Page 46 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

HIM

I ’d been nearly buried alive once before.

Four years old, baby limbs twisted back against their range of motion and jammed in a locked wooden trunk half my size.

Fingers raking off bloody shards of wood, screams buried in my throat, gasping for just one last chance to breathe.

It lasted barely a minute, probably, but felt like hours.

And I was there again. In the darkness, in the void. Dying, helpless, breathless, voiceless in a tiny box.

Until, from beside me, a light.

When the box had popped open again and the sunlight came pouring in and the sparrows started chirping, when I was weeping and gulping air and giving thanks for the piece of shit life I’d been so generously given back, the first thing I glimpsed was Master Jhemp, two years older, eating a chocolate bar with his mouth open, crumbs gathering in the corners of his pale, doughy lips and tumbling down onto the lush, manicured lawn.

O jee, I was just kidding. What, did you really think you were gonna die? It’s true what Papa said. Slaves really are pathetic cowards. Wouldn’t last a day without us around telling you what to do.

But when the light came this time, it wasn’t Master Jhemp’s voice I heard.

“Are you okay?”

What?

“Remember when I asked you what a miracle was, Lou?” I murmured weakly. “Well now, finally, I know the answer.”

“What?” She coughed, her lungs rattling with a sickening hollowness.

“A miracle is having reached twenty years old, having made it out of every hellhole they ever tried to toss me in, and having you here, asking that . Here I am, a bloody, broken-limbed, mutilated slave slowly suffocating to death at the bottom of a mine, and I’m still the luckiest son of a bitch in the goddamn world. ”

Her fingers curled lightly around my wrist, where they held on and didn’t let go.

As I spoke, I slowly realized I wasn’t suffocating. That I could breathe. We weren’t buried alive. There was still air and—though the electricity was out, the fluorescent glow gone—distantly, more light. We were still in the slave barracks, and the building was even still partially standing.

Forcing words out was painful, through gritted teeth, ignoring the hot streaks of pain, sharp and dull then sharp again, shooting through every nerve.

Dust swirled as my lashes struggled to open under layers of toxic detritus.

Head pounding, limbs once again twisted at bad angles under a stack of rock and plaster and metal and barbed wire.

Sizable but not so large I couldn’t throw it off.

Good. Because for more than a few reasons, we really needed to throw it off.

Louisa lay curled up under me, mostly in shadow, hair dressed in a thick coating of snowy, undoubtedly highly toxic dust. Her fingers seemed impossibly small and delicate, and now she turned to nuzzle me, one hand on the flashlight, the fingernails of the other digging further into my skin through the ragged fabric of my shirt.

It killed me that I couldn’t really hold her.

When we’d fallen—after she’d saved me, speaking of miracles—the only thing I could do was lightly drape my arms around her.

Now I couldn’t even do that . And God, she deserved so much more than that.

“You deserve to be out of this nightmare I sucked you into,” I murmured into her ear, “and to rest, to sleep. To be safe. And I’ll give you that if it kills me, which it very well might. ”

It already was .

“Lou.” Had she heard anything I’d just said?

She stirred and tried to raise herself up, but her wet cough interrupted the effort. The heat from her burning lungs seemed to radiate out at me.

My own chest tightened, the realization of the cause hitting me like yet another blow. No wonder I’d felt nauseated, dizzy, hallucinatory. And every second we stayed here, it would get worse.

And I needed to tell her. But I also had to get her out of here, so not yet. I didn’t know all of her anxiety triggers, but now was not the time to start compiling a list.

I glanced up in a panic as another beam of light flickered over the rubble. Whose? A whistle sounded, the same one from just before the explosion, and beside me, Louisa stirred again, kicking weakly at a piece of rubble pinning down her leg.

Through a hole in the debris, I could make out Max scrambling toward us, furiously throwing aside everything in his path. About time. But he clearly couldn’t see us—in fact, he was already heading off in another direction.

I opened my mouth, but only a raspy croak emerged. I tried again, desperately. “Max.”

“Max!” Louisa’s voice was more robust.

“Louisa?” Max’s head snapped back.

“I’m here.”

Max hurtled over to us, but his face paled when he laid eyes on me, struggling to raise the upper half of my body. “Fucking hell, kid. I guess she always did have a weird thing for hair. But never mind how you look. Can you walk? That’s the question.”

“Never mind if I can,” I managed to say. “I will. We have to get out of here, now.”

“Well, the main exit’s blocked off,” Max began. “Elevator’s fucked. And all the outdoor pathways leading out of the pit are now rubble.” He brushed some dust off his shoulders. “But hey, on the bright side, Obadiah’s dead.”

“What about Noam?” I asked warily.

“Long story. Look, there’s still a chance. My father built at least one secondary exit.”

“You know where?”

“I know not where.”

“Good enough. Lead on.”

Max helped Louisa to her feet first. She had a sprained ankle and bruises that were quickly darkening, obscuring the burns just now starting to helpfully scab over.

Her face was grim with pain, but she didn’t complain.

My own injuries seared hot and cold, but the pain felt secondary at this point. We had to move.

Max helped me up next, slinging one of my stiff arms over his shoulders. For now, I could hobble, which was enough. Louisa slid under my other arm with her slight weight.

I blinked into the gloom, scanning for an exit in the tangle of fallen beams and rocks, but another wave of nausea hit me, the room briefly spinning on its axis. We were already running out of time.

A metallic glint caught my eye and I squinted through the haze. There—a narrow opening in the rubble leading farther into the mine, back the way Resi had dragged me before. Max nodded, starting toward it without words. It was our best shot.

“Thanks for coming back, Max,” I said quickly, only to have Louisa and Max exchange one quick, knowing glance.

“What?”

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten about our agreement, slave.”

Resi was not quite there, in more ways than one.

She looked almost ethereal in the dim light, round eyes vacant.

She wasn’t coated in asbestos or copper dust like the rest of us, and her hair sparkled under Louisa’s weak flashlight, now rolling around on the ground.

She still looked clean—except for the blood and mascara smeared across her face like some kind of neo-expressionist mural.

Then it hit me. She’d planned this. She hadn’t gone crazy on me for trying to blow up the place. She’d gone crazy on me for trying to do it before she got the chance.

But the knife at Louisa’s throat—the very knife Louisa herself had dropped earlier—was real as fuck. And of course she’d gone for Louisa, the only one of us she was strong enough to physically restrain.

“You know, Obadiah tried this already—” Louisa’s voice cut off with a sickening gurgle, and my stomach dropped as blood cascaded down her throat like a trail of rubies. Not an artery. Maybe a vein.

“Did Obadiah do that ?” Resi sneered. “Stupid dead toothless fuck. Good riddance.”

“You fucking—” I bit my tongue so hard I tasted copper, choking on my helplessness, as trapped as when I’d been locked in that goddamn trunk.

Louisa wasn’t looking at me. She hissed through clenched teeth, her breaths rhythmic, controlled, like she was forcing herself to stay calm because she knew panic wouldn’t help. God, she is brave. And what was I doing? Standing here. Barely. Body broken. Mind foggy. Useless. No plan.

“Let her go,” I said, hoping it didn’t sound like a pathetic plea, even though it was. “Look at this place, Resi. This is over .”

“Resi,” Max broke in calmly. “I know I should have asked you this a long, long time ago, but just what the fuck is your problem? Do you seriously not understand that we’re all about to die if we don’t find a way out of here right now?”

“There is no way out of here.”

My heart pounded. She was lying. Wasn’t she? How had she planned on getting out otherwise?

“And you won’t shoot me.”

“No, I won’t,” Max replied.

Really? He wouldn’t? Seemed like a perfect way to deal with this to me.

“I’ll die the way I want to die—and that’s by killing them first. How you die is up to you.”

Louisa whimpered and shifted. Resi twisted her arms back violently, wringing out another stifled cry. She was as sick of being used as a bargaining chip as I was of watching her be used.

Resi was Max’s monster to handle. I knew that. And I trusted that Max knew what he was doing. But it was Louisa’s voice that had let me out of that box. And she needed me . It was time for another plan. If only my entire body and brain weren’t as much rubble as the mine now was.

“You aren’t this person, Resi,” Max said.

I almost laughed.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. I’m exactly this person.

And so are you . We’re the children of a monster.

The only difference is that I know what I am, and you’ve been running from it your whole life.

Well, surprise!” She threw one hand up in demented glee.

“Look where we both ended up! And the saddest part is that you had a chance . You had millions . You had everything you needed to give this whole fucked-up world exactly what it deserves. But instead, you thought you could save it, like the stupid, pathetic, naive bastard you always were.”