Page 7 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

The alternative was unthinkable.

My finger slid down to my jeans, then stopped. I physically couldn’t do it. Tears, as usual, ran down my face and dripped onto the carpet.

“Take your time, princess,” he said, looming closer. “I like it slow.”

I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction . Growling, I yanked down the zipper on my jeans, ripped off my pink lace panties, angrily kicked them off my legs, and pulled the stupid, lacy, embarrassing piece of shit over my head as fast as I could, the gardener cackling at me all the while.

I squeezed my eyes shut, but they might as well have been open for how aware I was of his eyes drinking me in as if through a straw, like some suction force, pressing down on my exposed body and prying into every inch of me, divesting me of everything good and holy.

“Good girl,” he said with a chuckle, pulling two pairs of shiny handcuffs from his pocket. “On the bed.” He pointed.

No. My eyes darted like a trapped animal in a cave.

Idiot. I should have run while I had the chance.

Why hadn’t I run ? I’d agreed to create a distraction.

I hadn’t agreed to die . My body stiffened as if to flee, but I only backed up in a daze.

The truth was, there hadn’t been anywhere to run to then, and there wasn’t now, and I guess that reassured me somehow.

That I’d been doomed no matter what.

My breath hitched as the unforgiving steel dug in, cold and alien against my flesh, and didn’t release.

He’d cuffed my wrists to the carved, decorative headboard, one on each side.

I was trapped upright against the pillows, knees trembling beneath me.

My body clenched as he pulled the cuffs tighter— as tight as they would go?

Not like I would know—trapping each wrist in place and immobilizing me.

My breath did not release, however. I just lay there, as choked as if his hand had been clutching my throat.

And there I stayed, shivering against the rich, silken comforter. The air seemed to congeal as raw, unfiltered horror washed over me and my throat closed in panic. My senses sharpened, the dread I’d held back when I’d been convinced rescue would come now pumping unbidden through my veins.

For him, after ten years, the tables had turned. Here I was, and here he was. The only thing standing between us was every depraved thought he’d ever had about me.

“Why would you do this?” I gasped. “You’re risking your freedom. They’ll catch you. You’ll be a slave again. “

He laughed. “You’re one to talk, in that position.”

My face burned. “You’ll get thrown in a mine.”

“Is that right? For doing what?”

“For kidnapping, dumbass,” I said. “For, um”—I swallowed, gulping to get enough air in my lungs to at least finish my sentence—“for rape.”

He laughed. “Rape? You wish. No, princess,” he said. “Not me.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and turned my face into the pillow as he leaned in close enough to choke on a cloud of his fetid, alcoholic breath, see the coarse gray stubble lining his heavy jowls, shudder as he ran his finger, permanently yellowed by dirt and decay, up and down the soft, unbroken skin of my arm.

“Well, not yet.”

HIM

“On behalf of Langer Enterprises,” I muttered, leaning back in my chair, squeezing my stress ball, and concentrating on forcing out my rounded European vowels and hard consonants for flat, nasal, elided American ones. Again. “On behalf of Langer Enterprises.”

I had spent all Friday afternoon hunched over the files from Corey’s tablet, squinting at the spreadsheet that I’d now transferred onto three different drives.

Scanning the columns and lines for anomalies, I recited what I’d learned from the free online accounting course I’d sped through, a quiet dread building in my chest. Corey and Resi had been plotting something financially, of course.

That didn’t surprise me. The file prominently labeled Wainwright-Phillips —and what it contained—did.

So much so that I thought there had to be a mistake.

I went back through the files, backward and forward, looking for some other explanation, but found none.

And worst of all, I still couldn’t prove the theory I did have.

That would probably take days, and I didn’t have days.

I didn’t even have hours. Eventually, I collapsed back onto my beanbag chair, my mind on one and only one member of the Wainwright-Phillips family.

Louisa would suffer. I’d known that. From the goddamn day I arrived at her house, I’d known that.

And I’d tried. I’d tried so fucking hard not to love her.

Because I didn’t want her to have to end up here , face-to-face with what I’d found in that file.

But here she was anyway, and a maudlin love message out of a dusty old poetry book by some dead fucking Irish guy was not going to make up for it.

And even though I was doing it for her—had convinced myself I was doing it for her, even if she couldn’t see it, even if she never saw it, which seemed likely—neither was what I was about to do tonight.

Because right now, I had two different pieces of the puzzle.

One was the finances, which I still couldn’t prove.

The second was whatever was going on at the house itself.

Lemaya—in the single message she’d been able to get out to me—had all but confirmed my suspicions about the spreadsheets, implying that nothing was okay over at 211 Cholla.

But I needed to get there to prove that .

And that was why I needed to convince Felix Sorrentino and Arlo Callwood, arriving at 5:15 p.m. from San Francisco and who I was 99 percent convinced were headed there—to let me take them there.

Lemaya had given me all the details about the security goons’ movements, and assured me that Resi would “set up” the girls for Felix and Arlo before she left.

Which was disgusting, but it was also key, because it meant that I could first, prove to Langer what Resi was doing to the girls, and second, get them out of it.

Assuming I did every single thing right with no slip-ups, of course. And assuming Lemaya was telling the truth.

And nobody could know anything. If the marketing guys found out, it would implode the company. If Resi found out, she’d implode me .

In other words, I’d need to deliver the performance of a lifetime. At least until I got to the house. After that, I could only improvise.

I checked the display on my phone. It was almost four. It was thirty minutes to the airport, and the rest of what had been on my to-do list for that day—like rehearsing how not to get myself killed—was shot.

“On behalf of Langer Enterprises,” I said one last time, slowly. This time, I tried to emphasize the laconic West Coast cadences Louisa had always told me she heard in my voice, to my amused disbelief.

Right. Now I not only sounded like a foreigner but a foreigner with brain damage.

Fuck it. It was time to get out of here. My heart beat faster as I opened my top desk drawer and pulled out a small, exquisite emerald-green box. I’d brought it from my bedroom at Langer’s condo this morning but hadn’t dared open it since. The more I did, the more nerve I’d lose.

I didn’t open it now, either. Instead, I slipped it in the pocket of my gray pinstriped suit jacket, turned off the computer, stepped out, and locked my office.

If only someone had informed Lizette, the assistant with the candy jar, that I had a very important con job planned and couldn’t be interrupted for a blow-by-blow account of her daughter’s piano recital last night.

But the way I figured it, I had exactly ten minutes to rummage through one of the downstairs storage rooms for the very specific tool that Langer had told me was sitting on the third shelf up, do what I had to do, and be behind the wheel of the Porsche en route to the arrivals terminal.

So I nodded and smiled and silently watched the floor numbers tick down as we descended, reminding myself that even in the close confines of the elevator, there was no way she could hear how hard my heart was pounding or see that my hair was damp despite the air conditioning.

“The nerve of some of these parents. Walking out after their own kid finished,” Lizette was saying. “I suspect they’re just jealous that Hallie is progressing so fast. Why?—”

“I’m sure she’ll be playing La Campanella before you know it.

Have a good one,” I said like a tool, ducking out the second the doors opened and reminding myself for the millionth time that here, turning my back on a free person was not going to earn me a beating.

And that I had a very important date with a pair of very illegal industrial-strength bolt cutters.

Or so I thought until I actually checked the shelf.

Fuck. I set the green box down and rummaged frantically through the junk cramming the closet, feeling along every crevice, cursing myself for waiting this long to check.

Meanwhile, the chain on my wrist, which most of the time felt like just another part of my body, suddenly seemed to weigh a hundred pounds, chafing my skin like the day they’d first welded it on me at fifteen, replacing the one intended for the wrist of a smaller, skinnier kid.

As if it had sensed what was coming and was crying out for release.

In the corner, a glint of silver caught my eye. Heart pounding, I reached in and dragged out a vacuum-sealed canister of liquid nitrogen with a spray nozzle—and a ten-pound sledgehammer.

I took back everything I’d decided about Langer and his trickery. Deliberate or not, it seemed the guy had just made me a victim of the world’s sickest chemistry joke.

Whatever. I could get revenge later if needed.

My minutes were ticking down to zero. The original plan had been for Arlo and Felix to take Langer’s car service straight here to the office, and I needed to head them off before they did.

Thanks to the internet, I knew what they looked like, and though the assistants might be curious as to why they didn’t arrive, I was counting on them not being curious enough to call Langer.

Or if they were, that Langer wouldn’t be curious enough to care.

But first, I needed to even get there , and there was rush hour traffic to account for.

I took several deep breaths and, hands already shaking, grasped the cold canister, moving to the center of the room and spreading my fingers flat on the steel table.

Palm up? Palm down? Down, I decided. It took me a couple of pumps of the nozzle before I succeeded in sweeping a heavy fog of the liquid over the entire chain.

I only needed to break one link, really, but best to be thorough.

Then I turned to the hammer.

I noticed two problems immediately. One, there was very little give between my skin and the chain, I only had two hands, and one of them was obviously useless.

Two, my free hand was attached to my bad shoulder, giving me less force and less chance of a clean strike.

I’d have to aim precisely, with just enough force to break the link—the steel alloy’s chemical bonds weakened by the nitrogen—without shattering my wrist into a million pieces if I missed.

Easy, right? Well, that wrist was already scarred to hell, anyway, reminding me that I’d endured worse, for worse reasons.

I blew some stray strands of hair out of my eyes, spread my fingers wider, and choked up on the wooden handle, fingers trembling as I lifted the sledgehammer: a tool designed for no higher purpose than to destroy things.

Should I close my eyes? Yes? No? I half-closed them, and before I could waste another second talking myself out of it, I struck, unleashing a clang that must have echoed through the entire building, loud enough to stifle a scream as the block of dead solid iron collided with the side of my wrist.

I took a second before opening my eyes, almost afraid to see the violet-colored bruise blooming and swelling where the hammer had landed.

The pain was right on cue, and I hunched over against the throbbing, gasping for breath, fiercely blinking back tears before they could dare to fall.

I’d known this was coming. But, like always, knowing pain was coming made it no easier to take.

I managed to weakly move my wrist back and forth. So it wasn’t fractured—at least not entirely. Brilliant.

What wasn’t brilliant was that the blow had only partially hit its mark. One of the links was not so much smashed as severely dented, which was no surprise. This thing had not been made to come off.

Again, then. If I got lucky, it would only take one more to shatter it, assuming I didn’t pass out from the pain first.

My hands, weaker and shakier now, gripped the hammer as tightly as I could and took aim. An even louder clang and an even better hit had the entire table vibrating.

And the link still held. I resisted the urge to pound the table and scream something in Luxembourgish.

The storage room had very little air circulation, and sweat was already dampening my hair and forehead.

I angrily reached up to swipe it all away with my good hand.

Retook my grip with quivering wrists. Brought it down.

Last one. Please.

I opened my eyes.

If I had been either of the two guys waiting impatiently on the curb outside the domestic arrivals terminal, I’d like to think I would have looked up from my phone to see an all-American golden boy in a pair of shiny aviators and sliding confidently out of a blindingly shiny silver Porsche convertible, only a minute off schedule and impeccably styled in a gray pinstriped suit, gold and lapis necklace, and a casual mauve shirt printed with a weird duck-feather pattern that still somehow worked—thank you very much, Lemaya.

On the wrist of a hand adorned with thick gold signet rings on the middle fingers, a stunning Rolex watch peeked out from under the cuff of a tailored jacket. But it was the other hand I extended.

“On behalf of Langer Enterprises, welcome to Phoenix,” I said, with a steady gaze and a luminous smile as confident as my grip. “I’m Corey Killeen.”