Page 12 of Never Broken

I just looked down at my rough hands curled around the chipped mug, hoping my face hadn’t given away my reaction to her name. Which annoyed me because I wasn’t supposed tohavea reaction. I wassupposedto use her to curry favor with her father, forget about her, and go get a blow job from the maid. That was the way I had operated for years, and there was a reason for that: it was safe, and it worked. And so it was really fucking inconvenient that my dick had decided to start twitchinginstead. To get rid of it, I decided Louisa was a spoiled brat and probably only looked good in dim lighting. Of course this approach could only work for so long, since I’d already noticed from the hallway that there were pictures of her and her brother on the living room mantel. So far, I’d managed to avoid going in there.

As the housekeeper bustled maternally back upstairs, I thought about how she’d mentioned a partner. With slaves, that usually indicated children, though none of them seemed to be around, and the current gardenerdefinitelywasn’t the same guy. I wouldn’t ask about them, of course—why cause the woman to mourn all over again? Still, it was another reason to dismiss Louisa. She’d been partially raised by a woman who’d likely had her own children ripped out of her arms so she could care for her master’s babies.

Yeah. Louisa was like all the rest of them. She was tainted by the original sin of slavery, and there was nothing she could do to erase it.

She didn’t have any say in it.She hadn’t chosen to be born rich and free, just as I hadn’t chosen to be born a slave. Not like I was defending her. Why was I defending her?

Anyway, it soon wouldn’t matter. When I was told the chore I’d been assigned that afternoon — helping the housekeeper with the heavy lifting as she helped clean and rearrange Wainwright-Phillips’s home office—I resolved that I wouldn’t be seeing Louisa much longer anyway. Not once I used whatever was in there to figure out where my sister was, and, even more challenging, get to her. And then, most challenging of all, figure out a place to hide her where she couldn’t be tracked down, even though currently, all four slavery-free countries in the world were islands in the South Pacific. Besides, to save her, I might have to kill Louisa’s dad, and then whatever fucked-upconnection I’d apparently made with Louisa would be as good as dead anyway—and so would I.

They were swapping out some of the old furniture in the office for a more modern theme, the housekeeper told me. “The master said he wants this to look more like a startup,” she explained with a shrug. “Any idea what he means by that?”

Not much, aside from a few photos I’d seen in my old master’s magazines and a few internet sites I’d glimpsed whenever I could sneak online. But I could sure bullshit it. “Of course. My old master owned one. Just relax and leave it to me. Will Master Wainwright-Phillips be overseeing this operation personally?” I asked slyly.

“No. He trusts my good taste.”

“Smart guy,” I said with my most charming smile, and she preened. Too easy. It got even easier twenty minutes later, when the maid burst in, hysterical, saying the motor on the stand mixer had blown out and she couldn’t find the handheld beaters anywhere, and the housekeeper ran off. If there was a god for slaves somewhere—or a god at all, which, logical as I was, I had rather confidently doubted for some time—he was smiling down right now as I triumphantly rolled open the top drawer of the file cabinet.

The files were mostly old as if my master had let filing fall by the wayside recently, and after ten minutes of digging, I’d seen mostly tax returns and folders and folders of receipts for office supplies and construction equipment. Nothing in the least bit useful, and I was already down to the innermost reaches of the bottommost cabinet when I spotted a thin file labeled “Langer.” Inside was a copy of a reference letter Wainwright-Phillips had written for some guy named Corey Killeen for a position as Langer’s intern.I have known Corey on a personal basis for nearly two decades, and during that time, I’ve found him to be a conscientious, ambitious, and industrious young man,it read.

In other words, a complete douchebag. I tossed it aside.

The only other thing in the file was a sealed manila envelope with the Langer Enterprises return address. Bingo. Wainwright-Phillips could pretend to be Man of the Year all he wanted, but if he was in any way in cahoots with the guy who’d stolen my sister, he was a scumbag, and he deserved to die. And if I had to, I’d be the one to kill him. I wouldn’t even think twice about it.

In the meantime, time to steam open this envelope. The trick would be to get it unsealed and resealed, then back into the file before anybody noticed it missing. I already had an idea how, if I could find an unoccupied bathroom somewhere, which shouldn’t be hard—I’d already passed about thirty of them. Footsteps pounded in the hall, and I muttered a curse in Luxembourgish, shoving the envelope under my T-shirt and down the waistband of my cutoff shorts.

“I think I can take this from here. You’re needed out in the yard. The gardener needs all the palo verde trimmings bagged up and removed. Move it,” the housekeeper said, swatting me lightly on the arm. It wasn’t her fault really, but it looked like the honeymoon was over and I was back to being treated like livestock.

Business as usual.

4

HER

Ihummed a tune fromGirl Crazy, the only school musical I’d ever been stupid enough to try to overcome my stage fright long enough to perform in, as I rounded the hall. I planned to jump in the shower, rinse off the day, and rub myself down with that new pomegranate bodywash before Corey’s arrival—it had been a birthday present and more expensive than anything I could afford these days, and it smelled divine.

Maybe I’d been wrong about Corey after all. He’d offered to help me study instead of going drinking, hadn’t he? Sure, his attitude about slaves was a bit harsh, but just because Erica Muller was a professor didn’t mean she was right about everything, either. And who knew? As improbable as it sounded, maybe Max Langer’s plan, whatever it was, would disrupt slavery or even end it. And even if it didn’t, Corey would make boatloads of money one day working for Langer, and if I chose to hitch myself to that wagon, I’d probably be able to coax him to see the light—to treat the slaves we would someday own morelike the people nobody seemed to want to acknowledge they were.

I shook my head as I rounded the corner of the hallway. What was Ithinking?

There was no “we.” Yet.

Even before I reached the bathroom, I knew something was wrong. The light was off and the door was closed, but I could already hear water gushing out of the tap and into the tub. When I pried the door open, steam was fogging up the mirror. Someone was running the bath. How? Why? This wasmybathroom. Nobody else bathed here.

“Hey, what’s going on in here? I need to use the?—”

Before I could switch on the light, I stumbled right into a rather large form crouched by the bathtub. Whoever it was scrambled backward to steady himself. He’d been holding something over the tub, which he quickly, furtively, shoved beneath his shirt. In the process, his hand—his wrist bearing the kinds of abrasions I’d seen on slaves forced into tight shackles—landed on the top of my foot. I recoiled immediately, not because it was unpleasant but from the shock. Electric shock.

“Sorry.”

Sorry?Did he think he’d touched another slave or something? Because that sure wasn’t how he was supposed to apologize tome.

To his credit, though, he realized his mistake quickly as soon as I flicked the switch. “Oh,shit.” He even shrank back for a second but composed himself, running a damp hand through his hair as he shut the water off and scrambled to rise to a height that was as impressive as his audacity.

The only thing Ishouldhave been thinking about right then was how to punish him for touching me. But when I saw what stood before me, I was robbed of all thoughtandspeech. In the past twelve hours, I’d spent way more time than I’d ever admit toanybody dreaming, imagining, and—okay, I admit it—touching myself thinking about that guy on the intercom, but never for a single second had I imaginedthis.

If my father had bought him specifically to torture me, I couldn’t imagine how he could be more gorgeous than he was. Natural sun-bleached golden streaks shot through thick hair long enough to brush his neck, falling carelessly across and to one side of his milky face with its bone structure sculpted and smooth enough for a sorority girl to envy, all topped off by eyelashes so ridiculously long they cast shadows on his cheeks.

And then there was that body.

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