Page 12 of Never Bound

This guy wasn’t Santa Claus, and he wasn’t doing or saying any of this out of charity, compassion, or even friendship. This was a rich and powerful guy keeping his enemies close. I should know. I was doing the same.

“I told you, the holes are as good as done. And there’s no point unless you want there to be,” Langer said.

“And if I want there to be?”

“Then we keep talking. Yes, I’m giving you a choice.”

I blinked. I didn’t know what to do with a choice.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?” asked Langer smugly. “Like something you could get used to?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So there’s something that feels even better. Something you may not have considered.”

“What’s that?”

“Telling other people what to do.”

Look, it wasn’t as if the opportunity for power hadn’t ever arisen. It had. But for a slave, power was never really power. It was a trap. Free men could be played like free women if you were careful, but you had to keep it close to the vest. If you sold out—if you lost that tiny little sliver of yourself that was yours alone—you’d turn into a rapey psycho like the old gardener, or one of those loathed slaves who would sell out a cohort to be flogged within an inch of his life for the privilege of an extra bowl of gruel. For a slave, chasing power wasn’t a formula for success. It was a formula for losing friends and whatever remaining self-respect you had, and worst of all,stillbeing a slave.

If that was what Langer was offering, the choice was easy. “I’m not going to be your lapdog, Max. What price do you think I’ll sell out for? A place at your feet by the fireplace? Sorry. It’s hot enough here already.”

“You disappoint me.” He stopped and turned, eyes flashing electric blue. “Do you really think if I were after some broken, brainless robot to blow smoke up my ass, I’d be standing out here in this godforsaken heat, wasting my time with you? I could go down to the local auction house and walk out with fifty slaves like that without even putting a dent in my bank account.”

“So,” I replied, a very familiar feeling spreading in the pit of my stomach. “You want to buy me. That’s it, isn’t it?”

Three times in my life I’d been bought and sold. Three times it had felt more or less like this. But only one time had I faced the prospect of leaving behind anyone I cared about.

“Honestly? I thought about it. But no. And this is why,” Langer explained. “A, I don’t want to own a slave. B, I don’t need to own a slave. And C, even if A and B weren’t true, Keith won’t sell you for any price. He told me he already had an inkling of just how good of an investment you might be when he bought you, but the other night confirmed it.”

I shrugged and gestured to the holes in the ground behind me. “Funny, you could have fooled me.”

“Okay, so your master’s a bit misguided. He’s also bipolar, on like ten different medications, in debt up to his eyeballs, and if he could spend all his time on the golf course hiding from his shit show of a family, he would. In other words, he’s got enough to deal with without worrying about whether his slaves are living their best lives. In the meantime, I’m offering you a deal.”

“You’re offeringhima deal. Let’s not bother pretending that I get any say in it.”

“Wrong.”

I looked at him, stunned.

“Listen. You’ve probably figured out by now that I’m not only in aerospace. I’m also in software and now chemical engineering. Project White Cedar—you may have heard of it. So I need someone who understands chemistry, physics, and math. You know, the hard shit. Your kind of shit. But more importantly, someone who has the balls and ambition to help me grow and scale my companies. The engineers they keep hiring have all been neutered and/or brainwashed by their pricey, worthless educations, and I’m not getting shit from that tool of an intern who can barely stack a set of wooden blocks—who won’t be back, by the way, in case that was something you were concerned with.”

Yes.If I were with anyone but Langer, I would have pumped my fist with boyish glee. But I didn’t because I could still hear the sound the bracelet made as it fell out of Corey’s hand and pinged off the tile. He’d said it came from his boss, but maybe that wasn’t the whole truth, considering it was unlikely that his boss would promote him to threatening his enemies while planning to fire him the very next week. Still, Corey was clearly too dumb to have orchestrated that whole thing on his own. It had to have originated with someone smart. But who else was as smart as Langer? Besides me, of course.

“Come with me.”

What?

“Work with me. Consult with me. Live with me. My wife moved out two years ago. You could have your pick of ten spare rooms.”

I opened my mouth.

“Oh, and just so we’re clear, my interest in you is purely professional,” he continued. “I don’t like dick, and given your extracurricular activities, I’ll assume at the very least you can take it or leave it. And if you end up hating me, which you very well might, you can have a whole suite to yourself and never have to see my face outside of work. I don’t care. Or we can drink Bordeaux and watch association football like the good Europeans we are.”

“Well,” I began weakly, not knowing where else to start, “I support Luxembourg, and if you’ve seen them play at all in the last two decades, you’d know that’s not quite the selling point you think it is.”

He smirked.

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