Page 45 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

“Because—because I love him,” I said. “And because he saved me. And now it’s my turn to save him. I know he—he thinks I’m not ready for it. That my life hasn’t prepared me. But,” I said louder, just in case , “it has now. Here.”

I stepped forward and tossed the knife from my inner jacket pocket down to clatter on the stained stone. My heart raced. My breath hitched. And I said:

“I’ll—I’ll be your slave instead.”

Resi looked from Noam to Obadiah, incredulous. “Uh, honey?” she said. “I’m not really sure you understand what slavery really means.”

“No,” I said. “Thanks to him, I understand perfectly.”

He was struggling in the muzzle, thrashing, gasping, screaming noiselessly now like a hooked fish, the acid still eating through him. In a minute or so, give or take, he wouldn’t just be tattooed. He’d lose the hand. Maybe the arm. Maybe more.

And, fuck. What could be worse than being unable to touch him when he was just centimeters away?

Well, nothing.

But we’d been there before.

Keep acting. Keep breathing.

“Burn me. Rape me. Or have them do it. I don’t care.”

Resi laughed. High, warbling, deceptively pleasant. Like the high school mean girls whose cruelty had been almost beautiful , glittering diamonds.

But even diamonds could shatter if struck in the right place. Chemistry told me so.

“Well, come on,” she said. Before she could beckon Noam to drag me forward, I darted toward them myself, hands outstretched to accept the set of chains Noam produced from the seemingly bottomless pile.

I even lowered myself to my knees without being ordered to, inhaling sharply as he locked my wrists in the cold iron cuffs.

Noam yanked on a lock of my hair, forcing me to look up at my new mistress , at the red harlequin smile painted in flecks of blood and tissue across her face.

I was inches away from him now. Right where I wanted to be.

Because just as Noam hadn’t thought to check me for the knife, he’d forgotten to check me for the master key, too.

Which was good because I’d had it in my hand the entire time, having found it in Gerald Langer’s own whisper room , after following the red-veined arrow.

Sure, the mining slaves had never gotten the chance to use it, and most of them had paid for it with their lives, but they sure had given it their best shot.

Left it, I liked to think, for the one person smart enough to give them credit for it.

My only regret was that I’d needed Noam to take me here. Otherwise, I would have shot him in the head.

“Your boy fucked me, you know.”

What? My heart turned a traitorous little somersault, but I shoved it down as I slipped the key into the tiny lock, breathing only when I heard the tumblers move once, then again. “I don’t believe you. I mean”—my face flushed—“ma’am.”

“Show her.”

The bald goon grabbed a cell phone, an app cued up to a video feed from a camera mounted somewhere on the ceiling, and shoved the screen in front of my face. I looked away and shoved down my gag reflex as if the thing were emitting some kind of toxic miasma.

But I turned back. Because I couldn’t look away from what she’d done to him.

“God, see how fucking huge and hard he was?” she purred dementedly as I stared, nauseated, at the pixelated images. “When you were trekking through that goddamn desert trying to save him, he was moaning for me, begging to taste me, begging to come inside me.”

My stomach churned, but I kept working the lock. Fucking hell. How could this pathetic, perverted woman possibly think any of this meant anything to me, other than proving it was actually possible to hate her even more than I already did?

“So, Louisa—oops,” she taunted, creeping nearer. “I forgot. Slave. Any regrets yet about your noble sacrifice? I mean, besides the fact that I’m still going to kill both of you, but I figured that went without saying.”

My eyes flicked to him. He writhed, barely conscious. Could he hear her? Could he hear anything ?

Like it mattered. I’d feel the same, say the same. In silence, in noise, in darkness, in light, in night, in day. Whether anyone could hear or whether everyone could hear.

And that was exactly what Resi would never be able to understand. Because I did love him. And he had saved me.

But that was so, so far from all he’d done.

“Regrets? No.” I kept going on the lock, applying minute pressure on the cuffs, whispering an escape artist’s prayer for it to yield. “I’d make it again.”

“What?” She blinked once.

“Luckily,” I said with a smile—showmanship—as the lock clicked open and my chains fell away. “I don’t have to make it at all.”

“Oh, fuck,” she said. “ Obadiah! ”

At her desperate screech for backup, the reluctant goon sprang forward, his overgrown frame a cannonball hurtling toward me, bent on rage to collect the payment he’d been promised and denied over and over again.

His timing: perfect.

Because Resi, in her outrage at being outsmarted by me , of all people, had lost hers. In a frenzy, she grabbed the remaining acid in the vial. I lunged for it, managing to veer it off course by barely a centimeter.

Which was enough. The vial hit its target dead-on, shattering in Obadiah’s face. He shrieked like a demon, clawing at the flesh of his eyes as it bubbled and melted, the acrid stench of smoldering skin seizing my nostrils as he collapsed in a writhing pile of contorted limbs and incinerated tissue.

The world around me seemed to stop dead as Obadiah’s screams echoed and his body convulsed on the floor, hands blindly grasping at nothing.

In the chaos, I dove toward Resi’s metal shelf full of fun, pure adrenaline buoying me now, greeted with a series of unlabeled vials and beakers. Ones a chemist would know. Ones he would know, not that he was in any shape to tell me. Breathe. Think. Don’t cry.

What neutralizes acid?

Tsk. Slow learner. A base, of course. But where?

My gaze settled on an unlabeled container of white powder.

I snatched it up, fumbled with the lid, wailed in frustration as it resisted in only the way an inanimate object could.

But at last, it popped open, and I stuck in a finger and tasted it.

No mere powder was going to kill me or him more dead than we were being killed now.

But before I could open it, a pair of small, cold fingers closed onto the box, trying to wrench it away.

I clenched my teeth and growled, pulling it back.

But robbed of her hired muscle, Resi was smaller than me and weaponless.

I grunted and kicked her away, in the process letting what I was reasonably sure was baking soda loose all over the room in an enormous frosty cloud, eliciting a blissful fizzing sound as it at last overpowered and neutralized the acid melting him piece by piece.

He slumped in his collar, his once-shimmering eyes dulled and glassy with pain, barely able to focus. The chains rattled weakly as he gasped, gulping air as best as he could around the muzzle.

I kneeled, my fingers curling around the cool metal cuff around his withered inner arm, the jagged numbers seared into his skin in gruesome greenish-yellow cavities.

The lock, though, blessedly yielded to the key.

With a sharp twist, it snapped open. The collar came undone just as fast, clattering to the ground with finality.

Immediately, he wilted against me, eyes glazed but astonished, his still-muzzled breath warm against my neck. I slipped an arm around his waist, propping him up with what little strength I had left. And finally, I undid the muzzle’s buckle, unpeeled the straps, and flung it away.

“Lou,” he said before it was all the way off, and for a second—but only a second—I dared to fret about what he would say first.

I really needn’t have.

“I love you.”

“What?”

Despite imminent danger, despite certain death, I froze, trembling in sheer amazement.

At hearing the words, at hearing them now , at the fact that he was actually clinging to me and maybe even smiling, and delivering a series of half-blind, chaotic, bloody kisses to my lips, my forehead, my nose, my eyelids.

And at the fact that I was probably putting both our lives in further danger by pausing to kiss him back , because of course I was.

“Am I not getting through to you, slow learner? I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you. And?—”

But in the degraded gold of his irises, for a split second, reflected back, I saw Resi catapulting toward us from behind, wielding the knife I’d theatrically tossed away.

On instinct, I whirled, snaked out with my arm, and scooped up a discarded piece of ore.

Even weakened, my aim was good enough to connect with Resi’s temple with a satisfying thwack .

She physically jerked and crumpled, the knife clattering out of her grip.

She hauled herself up almost immediately, of course, but before she could counterattack, a series of frantic, shrill noises cut through the chaos.

Rape whistle.

“It’s Max,” I breathed.

“Right on time, I see,” he muttered sarcastically against my lips, filling me with bizarre delight. But then his body went taut, head turning, eyes searching, mind calculating.

I knew that look.

“Wait. Where’s Noam?”

Before I could say another word, the mine—that vast, barren tomb in which we had all forgotten we were buried alive—answered for me. A blast rocked the ground. Dust rained down. The world blurred.

And I clung—like the last time, like the first—to all his weight, to all his heat, to the miraculous unbroken circle of his arms on my waist.

Closed my eyes and fell.