Page 47 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

“Someone had to,” Max said quietly. “Someone had to try . Look, contrary to popular belief, I’m not so arrogant as to think I know what the meaning of life is.

But I do know there has to be more to it than just fucking over everybody who fucked you .

Because if it is, we’ll all be slaves for the rest of our lives.

” He exchanged glances with me. “Whether we started that way or not.”

“Did he teach you that? Did she teach you that?”

“No,” Max said. “You did.”

His voice was calm, eerily so, as he stepped toward Resi and Louisa.

“When we played outside in the evenings. After chores. After homework. You would start running,” he said, breathing deep.

“Out into the desert, as far as your legs could carry you, your hair flowing behind, until it just blended in with the sand. And every time, I chased you. I’d scream at you, beg you over and over again to stop.

That he’d track you down no matter how far you got.

That you’d just make it worse for yourself.

And I was right. He always did. And then he’d make me watch him punish you.

As if it were my fault. Which in a way I guess it was.

” He swallowed thickly. “Because I couldn’t stop you. ”

“So you talked,” Resi said quietly, voice echoing oddly in a space now utterly silent except for the beating of our hearts.

I tried again to catch Louisa’s eye, but it was like she wasn’t even aware of me. Why?

“I talked,” Max continued. “I figured if he wouldn’t let me leave, the least I could do was talk you through it so you could hear my voice.

So you could have something to listen to that wasn’t—that wasn’t—anyway.

” He coughed. “He muzzled me next time because no son of his could be allowed to talk to a slave girl like that. Like she was anything more than a hole to be fucked.”

Resi’s expression twisted minutely. Because if she was skilled at anything, it was tricking you into thinking she could stop being a monster if you just pressed her buttons right.

Don’t fall for it, Max.

The silence shattered. A low rumble from deep within the mine. Dust rained down; the ground beneath us shifted. Louisa whimpered again. What the fuck was that? We might be dead sooner than even I thought.

Enough of this. I slid into a slight crouch, muscles screaming in protest. Resi didn’t even turn. She hadn’t looked at me once, in fact. From where I stood in darkness, with the angle of the one light shining up from the ground, she couldn’t even see me.

Perfect. I could use that.

“But I still talked,” Max continued. “Even if you couldn’t hear my voice.”

“I didn’t ask you for that, Max.” Resi seethed, her nails digging into Louisa’s neck like she was some kind of living stress ball. “I didn’t fucking ask for some idiot boy to make me into something different than what I was. Than what I knew I was.”

“I know you didn’t. I did it because I wanted to do it.

Because I love you. I love you as my sister, and I loved you even before that.

It’s why I gave you everything. And I would have given you more, so much more.

I would have given you my entire fortune if you’d only asked.

I would have fucking bankrupted myself just to take away one single second of your pain, and I—Fuck, Schatzi , why was it not enough?

Why was—” He stopped, on the edge of some emotion so large and terrible he couldn’t voice it.

“Anything, huh?” Resi demanded. “What about her ?” She grabbed one of Louisa’s damp, dusty curls and yanked her farther into the light.

“Would you give me her? Would you give me him ? Would you let me torture them to death, slowly and painfully, if that were the only thing in the world that would make me happy?”

Max shook his head. “That wouldn’t make you happy, Schatzi .”

“Of course it wouldn’t. But who cares?” Resi screeched. “As you keep telling me, we’re all going to die anyway!”

“We’re not.” I forced myself to hold her gaze. “We can walk out of here together. It’s not too late.”

She raised the knife. “Yes, it?—”

I didn’t let her finish. Pushing off with my good leg— good being a laughable term at this point—I lunged, straight at Louisa, knocking her out of Resi’s grasp.

One short, sharp cry escaped her lips as we tumbled down together.

She rolled away with whatever strength she had left, swallowed up by the darkness.

But Resi had strength and speed too. And I had nothing.

“I didn’t want it to be you first,” she whispered. Her knife plunged toward my throat—an artery.

A gunshot shattered the silence, the echo ricocheting wildly through the chamber’s collapsing rings. With a meager little cry, she crumpled, knife spinning from her fingers in a perfect, symmetrical spiral.

I whipped around. Max stood there, lowering his pistol, face drained of blood. He took two steps forward and sank to his knees.

Trembling, I crawled immediately toward Louisa, who was shaking even harder.

Clumsy elbows, useless fingers—I clawed for anything to stop the bleeding at her neck, finally grabbing a rough wool blanket and balling it up against the thin red line along her jaw.

She rested her head on my shoulder, pressing into me closer than she had after the blast, if that was even possible.

There were tear tracks on her cheeks. Old or new, what did it matter?

She’d cried enough. She’d cried fucking enough on my behalf.

God, she just looked so tired .

It’s over, I wanted to tell her, just whisper it in her ear and cradle her against me. But I didn’t. Because it wasn’t.

I tried to take a deep breath and only coughed. “Guys,” I rasped. “I don’t want to alarm you, but I figure you’re already alarmed enough.” They turned toward me, Louisa’s breath still hitching, Max still staring at something I couldn’t see. “The air. It’s, uh, highly toxic.”

They stared.

“And, well, we’ve all been breathing it in since the collapse.”

Louisa didn’t say anything at first. Then, fingers trembling, she reached for her flashlight, its weak beam sweeping toward our intended escape route.

The tunnel—our only way out—was choked with debris and shattered rock.

An impassable wall. She gasped, shrinking back, her shoulders rising and falling with each quick, sharp breath.

I didn’t even have to look at her to know exactly what she was feeling—stomach twisted into knots, lungs working too hard, panic creeping up her throat.

This was what I’d been trying to hold off as long as I could. It was inevitable, but she’d been doing so well .

“There’s another way out,” I coughed, my lungs tightening with each word. “Max”—I barely swallowed the next hacking fit—“Max said so.”

She clung to me as we struggled to our feet, both of us staggering. The key now was just to buy enough time before we lost consciousness.

“Max, what?—”

But he wasn’t listening. He wasn’t even looking.

Dark hair obscured his face like a shroud as he kneeled over Resi, blood seeping through his fingers as he pressed them to her gushing wound.

His other hand brushed back her hair from her face.

Her strange, glassy, angelic face, still twisted in something almost divine in its ancient anguish.

Max laid her down delicately, like a bouquet of white nightshade—precious, poisonous, already dead.

When he bent to kiss her brow, amid the dust streaking his cheek, I saw a single tear track.

A mark he, like all of us, would wear forever.

Louisa stared at them.

“You don’t need me anymore, kid,” Max said. “You’re practically free already.”

Apparently, he hadn’t noticed the number burned into my arm.

“Max!” Louisa bit her lip, her body wracked with sobs trying to break free.

But there was nothing else to say. Ten tons of rock buried us, and this weighed more.

She just stood there, rigid, eyes staring at nothing. “We can’t.” She gasped. “We can’t go.”

“What?”

“Without Max, how can we?—”

Removing someone’s chip doesn’t make them not a slave. It just makes them a slave who’s breaking the law.

Without Max—without the offshore accounts, the private jets, the forged documents—what could I do? Run?

And I couldn’t run. Physically or any other way. Louisa, albeit hysterical, was right. What the hell were we escaping to ?

“We have to try, Lou. I?—”

“But Maeve—and Daddy still—and you’re still—we can’t go back. We—” She gasped for air, eyes wide and unfocused.

And something in me snapped. I might have failed at everything else, but I had one job, one job I couldn’t fail at no matter what: saving her. And she —the girl who had done everything to save me—was stopping me from doing it.

“Lou, I love you and I’m sorry, but shut up ,” I rasped. “And for the last time, quit holding your breath . What have I told you? If you stop breathing, I guarantee you, you will die . You will not make it out of here.”

“But what about?—”

“Let me finish. You are not allowed to think about any of that.”

“But—”

“No. Shut up. I don’t care. Don’t think about Maeve, or Max, or your dad, or”—I swallowed hard—“or about me. The only thing you’re allowed to think about right now is getting yourself out of this goddamn mine alive. That’s the only thing that matters. The one and only thing. Do you understand me?”

“No,” she whispered, shaking her head. “No, I can’t. What about?—”

“Goddammit, Lou. I’d say don’t make me shake you, but I can’t shake you. Answer me. Do you understand ?”

At last, she nodded, tears spilling freely.

“I need a yes. Say yes.”

“YES,” she screamed. “Yes.”

“Good. Now I need you to find us some water, yeah? Just find some water . Don’t think about anything else.”

She didn’t move.

I almost groaned.

“Don’t leave me,” she whispered. “I’ve lost you enough already.”

“I won’t leave you, m?i léift ,” I murmured, pressing a kiss to the side of her sweat, dirt, and tear-streaked face. That I could do. “I’ll be right here. Now water, yeah? You can do that. I believe in you.”

She still didn’t move, and for a second, my own panic started to build.

But then, she dove into the rubble, after a few seconds emerging with a half-filled plastic jug among the remains of the chemistry supplies.

Calmly as I could, I indicated for her to rip another strip off the blanket she was pressing against her wound.

“Soak it with water and hold it over your mouth and nose. Breathe slowly. It’ll help filter out some of the gas. ”

She placed the cloth to her face, pressing it flat like a shroud. She tried to do the same for me, though my arms were too weak to hold it on properly, and I gave up in frustration, flinging it aside.

“But—”

“Never mind. Remember what I said? We’re going to move, yeah?” I said. “Just keep moving. Don’t think about anything else. Keep moving. That’s all you have to do right now.”

So we did. And for a few seconds, there was silence at last. The sound of our labored breathing was all that echoed in the dark.

But out of the tunnel to become her tomb, Resi’s voice drifted. “I still heard your voice, Max,” she whispered. “I always heard it.”