Page 57 of Never Bound

“That’s why I’ve worked out an alternative solution—courtesy of Max Langer.”

My head hadn’t snapped up so fast in front of one of my owners since I was a child. I forced my eyes down to the bare concrete again, my heart pounding so fast I was certain Wainwright-Phillips could hear it.

“Mr. Langer has offered to pay the Killeen boy’s medical bills—for my family’s sake, hopefully not his funeral costs—plus a significant sum in exchange for their keeping quiet and pursuing no further action. And in return, I’ll lend you to Mr. Langer. Permanently.”

The implications of this—what it meant for me, for Louisa, Maeve, and for the future—were almost incomprehensible after forty-eight hours of this funhouse of pain and anguish. And Wainwright-Phillips wasstilltalking as if from the other side of an underwater tunnel.

“After all this, I doubt you’d be foolish enough not to rid your head of any further thoughts of my daughter, but if you are, rest assured I’ll be confiscating her phone and computer and monitoring all her other communication channels. And don’t forget I’ll still have the capability to track your whereabouts. If I find that you’ve tried to contact her in any way, I can and will revoke the deal. The mines arenotoff the table. You’re being given a chance to atone for the damage you’ve done to my family. If I were you, I’d work very hard to keep on Mr. Langer’s good side. Do not squander this opportunity as you won’t get another one.”

He paused again. Oh, shit, I was probably supposed to say something. I opened my mouth.

“Donotthank me, boy,” he cut me off. “This is entirely Mr. Langer’s doing. You have him to thank that you’re ever going to get another chance to see daylight. What you willnotsee is this house again or anyone in it, except for perhaps myself and then purely for business. Other than on paper, I’m completely washing my hands of you. Your future is effectively his to decide. And that’s far better than you deserve.”

I drew in a ragged breath. “Am I—”

“Are you going to be flogged? That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?”

Actually, it wasn’t even near the top of the list.

“The answer is no. Not on my orders, anyway. And—” He cut himself off as he often did when he seemed tempted to treat me too much like a person. When he felt too compelled to say something like,You’ve suffered enough.Slaves couldneverbe allowed to think that they’d suffered enough.

He looked at me expectantly. Wait, he was still going to let me speak?

“How much time do I have, sir?” I asked.

Of course Wainwright-Phillips would be appalled to know the one and only reason I was asking. To know that I was praying to something that yesterday I’d been convinced I didn’t believe in for just one chance to say all the things to that fearless angel that I was too much of a coward to say last night. How could I have been so foolish as to think I’d ever get another chance to say them? To ask for more time? There wasneverany more time when your time wasn’t your own.

“One of Mr. Langer’s security team is outside the door as we speak. As soon as I leave, he’ll show you to the car.”

My vision blurred. I looked down at my hands and nodded.

All right, then. That’s how it will be.

By the grace of whatever, I’d been spared the mines. And yet it barely registered. All I could think about was that Louisa was right. She’d entered my life as merely a voice, and she’d exited that way, too. And like countless times before, she’d been braver than me, braver than anyone ever gave her credit for, brave enough to say what I couldn’t. And now, because of my cowardice and stupidity, she’d exit not only not knowing that I loved her but not knowing that she’d accomplished the impossible: proven, definitively, that I was capable of love.

At Erica’s, I’d heard a phrase I knew I’d read before, and it soon turned out I had. Five years ago, soon after the professor had ensured my literacy was up to an acceptable level, he’d handed me a stack of books he felt an educated person should be familiar with and ordered me to read. Shakespeare and Dickens in English; Goethe and Hesse in German; Hugo and Dumas in French, plus—much to my frustration—poetry, in all of them. Because literacy, I’d quickly discovered, wasn’t the same as comprehension, and I was pretty sure Louisa had caught onto that when we’d started exploring her bookshelf. It didn’t help that there was almost no real Luxembourgish literature, as tiny as the country was. But as a teenage slave, lately erased from and restored to the world, I simply lacked the cultural context to understand it, in any language. It wasn’t because of the inferiority of myfundamental nature, as Wainwright-Phillips had said, but simply that I’d been raised by those who already believed in it.

Maybe someday, I’d hoped, when I was older and wiser, I’d go back and the meaning would just fall into place as easily as the hydrogen and oxygen molecules did in those endless chemical reactions I’d spent thousands of hours poring over in the lamplight after the professor had gone to bed. Maybe someday was now.

And this was why my eyes, under my matted hair, scanned the room—the shelves—one more time.Time.As predicted, my luck had run out, but surely—even restrained, weakened, in pain—I was still good enough to find a second. Because that was all I needed for this.

Meanwhile, Wainwright-Phillips was preparing to sweep out of the room like he usually did. He stopped, though. Softened his voice. “Look at me, boy.”

At first, it seemed he meant to grab and tilt my head up, as he did. Instead, he let me raise my gaze on my own. For a second, our eyes met.

“In this world, there are some things that simply cannot be, no matter how much we want them,” he said. “I’ve come to understand that more than you probably know. And in time, so will you.”

I dropped my eyes again as he paused, just for a second, on the knob.

“Good luck.”

Then he was gone.

17

HER

Ilaymotionlessonthebed as I had for most of the day and night. I was vaguely aware of the sun rising and setting and rising again, that the week had begun, and that I should be getting up, getting dressed, and going to class. Ha. It was as if my body refused to respond to normal stimuli, just as it unconsciously refused to shower or remove the clothes I’d worn for two days, as if even the last things I’d worn in his presence were a memory worth keeping. The housekeeper rotated in and out, her offerings and admonitions largely ignored. But at some point, as I knew it would, the door opened and it wasn’t the housekeeper. And when it finally did, I squeezed my eyes shut. My ears. My mind.

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