Page 58 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

HER

L et’s face it, my track record with coffee had never been great.

And yet here I was, red-faced and frantic, mashing buttons and spinning dials on a humongous, gurgling copper espresso machine at what I was optimistically calling my new job, all while juggling the wand that was supposed to froth the milk to the perfect microfoam consistency but was actually just dripping warm, milky liquid all over the tile.

“Excuse me, ma’am.”

Ma’am? Ugh. That was almost worse than miss . “Call me Lou,” I told the customer without looking over, but he only rapped his knuckles loudly on the counter.

“I don’t care what your name is. I’ve been waiting for my double-shot soy latte for ten minutes! Do you even know how to work that thing?”

“Yes, sorry, I’m new here. Just trying to figure out how to—” I yelped as steam shot out, scalding my hand. Frantically, I dashed to the sink and held it under the cold running water. Fucking hell, was there any spare inch of my skin that wasn’t destined to be cooked to death?

Another woman spoke up loudly. “This is ridiculous. The slaves at The Copper Leaf across the street work at three times this speed.”

“That’s because they’re beaten if they don’t,” I shouted back.

“Excuse me?”

I sighed and finally glanced their way, gathering from their tailored power suits that they were Financial District lawyers who had wandered in without realizing they were in a slave-labor-free establishment and that great patience had to be exercised.

Not that I wasn’t trying to be a good employee.

I’d never had a service job before and had for a long time assumed I’d never need one.

But I was on my own now, with books and subway fares and phone bills to pay for, and the choice had come down to which of two things—coffee or cooking—seemed less menacing.

Coffee had won. I only wished I’d buckled down and finally figured out how to use that espresso machine my dad had bought last year.

I’d meant to. I really had. I’d also, shortly after he’d bought it, become very, very distracted.

Speaking of being distracted, I’d completely forgotten which drink I was supposed to be working on. With mounting panic, I scanned the names attached to the orders on the screen in front of me, hoping they’d offer some clues.

Double shot soy latte, he’d said. Right? I glanced at one of the names. “Are you… Michael?”

“No.”

“Shit.” I stood there helplessly, my face collapsing into that familiar about-to-ugly-cry crumple I’d once made the mistake of looking at in the mirror and now couldn’t unsee.

Idiot. Had I learned nothing? I’d fought my way out of certain death in a collapsed mine, but it seemed making a macchiato was simply too advanced for the feeble abilities of Louisa Wainwright-Phillips, Hothouse Flower.

Well, that and grocery shopping, taking a trip on the subway without riding ten stops in the wrong direction, and finding a cheap apartment within fifty miles of my new university that didn’t smell like an entire family of rats up and died in the walls.

The woman lawyer scoffed in irritation. “Let’s just get out of here,” she told her colleague.

When they left and I had stopped unhygienically snorting and sniffling all over the glass bakery case, I grabbed my phone, feeling obligated to call the girl who’d gotten me the job in the first place and offer to resign in disgrace.

“I can’t do this, Bex.”

“You what?” The girl on the other end sounded like she was walking, which she usually was when she wasn’t in this very coffee shop. “Why the hell are you there alone on your first day? Didn’t anyone train you?”

“Basia started to, but she left early.”

“Figures. She’s probably out picketing outside that slave dealership that just opened across the river. God forbid a coffee shop owner would be concerned with whether anyone actually gets their coffee.”

I tried to smile but only hiccupped. “I just feel so useless. There were these lawyers in here and?—”

“Lawyers? Fuck ’em. I’d like to see them try to work that thing. Besides, if they want slaves waiting on them hand and foot, it’s not like they don’t have plenty of other places they can go.”

“Oh, they already have.”

Rebekah chuckled. “You know I referred you for that job for a reason.”

“Because you thought I’d be good at it?”

“Bless your heart, no. Because you were brave enough to want to try. Anyway, I’ll call Laken and tell him to come over there and help you. Just sit tight, okay?”

It took Basia’s partner twenty minutes to come over and save my ass, but save it he did.

Luckily, the only customer to arrive in the meantime ordered an iced tea, which even I couldn’t fuck up, and thanks to Laken, it only took another two hours before I was successfully pulling espresso shots.

Of course I still hadn’t memorized any of the drink combinations and didn’t even know what half the terms meant.

But I’d like to think I had a chance. After all, I’d passed o-chem for two straight semesters—the second one without my tutor, even.

It was funny, I thought later as I finally threw my apron down and started trudging the three blocks to the subway station, desperately hoping to avoid another side trip halfway to Cape Cod.

Although an ocean view would be a hell of a lot nicer than the one from the room I was currently renting below a takeout chicken restaurant, whose price was still a stretch for my paltry savings.

The only time anyone ever seemed to think I was brave was when I was forced to be.

But then again, maybe that’s what bravery was.

I wondered if Rebekah felt the same way. Yes, that Rebekah.

At first, I’d thought I was hallucinating when, a few weeks earlier, I’d spotted the name “Rebekah Roth” in the university directory, right there in black and white like any ordinary student.

I shouldn’t have been shocked, really. My childhood friend wasn’t dead, after all.

She and her family had just fled to the other side of the country after she’d let a slave boy kiss her and touch her boobs in her childhood treehouse.

Or at least, that was the story my classmates and I had all spread around in hushed horror at the time, with Rebekah’s presence eventually lingering among us only as a kind of ghostly morality tale.

Either way, I hadn’t ever expected to see her again, let alone as a business student at one of the largest, most esteemed universities on the East Coast.

But to my astonishment, here were my shaky hands dialing the number, quickly before my anxiety had a chance to devour my nerve. I wasn’t exactly sure why I was calling. Maybe because after everything that had happened—to us both—it seemed like a sign. I might even call it fate.

Which should have given me hope, but all it really did was make me think about how if he were here, he would tease me for believing in it. And then, as usual, sort of start believing in it himself and never admit it.

Shut up. How the hell do you ever expect to function if you’re constantly lost in the memory of someone you might not ever?—

“Hello?” inquired the voice on the other end.

I went suddenly shy. “Rebekah? Bex?”

Silence.

“This is Louisa. Louisa Wainwright-Phillips. Lou. Remember?—”

Remember? Remember how I scrolled past all those evil memes about you without calling them out?

How I just watched open-mouthed across the hall while someone scrawled “whore for slaves” in permanent ink across your locker?

How I just walked by like you were invisible when I saw you crying on the stairwell?

Fuck. What was I thinking? I didn’t deserve sympathy. I deserved to be shoved under an oncoming Green Line train.

So it didn’t surprise me when Rebekah immediately hung up.

It did surprise me a second later, however, when another call came in—from a different number. I answered it immediately, and this time, I had an idea.

“Ericamuller,” I blurted out.

“Huh?”

“Erica,” I repeated, enunciating more clearly. “Muller.”

A long pause as my heart battered my ribcage.

“I think we should talk,” said Rebekah finally. “Meet me at Café Jennet in an hour?”

And that was how I first stumbled over the threshold of my future workplace on a breathtakingly crystalline autumn day in September, shivering and drawing my cute but totally inadequate gray cashmere cardigan around my shoulders.

I knew the wardrobe of a lifelong desert girl wasn’t going to fly in New England, but given my finances, a shopping trip was out of the question.

Right now, everything but survival was out of the question.

I’d agonized for weeks about when, where, and how to drop my decision to transfer to a new school on my father, who was scarcely leaving his study these days, even to golf.

It wasn’t like before, though. I genuinely did think he was working.

He even said he was working. But I was afraid to ask what he was working on, and he’d been volunteering nothing, at least not since we’d hit a wall in the search for Ethan.

The database had been no help. Free people who became slaves—either via debt or a felony conviction—were completely disassociated from their former identities, for exactly this reason.

Besides, even if my dad somehow found Ethan and could afford to buy and free him, which he couldn’t, he’d be legally barred from doing so—again, for exactly this reason.

Given that blow, it was a miracle that whatever my dad had turned his attention to now was even getting him out of bed in the morning.

In any case, I thought it wiser to leave him to it.

In the meantime, we would just have to accept that my brother had been enslaved forever and then vanished off the face of the earth, and only a dead man—or at least a man who preferred to be thought dead—knew where he was.