Page 49 of Never Bound

“I think ‘cocksucker’ is too good for you, but I was trying to be diplomatic.” I knew Louisa was smiling. Not so as to be seen. But when I briefly met her eyes, they showed it.

However, Corey was not smiling. “You fucking just can’t keep your smart-ass mouth shut for a second, can you, slave?”

“You know, I get that response a lot,” I replied. “Especially when what I said can’t be argued with.”

“Now,” he forged on in denial, “I could hang onto this until Daddy gets home and tell him about your late-night sex chat, too. That might be fun. But the truth is,” he said, tucking the phone in his pocket and tossing the book away to catch on the paddle of a prickly pear, where it lay open limply, its pages impaled on the spines, “I’ve been drinking, and honestly, I kind of justreallywant to beat the shit out of you. The problem is, you don’t fight back. But hey, I get it. I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life breaking rocks, either. Fortunately,” he added with a nasty grin, “I don’t have to worry about that. So I think I’ll just take back what should have been mine.” And now he looked at Louisa with interest for the first time since she’d arrived on the scene.

“Yours?” I repeated the word with a disgust I could almost feel on my tongue. Of course, the only thing I wanted to do at that moment was shove Corey balls-first into a cactus. And Corey, shitfaced as he was, knew it was exactly what I couldn’t do. “Fucking hell. You know, you seem to have a real problem telling the difference between people and things?”

“Things?” Corey chuckled with derision. “Let me guess, you think you fall under the first category?” He hiccupped. “You and that bitch who fucked ten mutts a day before spawning you? The one who lived just long enough for you to watch her bleed to death out of her gaping hole? I don’t think there’s any word for that butthing.”

A very old heat—one of guilt and shame and helplessness, one I’d spent almost seven years trying to outgrow and outrun and outsmart—flooded over me.Fuckthis guy. Louisa was looking at me, but I didn’t dare look at her.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Corey barreled on. “Thanks to my ex-boss, I know everything. I know your master chained you up and made you watch him fuck her right in front of you. They should have cut your balls off, too, because a man who can’t protect his women isn’t much of a man, is he?”

Even Langer had been decent enough not to bring that up. But decency had no meaning for Corey.

I couldn’t bear to look at Louisa. Yes, she knew. But for some reason, hearing it from Corey seemed to negate all the comfort and compassion and forgiveness she’d offered me and all the progress we’d made. Like we were back to square one.

But to my surprise, nothing changed. She was breathing evenly. In fact, her entire mien was oddly calm. It’s not as if screaming for help would improve the situation at this point, but the serenity in her eyes was almost eerie.

“You’re wrong,” she said.

“I don’t think so.” Corey laughed. His hand went for her arm. She jerked away reflexively, but he caught her in his grip just the same. However, the entire time, his gaze was fixed on me. Watching my eyes. Watching how they moved, strained and helpless.

“Keep it up,” he told her. “Wait for your good boy to attack. As soon as he does, they’ll put him back in a cage where he belongs. I mean, we all know his history. Which does tend to repeat.”

“Lou—”

Corey flicked his chin behind him woozily. “And when they come running—I tell everyone—and poor pathetic Daddy can’t save you from the auction block, I only hope you’ll be lucky enough,” he continued, his voice low and hideous as an infected boil, “to get a master who’ll give youexactlywhat you deserve.” He grabbed her and jerked her toward his face, his fingers leaving an angry red mark on her satiny white flesh. Flesh she had revealed to me last night; in trust; flesh I had spent all night kissing and marveling at an infinite array of miracles, the first of which that she had ever chosen to reveal even an inch of it to me.

But choice had nothing to do with the world we lived in, as if we could ever forget. And it wasn’t the look, or the touch, or even the threat that made me ill. It was the fear behind her eyes, much as she tried to hide it, the fear I had once again failed to prevent. The fear that there was no one left in the world who could help her. The fear that she’d be sullied, violated, terrorized, discarded, just like everything that had ever been precious to me. And that maybe the streak could never be broken.

But no.No.Like she’d said, it was fifty-fifty, every time. And for a slave, those were better odds than most.

My voice was as calm as hers had been. “Get your hands off her.”

“Like I said,what are you going to fucking do about it?”

“How aboutthis?”But it was Louisa who had spoken, and I had no doubt my eyes were just as wide as Corey’s as we watched her duck out of his grip, wrench her arm around, and take aim with a four-inch-long red cactus spine, the one no one had noticed had been lying flat against her wrist. He froze for a second as the spine drove into the flesh of his cornea. His scream echoed in sharp ripples through the dry night air. He cupped his face with both hands, streaks of blood oozing into the grooves of his fingers. His open eye was wild and mad, his body shivering with rage.

“You little bitch!” he yelled as he staggered half-blindly toward her, fingers clawing through her shirt, digging into her skin, his breath heavy as he wrenched her breast tissue toward himself, throwing her down on the chaise so hard one of the legs collapsed. “You’re going to regret that for the rest of your fucking life.”

She screamed as one of his bloodied hands pressed down on her tenderest place with all the strength of his body weight as the other one tore brutishly at whatever fabric of her clothing he could get, intent on taking whatever he could take.

Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t dealing with a helpless, trembling, chained-up child anymore.

A second later, I had Corey off her and on his feet. He growled and lunged, but I jabbed my elbow into his throat and followed it up with a whipping uppercut that sent him tumbling backward. But he recovered more quickly than I expected, hissing as he charged. With a snarl, he grabbed hold of my weak shoulder—the arm I’d almost lost—with a grip as sharp as white-hot metal teeth, twisting it back against its already-limited range of motion. I stifled a scream at the sharp crack of my shoulder bones reverberating, grinding against each other, followed by a faint sound of tissue tearing again, awakening the old wounds, the old scars, the old sorrows.Not now.I drew up my strength, my other fist slamming into his chest, propelling us both onto the sharp trunk of a dead paloverde. The thin bark cracked and splintered under our combined weight, shards of wood flying off in all directions like shrapnel.

Corey, enraged, rolled out from under me, slamming me back where I had just been. We were back up an instant later, with Corey throwing wild, desperate punches that I easily blocked, followed by aiming a knee to my chest. I stumbled back but countered with what I had left, delivering a punch to his stomach, followed by a knee to the solar plexus that sent him staggering, and finally a hook that caught him in the jaw and sent him crashing to the ground.

He roared, attempting to scramble away, but whatever was left of his energy quailed as I went to the ground after him, unleashing the kind of one-handed fury I hadn’t had to use since some bored overseers had thrown a skinny thirteen-year-old farm slave into a bare-knuckled match against a kid four years older and a hundred pounds heavier, expecting a quick kill and an even quicker payout on their bets, only to find my barrage of precisely calculated blows to his brainpan raining down so quickly he could barely cover his face.

They never bet against Lucky Sevens again, and neither would Corey.

After I’d pummeled him into oblivion, Corey lay spent, still, chest laboring to fill his lungs, blood seeping into the earth like spring rain.

And everything was silent again. Time had stopped. I stood there for a second, unthinking, unseeing, my shoulder throbbing as hard as if Corey had left a knife buried in it. My body was still as tense as if I expected another blow, my hands balled into fists and spattered burgundy alternating with dirt and blood, mud and grit, wood and bark. Finally, with a shaking hand, I swiped some limp hair out of my face and turned to face Louisa. Her sheet-white face emerged out of the gloom. During the fight, she’d been helpless, even to call for anyone to come, knowing how unlikely it was to result in anything in our favor. But now, gingerly approaching Corey’s prone body, she seemed—foolishly and yet fittingly for a girl who aspired to heal—preparing to aid the person who least deserved it.

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