Page 55 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

HIM

EIGHT MONTHS LATER

E very slave dealer on both sides of the Atlantic knew that I, Sébastien Pomerleau, accepted only the best. However, the girl I had just bought, sight unseen, was far from that.

But the dealer had no choice but to sell her if he wanted to stay in business.

If word got out that Arnold Flamm had refused me—even once—Aurum Luxury Slaves risked never again making a sale to any member of my elite circles.

Spoiled Eurotrash brats like me had that kind of pull, and everyone knew it.

So when my personal assistant called Aurum with the request for the French girl, only freshly added to the listings, Flamm quoted an outrageous price, clearly hoping I’d change my mind. But when I got on the line myself, even the dealer, with his oily superciliousness, folded.

“Let me be the judge of what’s inferior and what’s not, Monsieur Flamm,” I said with a light laugh.

“I put my trust in a fine establishment like Aurum to ensure she’s at her best by the time I receive her.

After all, when it comes to slaves, this isn’t, as they say on this continent, my first rodeo. ”

Who could argue with that? Not Flamm, especially after I wired the obscene dollar amount he’d quoted into escrow within the hour, pending inspection of the girl at a cocktail party I was throwing that Friday afternoon. And, I added, I wanted her delivered. By the dealer. Personally.

None of this was exactly normal, but it wasn’t Arnold Flamm’s place to question the eccentric tastes of the rich.

And that’s exactly what I was counting on.

Now, as the sleek black transport van with its discreet logo pulled up next to the other luxury vehicles parked in my manicured, circular drive, there was no way Flamm didn’t know that the scrawny, scowling French girl in the back—complete with scoliosis and rickets and the tendency to bite—wasn’t up to my standards.

He must have been ruing his inability to convince me to opt for one of the curvy, peachy, eager-to-please specimens he’d imported from Belgium last month.

But I had told him I wouldn’t hear of buying any other slave.

I wanted this one, 974312, and that’s all there was to it.

So it was no surprise to me that Flamm—a short, stout, overly tanned man in a gold-crested suit jacket and too much product in his black hair—was sweating like he’d just run a marathon as he stood in the drive, motioning to the uniformed handler who’d accompanied him.

To my dismay, I was sweating, too—recently relocated, I wasn’t yet used to all this goddamn humidity—but I hoped the swipe of patchy but artfully tousled golden hair off my face looked at least semi-effortless as, hiding a slight limp, I emerged in a crisp white linen suit on the marble steps above the manicured lawn of my brand-new Greek Revival home in a gated community on the outskirts of D.C.

, with a glass of bourbon one of my uniformed slaves had handed me.

Behind the house, in the sprawling back gardens, a live jazz combo played as chic guests sipped mint juleps beside the marble fountain or snapped selfies under the trellis.

We’d better make this quick. My ice was melting.

Partially so no one would examine it too closely, I stuck my other hand casually in my pocket, watching impassively as the rear doors of the van swung open.

A female handler stuffed into tight black uniform trousers tugged the girl down by a chain lead, wearing a muzzle and the standard khaki clothing of the Aurum dealership slaves, its plainness meant to imply neutrality, a blank slate, a slave who could serve in any way her master might require.

The scrawny, hollow-cheeked girl twisting at the end of the chain might disagree.

Which was unsurprising, considering that as recently as two years ago—if my theory proved correct—she’d been French supermarket heiress Delphine Bisset, living with her parents in a house outside Paris about the size of this one, with slaves of her own.

Her life had been a powder-pink whirl of pool parties and shopping sprees and Riviera holidays.

But I knew about all of that, of course. We were one and the same, she and I.

Did she know it? Maybe. She watched me out of the corner of her large brown eyes, exhausted but still unmistakably engaged as she blinked against the bright sunlight, even as the handler tugged her forward with such a violent jerk that she almost face-planted on the lawn.

I drew in a sharp breath, louder than I’d meant to. “Go easy on the girl, please, yeah?” I said lightly. “I have guests, monsieur. I can’t bring in a filthy, grass-stained gamine to greet them.”

The female handler looked at me askance. I eyed her back, lazily savoring the rich caramel bouquet of my drink, the remaining ice clinking against the crystal.

I wasn’t concerned. We both knew who had the power here, after all.

The handler wrangled the girl the rest of the way through the portico and shoved her to her knees on the rock-hard, polished floor before the marble columns, in front of me . Her new owner.

“If she’d just comply, it would go easier for her,” the handler remarked.

That’s what they always said. They lied.

Now it was Arnold Flamm’s turn to bound up the steps, smile strained, palms visibly sweating. “Mr. Pomerleau. It’s a pleasure.”

I glanced briefly at the outstretched hand but kept my own in my pocket because Sébastien Pomerleau didn’t have to shake any hands he didn’t feel like shaking. This, like the bourbon, was a perk of the position.

I did look the dealer straight in his dark, predictably soulless eyes, though, for the same reason I made it a point to look all men like Flamm in the eyes.

Because I could.

Next, I studied my soon-to-be slave openly, while she studied me right back, not so openly. Then I frowned, trying to ignore the sweat trickling uncomfortably down my back.

Something was wrong. Despite myself—despite my preparation—my heart rate picked up slightly.

Fuck.

I’d made my opening in the chess game, but it was time to change up the strategy. No plan survives contact with the enemy, they’d told me in training. I knew that already, but it was nice to hear it acknowledged. And for once, given the resources to do something about it.

“Take the muzzle off,” I ordered the handler. “I want to see her face.”

“But—”

“She wouldn’t bite me,” I said in English, looking at the girl, whose scabbed-over lips twitched when the muzzle was unbuckled, obviously thinking about it. Then I repeated myself in French. “N’est-ce pas, fille?”

She froze, having clearly understood the French, which was a good sign. But not good enough.

Flamm stepped forward, ignoring the handler, and jerked the girl up by her hair. “Rest assured, we’ve already addressed that,” he hissed at her in English as, for the first time, an unshed tear appeared in the corner of her eye. “It took some of our most creative methods, but we’ve addressed it.”

I closed my eyes briefly. Fucking hell. “Allow me, monsieur.” With my free hand, I reached for her now-bare chin and held it lightly between my fingers, my gold watch glinting beneath the long sleeve of my jacket. She gnashed her teeth briefly but didn’t try to sink them into my fingers.

Instead, a look of surprise crossed her face. Surprised, too, was the handler, going by her suspicious glance, though thankfully, Flamm wasn’t.

Working the lines on my father’s yacht was my rehearsed explanation for the condition of my hands, which I would only need if the girl were stupid and brazen enough to say anything.

Luckily, she was far from that. Her face had actually softened a little as she sized me up, even as she kept her eyes turned away.

She knew.

Well, shit. This kid was smart.

“I know that trick, girl,” I said in French. “Look at me so I can see your eyes.”

Not only was she smart, but she knew where her bread was buttered. Without even a glance back at Flamm or her handler, she obeyed, raising her chestnut irises to meet mine.

Well. She was the right age and coloring to be Delphine Bisset, though it was hard to connect the pale, hollow-cheeked moppet in front of me to the girl with the silky brown tresses and professionally whitened smile grinning in the hundreds of snapshots I’d spent the past few months examining.

There were millions of skinny, brown-haired, brown-eyed fifteen-year-old slave girls at dealerships all over the country.

Normally, nobody gave a shit about any of them.

Only her birthmark—if it were indeed concealed by the metal chain on her wrist, as I hoped—would make her of particular interest to me.

It was a cruel and heinous crime, you see, to kidnap freeborn children and sell them into slavery.

Flamm cleared his throat nervously, obviously afraid I was about to change my mind.

I had no plan to disabuse him of the notion. “Do you know anything about her background other than what was in the file?”

“Raised in the household of an excellent French family who sold her off quickly when they fell on hard times,” he said, trying to play up the girl’s minimal credentials. “She ended up on a farm in Moldova until one of our agents found her.”

“Former farm slave, huh?” I said, eyeing the girl with mild disinterest. “I like some spirit, make no mistake, but those places aren’t exactly charm schools.”

“Of course, monsieur,” Flamm said desperately. “But they break them under the lash.”

I smiled. “Not always.”

She refused to flinch as I raised one of her arms as much as the chains would allow. Counting the old bruises and scars mottling them, my stomach sank lower and lower. They weren’t the kind of scars you got guzzling champagne on a yacht in Cannes.

Not to mention, the way she kneeled in shackles was—well, she wasn’t comfortable, exactly, but she also clearly knew flopping around like a fish would get her nowhere.