Page 51 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

But perhaps the strangest thing of all was that the shoulder I leaned into for comfort—the arm that drew me close—was my father’s .

In the days and weeks since the mine, I hadn’t dared say it—dared to think it—but eventually, I’d had to face the truth: Keith Wainwright-Phillips was different.

Getting me back alive was certainly part of it, given that his second-to-last call from Agent Labrecque had been to inform him that the Cebolla Canyon mine had collapsed with me in it.

I’d at one point thought I’d hated my father, but he still didn’t deserve to think the worst, even for a second.

And once I realized that , it wasn’t much of a stretch to realize that I still loved him. And that I was glad I still loved him.

Accepting the truth about Ethan, of course, was part of what had changed him, too. And if he couldn’t have him back—if there was nothing he could change, for the arm of the law that had enslaved his son appeared long indeed—well, it made sense that he’d turn his attention elsewhere.

And the last ingredient, undoubtedly, was that they’d dropped the investigation into his involvement in the White Cedar debacle.

“New evidence has surfaced exonerating you from any wrongdoing, financial or otherwise,” Labrecque had informed him nasally over the speakerphone in his study earlier that week.

Her disappointment was almost tangible. I’d listened from the other side of the door, breathing the way I was supposed to—three seconds in, five seconds out.

I knew exactly where the evidence had come from, of course: the flash drive in the envelope I’d given Erica, and that Erica had handed over to the police.

But only the flash drive—nothing else. The note, sadly, was gone.

His chip had been destroyed, and the scientific formula that had removed it, for now, would remain carefully concealed.

As much as I wanted to shout to the rooftops about my boy genius and what he had discovered, I knew Erica was right to want to keep it all under wraps.

In the hands of the wrong person, the formula could be a dangerous cudgel—they’d seen that already.

Besides, the only people who could be trusted to do anything with it were currently, well, indisposed.

And lastly, the money, as it turned out, had already been spoken for.

“I used it to free Maeve,” Erica had explained immediately upon her arrival in my hospital room earlier in the week.

For a few seconds, the room had gone silent but for the dull hum of machines.

“I think it’s safe to assume it’s what he intended it for,” Erica had gone on calmly as if this were the kind of revelation she divulged all the time. “Don’t you think?”

“Wait, what ?”

Erica frowned. “I told you, I?—”

“No, no, I get it, I just— how ?”

I couldn’t believe it and didn’t understand it, but it was true. Maeve was free. Her brother, through his genius—in many ways—had done exactly what he came here to do.

And wherever he was, he probably had absolutely no idea.

During my three days in the hospital, I’d clung to a ridiculous hope that things would somehow turn out okay, even after the EMTs had spotted the number on his wrist, ripped us apart, whisked us off in different medevac helicopters, and in general made it abundantly clear that they wouldn’t turn out okay at all.

Fact was, we’d never even had a chance. I’d known that from the start.

I’d panicked over it, and he’d talked me down, and that was the one and only reason I was alive.

But now I was stunned to realize that he’d known it, too.

He’d fought his way through the belly of hell itself knowing that if he got out alive, slavery would be his only reward. He’d fought for a life that wasn’t one.

But mostly, he’d fought for me.

And that was why, while the nurses in my private room in my well-appointed hospital had treated my wounds like clockmakers, humming and sponging and rubbing me down with a rosy-smelling salve, pumping oxygen into my lungs and taping and retaping bandages to my throat, I had to fight the urge to beat them all off and demand to know where he was.

What kind of treatment he was getting, if any.

And if, now, anybody had even bothered to tell him that his sister was free.

Which I still had to get to the bottom of. “I thought Max?—”

“Max transferred ownership of her to me for a dollar, electronically, just before you drove to the mine,” Erica had replied patiently. “Good thing, too, because if he hadn’t, she might have been detained indefinitely.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s been declared dead, and there are going to be years of legal wrangling over his money as part of the White Cedar fallout. All of his accounts are frozen, and they’ll stay that way for a long time.”

Dead? I didn’t believe it. Not for a minute. Not for a second . And I suspected Erica didn’t, either, given how she glossed right over it.

“Will you miss him?” I asked her.

“The abolitionist community will miss him,” Erica said primly.

“What I think is immaterial. And by the way, if you’re wondering why we still had to pay the manumission fee for Maeve when her last sale price was a dollar, the government caught onto that little trick some time ago, unfortunately.

I tried it with Milagros, too, with no luck. ”

Milagros. “Oh, shit, Erica. How?—”

On the professor’s face now appeared the biggest smile I’d ever seen on it. “She’s fine, Louisa. I left her room five minutes ago, where she was planning out where she’ll put her ‘woke up like this’ tattoo.”

So Milagros had survived. Maeve had survived. We’d survived. But Max Langer, the man who’d confidently underpromised, had not yet overdelivered.

Technically.

Look, yes, we’d left him in the mine. Yes, we hadn’t seen him make it out. But if there was one thing I knew about Max Langer—if there was one thing I’d been taught by someone who knew him even better than I did—it was that that man didn’t do anything without an ulterior motive. Even die.

But fuck, that private jet sure would have been nice. The offshore accounts, too. Because without those, my boy and I were right back where we’d started.

Unable to touch.

“We’ll find your boy,” was all Erica had said before she left, though not before encountering my father in the doorway and exchanging a long glance. I had no idea what it meant, but given everything else, it fell near the bottom of my list of things to investigate.

And that brought me to my father, who, for a change, had said nothing at all. He’d just sat quietly beside my bed, clutching a disposable cup of terrible coffee, studying my face as if I were some stranger he vaguely remembered from long, long ago.

Instead, during the day, he’d read . Out loud.

The way he used to before bedtime, every night, without fail, despite having a million other things he could have been doing.

But this time around, instead of fairy tales, he read from my favorite novel, Les Misérables —in English, of course—and from his favorite novel, War and Peace , a book he’d been recommending I read for years, though I’d never gotten around to it because, come on.

And after a while, he’d given up. But now, his rich voice rolling over the words, both familiar and unfamiliar, was warmer and thicker than any blanket they could drape over me, especially when I would awaken to the sound of someone screaming and realize it was me.

And realize I could still breathe. And realize my boy’s hand had not gone limp in mine all over again. It simply wasn’t there at all.

But my father’s was.

In the greatest confusion, there is still an open channel to the soul.

Each evening, as the hospital lights dimmed, he would close the book and just look at me.

And every evening, I expected the interrogation—the one I’d spent the past few weeks dodging, even before the mine—to start, but it never did.

And the minute I realized he was never going to demand that I speak was the minute I decided I would.

I told him a lot about some things and a little about everything. About Erica, about Ivy, about Max, but most of all, about him . And ultimately, of the escape. Our escape.

And he listened, silently, a range of emotions flickering—shock, anger, relief—but he never interrupted.

He never invalidated or objected or presumed I felt or thought anything different than what I told him I did.

For the first time, perhaps, he was seeing his daughter as a person.

Just as he now—ironically and too late—saw his son. And just as he saw?—

Well, I wasn’t pushing my luck. My dad was different, at any rate.

“You nearly died in that mine, Loulou,” he finally stated, voice raw and overcome. “Trying to save him .” A slave, was what he was thinking but didn’t say.

“Yes,” I said. “I did, Daddy. Because he saved me first. More than once and in more than one way. And what’s more, with the evidence in that flash drive, he saved you .”

My father’s eyes were as glassy and far away as the distant mountains, and he said nothing more, just looked down at the cup in his hand, then back up, away from the drop of liquid that had suddenly appeared on its top.

One that definitely wasn’t coffee and one that prompted me to propose something that left even me aghast.

“Find him.”

He looked up in surprise.

“Maybe you can’t find Ethan yet,” I said. “But you can find him .”

I said nothing about what might happen after that. I knew it might not be what I hoped for. I knew I might regret it altogether. I knew my father could change his mind, or change it back . But I also knew we had to try.

And that’s exactly what he began trying to do, the next day, right after driving me home from the hospital. But the bureaucracy would tell him nothing, and with my boy’s microchip gone—and apparently no new chip inserted—the slave database was useless.

It took another full week, just before Christmas and my final exams, which for his sake I was determined to pass, though my concentration was shot and the idea of going back to psychology or English or o-chem —after all that—seemed frankly absurd.

Not to mention that I was starting to wonder when I would have to face the fact that he might, in fact, be dead after all.

At any rate, that’s when Ivy’s nursing school contact in a different hospital across town had tipped us off that he was there, with his treatment being paid for by—of all things—the government.

But it was already too late. Immediately upon learning the news, according to Ivy, Maeve had rushed there to finally see him with her own eyes.

But she’d gotten all of five minutes with him before he’d been moved again—to my despondence, into the same detention center Maeve had been freed from.

On orders of the government. Indefinitely.

With no explanation. Even Labrecque couldn’t offer us an explanation because she didn’t know the explanation.

Well, shit. There was no question about involving my father, now. Whatever he planned to do with his slave when he got him back, it couldn’t be worse than being there .

Daddy, once he learned that , had thrown himself into the task of getting him returned to him as zealously as he’d once worked to get rid of him.

Of course, with Max Langer out of the picture, he was also now back to not having a job, so he didn’t exactly lack time.

Mostly ignoring the other slaves—though I doubted they were complaining—he had sat slouched in his study for hours upon hours, unshowered, unshaven, guzzling coffee, having to be reminded to eat, dialing number after number, making demands over the phone as aggressively as I remembered him working during his early days in the corporate world, when creating the largest buffer possible between his family and poverty had been his one and only ambition.

When he had motivation. When he had a goal .

My father, when he wanted to be, was good with goals.

And that’s when Agent Wheatley had called.

He was back on the job, apologetic, and invited Daddy and me to come to the detention center the following day, where he’d explain everything.

“Explain everything?!” my father had thundered. “There is no justifiable explanation for why you’ve wrongfully detained my slave for over two weeks and?—”

“Daddy,” I’d interrupted softly, from just on the other side of the door.

“We’ll be there.” He’d hung up.

We. And here we were, at the end of our journey into this human kennel, Deare pausing to usher us into a tiny, windowless cinderblock room where another uniformed handler named Tarrant—like most of them, lumpy and buzzcut, with a bit of an extra chin—waited, along with three stiff-backed chairs arrayed in a row.

For me, Daddy, and Wheatley.

And then, the door on the other side of the room flung open, and here he was, being tugged roughly through it on the end of a short chain lead linked to his cuffs and held by yet another handler.

Muzzled, shackled, the restraints all joined together with enough chains to restrain a rabid tiger—albeit one who was stiff-jointed, limping, and obviously in pain just about everywhere.

I stifled a cry. God, this place really was for animals.

And when his lead chain had been attached to the ring in the floor, he dared to flick his eyes up.

And when he saw me— oh .

Fuck it all. I ran toward him, swallowing the name I had the nearly uncontrollable urge to cry out. I hadn’t spoken it aloud to anyone yet, not even Maeve. After all, it wasn’t mine to give away anymore. It was his, provided he even remembered it.

And if he didn’t? Maybe, technically, it had never existed. Maybe it never would. Not like it mattered. All that mattered was that he was here.

He jerked on the chain, trying to reach out to me. Before I could touch him, however, a flash of lightning struck me blind.

“Stand back,” Tarrant barked, having fired up the sizzling prod as if he meant to use it on me .

I screamed and froze to the spot, immediately back in that white mausoleum of a room, where the leather and the cold marble walls had swallowed the echo of my screams. My father reached out and pulled me back into a fierce bear hug.

And then, as I tried to steady my breath, as I forced myself to look at my boy again, as the weight of everything that had happened crashed over me—I heard his voice.

“The fuck?”

I turned, stunned.

“Arlo?”

1 ? Are you okay?

2 ? “Naughty badger,” an endearment similar to “cheeky monkey.”