Page 36 of Never Broken

I backtracked, remembering Erica Muller’s advice. “I—you don’t have to tell me anything. I just?—”

“No, really, what? You ready for another fucking story time, princess? How about we start at the very beginning?”

“I—”

“With how my first owner passed around my mom like a party favor to his friends, one of whom was almost certainly my so-called father? Or that I got put to work when I was three, only to get caned every time I dropped something so I could, in my master’s words, ‘learn what my life would be?’ Is that enough? Or if not, how about that a few years later, he gave me to his son to be his valet, but the son was a sociopathic freak who lit his younger brother on fire and gotmeflogged for it? Or that a few years after that, he tried to rape my sister and when my mom and I tried to protect her, he chained me up in the shed and raped my mom instead, right in front of me, causing her to later die of a miscarriage they refused to treat? And then I flipped out, went at his head with a garden spade, and would have killed him right there if the police hadn’t come to cattle prod me into submission? He died a week later, by the way, and I’m not fucking sorry about it.”

I clamped down on my lower lip as he barreled on without a pause, inhaling another tear I knew was forming in a hot pit deep down behind my eyes.

“The only thing Iamsorry about is that the last time my sister and I saw each other was from separate pens at a public auction, after they sold us both to punish me.” The hard, cold edge to his voice didn’t change at all, even as he watched me stand there feeling ill. “Oh, and as a bonus epilogue, maybe you want to hear about how I lied and schemed and bribed and called in every favor I was owed from everyone I knew to make sure your dad bought me, to get here and look for her because I couldn’t forgive myself if I lost her, and by favors, I’m not talking about driving them to the airport. So there’s that, too. So what do you think? Great material, right? Think it’ll get you an A? If not, I’ve got more.”

It all felt like watching a horror film in slow motion. Of course I already knew intellectually that, at not yet twenty, he’d been through several lifetimes of hell. But to hear them fall out of his mouth like that, hard and brutal and unembellished? It felt like taking the blowsmyself.

“If you knew your sister was here, why didn’t you tell me?” I asked quietly.

“Tellyou? I don’t know,” he said incredulously. “Gee, I don’t know, you think the fact that you’re my master’s daughter might have had something to do with it?”

There it was.I didn’t trust you,in other words.You were the enemy. Maybe you still are.

But he wasn’t done yet.

“Let me make this as clear as I can,” he continued. “My sister has nothing to do with you. None of this hasanythingto do with you. And it won’t, as long as you and I are … who we are. It never will. It never can. Stick to what you know. Shopping, manicures, Daddy’s yacht in the Caribbean, and your advanced cosmeticdermatology course, or whatever the fuck it is you’re studying. We’ll both be a lot better off.”

“God, you can be such an ass! I’m not studying dermatology, and I’m sorry!” I shouted, too loudly, though I wasn’t apologizing for what I really wanted to apologize for: namely, his entire life. “I’m sorry I did anything, okay? I shouldn’t have gotten involved.” I could not cry again. Because I was pretty sure he was not going to comfort me this time.

“No, you shouldn’t have.” He crossed his arms in front of his chest again in that closed-off posture, an armor that nothing could pierce.

“I was trying to help you.”

“Am I not getting through to you, slow learner? I. Don’t. Need. Your. Help.”

“Fine.” I snatched up the aloe and the phone selfishly. “I’ll just take these back too, as long as you enjoy suffering so much.”

“Fine.”

And that was where, of all places, things stood when the front door was flung open, then slammed shut. For real.

“Louisa, where are you?” my mother’s voice slurred.

“Fuck,” we said in unison.

She was back from women’s league night at the country club, boozily trilling out my name again as she lurched toward the kitchen.

With another familiar, panicked exchange of glances, we sprang into action. He, one step ahead as usual, filled a glass with ice and sparkling water from the refrigerator and handed it to me. I took it and met my mother at the door of the kitchen, then guided her carefully away from the kitchen and into the living room and settled her on the sofa with the water next to her. Certain he’d had enough time to do whatever he had to do, I turned to guiltily go—but my mom’s icy-cool hand pinned me to the leather cushion.

“We hardly ever talk anymore, Louisa.”

That was because we had nothing interesting to talk about—at least not anything, as of tonight, that wouldn’t cause her to keel over in horror. Luckily, though, she didn’t even want to talk about me. She just wanted inane chatter about everything from the latest celeb gossip to my father’s golf game to her favorite story about that time I threw up on the dentist when I was six,ha ha ha.

Honestly, the best way to deal with her when she was in this state was to keep her talking. If I could just do that, she would eventually run out of steam and drift off to sleep. It was generally a slick and successful method.

Tonight, however, she was on a particularly good roll. I laughed and nodded and agreed at all the right moments, while secretly dying of agony to know what was going on in the kitchen. In my haste, I’d left the aloe and the phone. Had he taken them? Had he left them? Had he leftme? Not that there was anything to leave, but?—

The light was still on. He wasn’t allowed to go to bed until four, and until then, he was supposed to find things to do around the house to make himself useful, or pretend to. Was there any chance he was standing with his back up against the other side of the door, hanging on our every word? Or had he given up in disgust, retreated back into the pantry or the garden, and was now just waiting for us to leave so he could be alone with his thoughts and figure out how to get to his sister without my incessant fuckery ruining everything?

“So how are things going with Corey?” Mom demanded. “Are things moving at all?”

I moaned and leaned back on the headrest. “Can wenottalk about this? I’ve got my hands full with school, and?—”

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