Page 15 of Never Broken

“Fantastic. A tutor you don’t have to pay for, and he weeds the garden.” Corey laughed at his own joke. “Hey, you! Slave,” he called, shaking his empty can. The boy raised his head andset down the wheelbarrow. I face-palmed. I’d wanted to let him work undisturbed, but I also couldn’t let him ignore the request. It just wasn’t done. “Another. And one for Miss Louisa.”

I cringed at Corey’s rudeness, but the boy, so far, took it in stride, saying “yes, sir” as he accepted the can, kept his eyes down obediently—well, maybe not so obediently, since he was actually checking out Corey’s calculus textbook. Spotting his interest, Corey smiled nastily.

“Louisa says you’re educated, boy. Where did you go to college? Oxford? Sorbonne? Were you Phi Beta Kappa?”

“Shut up, Corey,” I hissed, glancing between them. This was about to spiral quickly out of hand. Italwaysspiraled out of hand with Corey. He’d been like this since our mothers’ book club meeting when we were six when he’d convinced me to help him eat an entire box of sandwich cookies out of the pantry and blame it all on his family’s slave boy. I didn’t know what exactly happened to the kid after that. But I didn’thaveto know exactly.

“Simon Schechter, sir?” the boy asked, indicating the book’s author. “I met him a few times, actually. He used to crash on my old master’s sofa whenever they went out drinking in Heidelberg. You don’t want to know the kinds of things I used to find when I cleaned the flat the next morning.” He had raised his head now with the trace of a smile, and I realized that, despite what he’d no doubt been taught his whole life, this guy didn’t have a submissive bone in his body. Frankly, it was hard to believe he’d survived this long, talking to free men so casually. The burns and bruises on his face suddenly seemed to make a lot more sense, and my heart clenched despite myself.

But no. He deserved it. He was defiant. He was disobedient. He was a bad slave. No, he was just bad in general, and it wasn’t my job to care what happened to him. Not like I didn’t have enough problems of my own.

“I studied in Germany last year.” Corey, much to my dismay, was still talking. “I co-wrote a paper on the P versus NP problem with Simon Schechter. It won an award from the International Mathematics Forum.”

“That must have been rough, sir,” the boy replied.

Corey scoffed. “Of course it was rough. Mathematicians had been working on that for two decades.”

“No, I mean not getting credit for your paper.” He pointed to the textbook on Corey’s lap. “May I?”

Corey’s mouth had dropped open in shocked silence. Not waiting for permission, the boy flipped to the biography page, pointing out the award Schechter had won and the year he’d won it—with a different coauthor.

“Ah, it’s probably just a misprint, though, sir,” the boy added, completely straight-faced.

I couldn’t help it. I felt a slow grin overtaking my face. Corey’s face, meanwhile, instantly flushed an unattractive shade of strawberry. The textbook rolled off his lap and onto the grass.

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Corey growled, which told me all I needed to know. “How dare you contradict a free man?” He turned to me. “Aren’t you going to do something about this?”

I looked at the slave, who stood there, defiant, unapologetic, unafraid. Dangerous. “He’s—he belongs to Daddy. I can’t—It’s up to him.”

“Oh, come on, I know you’ve got a switch inside. Draw some blood. Show him who’s boss, or he’ll think he can walk all over you.”

I looked in vain from one boy to the other. I should have been furious that a slave would speak to my guest that way, but instead, I was frantic to think of something, anything, to get us out of this situation. “I-I’ll do it inside,” I said desperately,jabbing my thumb toward the kitchen. As satisfying as it was to see Corey humbled so completely, this was getting serious.

“What were you thinking?” I hissed at him as soon as I slammed the patio door. I was scolding him, but for some reason, it didn’t feel like scolding a slave. It felt, somehow, like scolding an equal. There didn’t seem like there should have been a difference, but there was. “You see what you’ve done? He wants me to switch you!”

He crossed his arms and leaned against the marble island top, glaring back at me. “Ah,” he said. But in his accent, it didn’t sound like “ah.” It sounded more like “ach,” with a guttural little noise at the end that I might have found oddly adorable if I weren’t so furious. “Worth it. Trust me, anybody who uses that douchebag as a tutor is going to end up on the seven-year plan. Don’t tell me you’re dating him, too.”

“What did you say?”

“I’m not going to repeat it. Douche. Dating. Don’t tell me. I thought the meaning was fairly clear,” he said, turning around to the sink, flicking on the tap, and filling a glass. Wait, was he going to—did I even need to ask? Of course he was. All the dishes in this kitchen were off-limits to the slaves, and he knew it. That waswhyhe was doing it.

“It’s none of your damn business!” I sputtered as he knocked back most of the cup and set it stubbornly on the counter. He was clearly daring me to say anything, so I didn’t. And just how that gavemethe upper hand, I wasn’t sure. “You’ve known me for less than a day, and you’re a slave. On what planet does that give you the right to question who I spend time with? And for the last time, keep your eyes on the floor!” I snapped because they were enthralling and fathomless and liquid gold, and they were making my pulse race in a way I had no control over. So why, when he reluctantly obeyed, did it make me want to startsobbing? “Anyway, Corey’s not a douchebag. He’s one of the most popular guys on campus.”

“Really? How big is the campus?” He paused and tilted his head a little. “Wait. Corey? Corey Killeen?”

“Yeah,” I said cautiously. “How do you know?”

He shook his head. “No reason.”

“His dad owns every it-restaurant in the city, and we’ve been friends since preschool,” I explained. “And his boss is a tech mogul who got rich by, among other things, launching rockets into space. They’re both going to be over for dinner soon. We can’t afford to piss them off.”

He seemed to consider this seriously. “Well, I’ll say this. If your dad needs money, it can’t hurt to borrow it from somebody too dumb to calculate simple interest.”

A giggle escaped my mouth. I met his eyes again—yes, on purpose this time—and suddenly, we were both melting into the counter with laughter.

He had a beautiful smile.

“I suppose you think you can do better?” I finally said.

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