Page 22 of Never Broken

He spent three years toiling in the fields, you big baby.

“Not bad for a first try,” he said when he popped his head in and glimpsed the sparkling bathroom tile, mirror, and tub. He began gathering up the supplies and replacing them in the mop bucket. “Just think, next time we’ll have you doing something crazy like putting your own dishes in the sink.”

Well, it was official: story time was over. It was going to be snark from here on out. But before I could say anything, the intercom buzzed.

“Excuse me, miss.” It was the housekeeper, clearing her throat ever-so-politely. “It’s fifteen minutes past the time whenI would have needed all the outdoor furniture cleaned off and rearranged, the terrace swept, the table set?—”

I took my finger off the button. “It’s for you,” I said to him with a smirk.

As soon as he’d left, I slammed the door, sat down, buried my face in my pillow, and screamed. Then I got up, went to my computer, and typed “slave welfare” into the search bar.

It was time to start my paper.

HIM

Getting what I’d come for had been the easy part.

First, distracting Louisa with a cunning bit of wit while subtly directing my eyes to her laptop password, then coaxing her out of the room and running a quick internet search to discover that the Salt River Boulevard address was a warehouse bought two years ago by Langer Enterprises with the intention of turning it into a lab/manufacturing plant for Project White Cedar—some kind of “revolutionary” thirty million-dollar biotechnology that Langer was assuring investors would disrupt the slavery industry. Learning that last year, the property had been transferred into Keith Wainwright-Phillips’s name. Even getting the printout—a last-minute stroke of genius to use the vacuum cleaner to disguise the noise—hadn’t been hard. And even though I got affectionately whacked with a wooden spoon by the housekeeper when I arrived late for my usual bullshit evening chores, she still let me polish off some leftover banana pudding, so she couldn’t have been that upset.

No, I could have done all that with my eyes closed—and had, many times in my past.

Louisa.Shewas hard. Actually, so was I, but in an entirely different way.

Damn her for knowing exactly where to place those tiny little moles. Besides the one on her cheek, she had one centered perfectly above her left tit, and if that weren’t bad enough, the air conditioning kept making her nipples poke out of that tight little camisole she had on. And then she had the audacity to top it all off with that pile of curly hair she kept nervously running her delicate, manicured little fingers through. I loved them there, of course, but Iwantedthem somewhere else.

Shehadto know what she was doing, right? She couldn’t be that innocent. Or maybe she was. Maybe she genuinely had no fucking clue that those hands in her hair were the cherry on top of a giant ice cream sundae behind double-paned glass—one my starving self wanted to smash open, grab, throw down on the bed, and give the orgasm of a lifetime.

But to my dismayed surprise—and my dick’s—that wasn’t even what I was thinking about the most. What I was thinking about the most—and what Iwantedto think about the least—was how she had listened.

I hadn’t meant to talk. I hadn’t meant to bring those years up at all. Usually, I pushed them down into the far, far reaches of my psyche, where they couldn’t crop up at inopportune moments and make me want to burn things or collapse into a broken heap on the floor. Yes, she’d said some ignorant, spoiled, artless things. Things that made me want to stop talking because she didn’t deserve to hear them, and that she wouldn’t understand if I told her, and that I wouldn’t be so stupid as to imagine for a second that she’d care about. Things that reminded me that she had no reason to be different from all the other free women of my past who had held my fate in their manicured hands—a sweet, cuddly pet they could feed, tease, play with, and kill with one word the second I acted up.

But I’d kept talking. Because she wasn’t feeding, teasing, or playing. She wasstill. All except for her huge gray eyes, widenot with pity but with horror. As if what had happened to me actually mattered to her, when sometimes it didn’t even matter tome. I was just a slave, after all, and if slaves could feel, we wouldn’t get treated like this.

Right.

It was almost enough to make me want to tell her the whole story. Almost.

Not to mention, I’d bet that hand on the desk wouldn’t have feltanythinglike a slave girl’s hand.

Okay. Stop right there. That’s it. Abort the mission. I was done. Finished. Stage One had been achieved, right? I was there to use her, and I’d used her. It had taken all my boldness, all my cunning and skill, but I’d used her. And now it was time to throw her away.

But. What if Ikeptusing her and just didn’t?—

No, you dumbfuck.Not only would she catch on—because she was fucking smart,definitelynot in chemistry, but in other ways—but the more I went back, the more tempted I’d be by the information at my fingertips, information that could help me find my sister, and the greater the risk of getting caught. A slave found to be plotting against his master would be flogged and sold, if not to the mines then somewhere just as bad. But whatever beating I got couldn’t be worse than the beating I was already giving myself for having gotten too caught up in this whole tutoring debacle and nearly forgetting what it was I had actually come here to do.

And yet, the next day, here I was climbing the stairs. Here I was with my hand on the knob. Here I was waiting for the door to open.

She was wearing a sundress today.

HER

Louisa Wainwright-Phillips

Slavery Studies 101 Section 2

Balancing Necessity and Compassion: Enhancing Slave Welfare Legislation in the NNAU

While it is an established fact that the institution of slavery is necessary for the functioning of the society and economy of the New North American Union, it is also becoming increasingly evident that laws intended to safeguard the welfare of slaves are few and laxly enforced. The existing legislation, when properly applied, can indeed provide a measure of care for slaves. However, more needs to be done to ensure these laws are followed and to introduce additional measures that genuinely protect the well-being of slaves within the system …

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