Page 51 of Never Bound

Time.How had it all come down to seconds?

Louisa pulled away from the kiss. “I—”

All at once, the floodlights snapped on, effectively blinding us. Harsh, naked fluorescent light, designed to lay bare all the hardest, ugliest parts of the world. This was the light of dealerships and auction houses, buildings made of cinderblock and steel, chains and cages made for animals, where no one, least of all slaves, ever went by choice. Where I always seemed to end back up, despite every good thing I’d ever found in this nonstop horror show I’d been forced to call a life. Where Corey had insisted I would end up again, and it was looking like he might be right.

I’d thought I wouldn’t get lucky again—as if I’d everbeenlucky. What kind of twisted fucking luck would give me this girl, only to lose her likethis?

From the garage access door strode a figure, moving slowly, on a bad leg that, like always, he was unsuccessfully trying to play down.

The old valet.

Well, it was time to start praying. Just this once because if a god was good enough for Louisa to believe in, it was at least worth a try. And because dammit, he or she or it or they or whatever the fuck was up there owed me at leastonefavor, surely.

But the word on Louisa’s lips—once she made out the figure behind the valet—stopped me before I could even begin.

“Daddy.”

14

HER

Forthesecondtimein as many days, I woke alone, in terror, in darkness. Woke to find him gone. But this time, there was no chance he would appear at my bedside, amid the scent of flowering vines and smoke and starlight, coaxing my eyes up to the stars with boyish excitement. There was no chance he was seeing the stars wherever he was now. There was a good chance he never would again. This time, time was up.

But I wasn’t alone. There was a hand on my back, a voice in my ear, humming.

The last thing I remembered was screaming at my father over sirens and the neon blur of ambulance lights. Saying something,anything, to explain the situation. But I’d been shaking, disoriented, barely coherent, and I knew it hadn’t worked. He was already gone. My father had sent him awayfirst, to get him as far away from me as possible. And then the housekeeper had put a blanket over me and hustled me inside, all while my father’s eyes bored into me with sheer disgust—a look I’dneverreceived from him before, and one that made it clear that shutting up and following the older woman was my one and only option.

I’d been useless and incompetent, in other words. Like so many times before.

Upstairs, I stood catatonically in the shower for twenty minutes, thinking almost literally nothing, until the housekeeper came in again to tell me to turn it off and get into bed. She slipped a T-shirt over my head and handed me hot cocoa, tea, and soup as if tricking me into believing any of those things could possibly help this nightmare. My whole body felt wrung out and squeezed dry, the red marks on my arms and breasts still lingering nastily against the white. And that was the point. Corey had come for one and only one purpose: to make me a thing without agency, to be used as leverage, to be marked and manhandled and misused. Meandhim. Because that’s what Corey genuinely believed we were. And whether he had lived or died, he’d proven it. He’d won.

And just as that thought crossed my mind, a hand was rubbing my back and a voice was humming a song with my name in it, one I hadn’t heard in a very long time.

“Mom?”

Yes. My mom sat on my bed in that aura of golden lamplight that always seemed to follow her, even when I was a child. It bounced off her expensive jewelry, reflected off the crystal stemware she always carried around, chiming like her laughter. Sure, as always, she was several martinis in, but this was a side of her I thought she’d buried for good, along with my brother’s love. And yet, wasn’t it strange when the very last people you expected to try, tried sohard?

“Is he still as brave as you said?”

The question startled me, but my mother hadn’t indicated that she even knew whohewas. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she was pretending she didn’t. Maybe it didn’t matter because there was virtually no chance she would remember this conversation tomorrow.

So I stretched and leaned my aching limbs into her touch. “Braver.”

She nodded and kept humming.

I closed my eyes. When the sound of the door opening woke me again, my mother was gone, but the housekeeper had returned—not with water, soup, or cocoa, but with a silent, beckoning gesture. Without hesitation, I rose from the bed and followed.

HIM

In the weeks since I had arrived in the house, I had attempted numerous times to engage the old valet in conversation—half out of sincerity, half out of cynicism, knowing that when shit inevitably went down, it helped to have fellow slaves on my side, especially the ones at the top of the heap. But I’d given up quickly. The guy simply had no interest in engaging with anyone except his master. It was as if doing shit like picking out Louisa’s dad’s golf visor was the only thing that made him feel alive.

But that night, I found that maybe my efforts hadn’t been in vain. Because as the valet escorted me downstairs and into the windowless basement storage room I now occupied, he was gentle as he closed the metal cuffs around my wrists—new and shiny, like they lived most of the time in a drawer—and attached a short chain that he looped around the bottom of a metal shelf bolted to the wall behind me. There was nothing on the bottom of the shelf, but the top seemed to hold cardboard boxes and plastic tubs of odds and ends that were just barely visible in the light coming from the crack under the door. The old guy held a bottle of water to my mouth and let me guzzle half of it before leaving it behind to manage as best I could. There was more he could have done—like wash the blood off or give me some pain meds, you think?—but apparently, he was already on borrowed time, so he just shook his head and shut the door, switching off the light as he went. Which seemed cruel until I realized that the naked fluorescent bulb burning into my tender retinas all night would have been a kind of torture in and of itself.

Besides, what terrified me more was the way the valet had looked at me just before he pulled the string. Like he thought this was the last act of kindness I would ever get.

The chain was just long enough so that I could almost touch the bottom of the door, though not the handle. Meanwhile, blood from somewhere—my mouth? My eye? I wasn’t even sure of all the places Corey had managed to make me bleed—had leaked out to pool on the concrete beneath me, a wet, sticky, viscous mass soaking into my torn clothing, itself covered in dirt and broken bark. And my shoulder had gone rigid, even the slightest movement sending a horribly familiar searing pain down my entire arm and well into my torso. And with the addition of the metal on my wrists, the old wounds beneath it throbbed again as if the restraints had ignited the memories of the decade’s worth of scars they already bore. Ones that over the past few weeks, I’d almost managed to forget were there. Until Corey came along to make sure I never would.

If I’d been able to stand up or even move normally, I would have been rifling through the storage room for something to maybe pick the cuffs open with, followed by the lock on the door. It wasn’t as easy as it looked, but—usually with the help of idiots who hadn’t put them on correctly to begin with—I’d managed it a little more often than the average slave. Anyway, say what you would about the valet, he wasn’t dumb. And he knew what he was doing—the things were on solid.

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