Page 22 of Never Bound

So where Maeve had ideals, I had facts and figures. In fact, I’d always thought the goal of a good scientist was to be a force of pure logic, to beaboveideals. That way, you could never be compromised. And less likely to ever be wrong.

The problem was that reality had already proven it didn’t work like that. I was already compromised. My mother and Maeve had compromised me. If I hadn’t cared about my mother, maybe I’d still be in Luxembourg. If I hadn’t cared about Maeve, maybe I’d still be in Germany. Or maybe I would have accepted Langer’s offer or someone else’s. Maybe I would have gone on to become a billionaire rocket scientist under some genius’s wing. Maybe in time, I would have even figured out a way to disrupt slavery for real. To free not only Maeve and whoever was trapped with her but myself and every other slave. And all because I wouldn’t be hobbled by feeling anything for any of them. But maybe then, I wouldn’t even care enough to try.

And, of course, if I hadn’t been compromised by someone in the ten-million-dollar mansion I’d just walked away from, I would have been gone from this place hours ago. The girl who had no stake in the revolution. The girl who shouldn’t care, and if by some miracle she ever did, it should be from an armchair like all those other useless so-called activists.

Instead, she did care. She cared so fucking much that it scared me. Because I didn’t know what to do with that. Because I didn’t understand why. Because it felt like a trap. Because no one wassupposedto care. And because it wasn’t supposed to feel like this. It wasn’t supposed to feel like anything.

So I was running away to just do everything on my own, like I always did.

Except I wasn’t. Instead, I was hearing Maeve’s voice. A voice I heard a lot, and that I probably would have listened to a lot more often if it weren’t for all the rainbow unicorn stuff.

Our lives are so shit we have to make up happy endings or we’ll never get them, and here you are throwing away your chance for a real one.

So down in the valley on the other side of the pasture, the ever-distant mountains red-gold amid the rising sun, the matching college hat pulled low over my face, the entire desert laid out before me, I did what I should have done a long time ago: I listened, and cursed the fact that sometime in the past few weeks, I had become worse than compromised. I had become human.

HER

When Erica hung up, I turned to the messages. But all I needed to see was the first one from Corey before I shakily bulk-deleted the rest as if they’d been splashed with toxic waste. In the two seconds it took to read it, the idea that I’d once considered dating him had gone from embarrassing to downright sickening.

Still shaky but doing my best to shove the messages out of my mind, I headed downstairs. Erica Muller had only been my professor for a few months, but I already knew she was the type where if she said something was important, she wasn’t fucking around. And I’d better not, either.

The maid was clearly aware someone had entered the kitchen, but she didn’t even turn around, which meant she knew it was me and had deemed me beneath her notice. Bitch.

“Hey.” I hated the way that sounded. “Turn around. I need to talk to you.”

She made a big show of violently jamming the knife back into the wooden block before turning to face me, hands clasped like a good little slave, staring down at her scuffed sandals, but even a submissive pose couldn’t hide her disgust as I fired off questions about a certain person’s whereabouts.

“I really don’t know, miss,” the maid replied with that infuriating lopsided little grin of hers. As if this bitch hadn’t caused enough trouble for me today, now she was deceiving me for no good reason. Was that just what slaves learned to do when they knew they’d be punished either way?

In any case, it felt familiar.

“If you’re lying to me—” I didn’t exactly know how to follow through with that. If you weren’t willing to go for the whip, there weren’t a lot of other good options, and she knew it.

“I wouldn’t cover for him, miss,” she said. “The fact is, he still owesmea few favors he hasn’t repaid.”

“For what?”

That lip continued upward. She wasenjoyingthis. “Why, some favors I did forhim,miss.” She outright smirked, though her eyes were still trained on the marble tile. “Not that I didn’t enjoy them, too.”

Whore.Humiliation mixed with rage boiled over inside me. If it weren’t bad enough that I might be about to lose him forever, now I had to contend with knowingthat.

I had never hurt a slave, ever, but at that moment I was ready to slap the maid’s face so hard it would leave a mark for days. And why shouldn’t I? She deserved it for talking to me like—

No.I took a step back.

Look, either those days were over now, or they weren’t. Either all slaves were human beings who deserved dignity and respect, or none of them were. Either I was the girl who would call her father and accuse my boy of something he hadn’t done, or I wasn’t.

Even if I never saw him again,thiswas what he would leave me with. This was about my soul, and ironically all because of someone who insisted he didn’t believe in souls.

Instead, I breathed and looked again at the maid.

She wore two items I could vaguely recall owning once upon a time—an oversized oatmeal-colored top with the sleeves rolled up, and a pair of faded ripped jeans that had shrunken and conformed perfectly to her body over the years. Since I was curvier, they were one of the few things I’d ever given her that fit her right. No wonder she never seemed to take them off.

I thought back further. The maid had arrived when we both were around fourteen. My family still had money back then, and young, pretty slaves were a must-have status symbol—to touch or just to look at, depending on the owner’s whims. My father, always with an eye toward the bottom line, had decided that a young teen would be a better investment than an older, better-trained slave, so one day, he bought the maid back from a high-end private dealer and set her in the kitchen like a gleaming new appliance: shiny, attractive, and quiet. I had never bothered to ask where she had come from before that. If I thought of her at all, it was to lazily order her around, throw her some of my old clothes, or resent her for her effortlessly smooth, dark, glossy hair, alabaster skin, and slim figure—all so unfair at a time when I had still had baby fat and braces and acne and a wild tornado of curls that I hadn’t yet found the right methods to tame. In fact, at least twice, I had invited crushes over to swim, and instead, they spent the whole time trying to grope the maid. Of course, instead of blaming the boys for being disgusting creeps, I had blamed her, as if she could have done anything about it. But beyond that, I had never asked about her day, solicited her opinion, learned her story, or considered that she must have had someone she had to leave behind. It had never occurred to me that she must have things she hoped for, things she dreamed of. Just likehim, she must have seen darkness upon darkness, must spend many nights dwelling on things that had been done to her loved ones and been done to her.

I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”

“Excuse me, miss?” The girl looked as bewildered as I felt. The teasing lip had fallen.

---