the cavern walls. To Obadiah, hunched over something— someone —near the wall.

My heart seized.

I’d seen him a mess before. No doubt. But was that really him?

Muzzled and cuffed to a slab of stone, his bare, pulverized scalp coated with dirt and blood, his skin as pale as a corpse where it wasn’t blackened and yellowed and daubed with fresh splatters of red?

Blood that Resi also wore. Blood that meant she wasn’t done hurting him. And she hadn’t even started hurting me.

He was breathing. I was breathing. That was a good start.

“Where’s Max?” Resi asked.

“No clue,” I said. Come to think of it, this would be a really good time for him to show up.

Resi nodded to Noam, who seemed to understand the gesture.

“I suppose you’re thinking,” she said, “that now that I’ve got you both here, I’m going to give you some long, grandiose speech about why I’m like this and why I’m doing what I’m about to do, et cetera, et cetera.

But I think we kinda covered all that already, so… ”

She flicked the acid onto his wrist.

I screamed. Because he couldn’t.

Horror swallowed me whole as his wrist—scarred but till now unbroken—transformed into a grotesque, twisted mass. The acid devoured it, relentless, eating through flesh and muscle, bubbling, blistering, consuming. The air’s coppery musk was replaced with the effluvium of burnt flesh and hair.

And the worst part was, despite the muzzle, I could hear him scream.

Something hot and terrible and profound surged in me.

My grip on the knife tightened as I rose, blinking through the pain radiating from my shoulder.

But I couldn’t lose myself. Not now. If I ran at Resi with the knife, the goons would pounce on me in seconds, and he’d still be there in chains. Dying.

Wait. Plan. Breathe. Keep acting. Don’t die.

If I couldn’t hear his voice, I’d just have to keep imagining it.

The numbers were seared onto his skin forever already. It had taken seconds. It was over. Resi had done what she wanted. She could stop.

Why wasn’t she stopping?

“Oh,” she mused. “I guess you expected me to stop, huh?”

“Please,” I choked out. “I’ll do anything.”

“Anything? Why? Tell me.”