Page 46 of Never Broken

He opened his mouth but didn’t get a chance to speak.

“Loulou? Is that you?”

Daddy, of all people, was in the kitchen, just on the other side of the door, raising his voice over the fizzing of the espresso machine. Why did there have to be so goddamn many people in this house? “What do we—” I started.

“Shhh. I’m not supposed to be in here,” he admitted. “Meet me after your class. Downstairs.”

“The slave quarters?” I hissed.

“Why not? No one’s going to look foryoudown there.”

“True.”

A second later, he had disappeared outside through the other door, leaving me standing alone in the cool, silent pantry and—not for the first time with him—unconvinced I hadn’t dreamed it all.

Well, I didn’t exactly relish a chat with my father given the state I was in, but I couldn’t stayhere. I opened the door to the kitchen, only to practically smack into Daddy, clutching an espresso cup.

“You’re up early,” he said, his voice brighter than I’d heard it in a long time. Why?

“Well, I have an early class today.” Not one that required me to be up at dawn, but it wasn’t like Daddy had nothing better to do than memorize my school schedule. Although these days, who knew?

“How’s the tutoring going?” he asked, of all questions. “Has it helped?”

Fucking hell, had my parents hatched some fiendish conspiracy to siphon my every thought and feeling about the boy right out into the open? Could the half-demented smile I’d pasted on my face possibly convince him that opening thatchemistry book hadn’t started an earthquake that might as well be knocking pictures off the walls as we spoke? “Um, good,” I said through gritted teeth. “Really good.”

“I know using a slave as a tutor is a bit unusual, but apparently, his former owner made it into a lucrative little side business for himself,” he said, apparently oblivious to the way my eye was twitching as if about to burst. “But it’s all about thinking outside the box and leveraging your strengths, right?”

Like punishing the boy for tutoring me and then taking credit for the idea? Yeah, that was a real power move right there. “I really have to run to my psychology class,” I squeaked, even though I knew the only psychology I was going to be capable of today was the psychology of how I could sit in a lecture hall for an hour, ruminating over everything he might possibly say when we met, without collapsing into a boneless heap on the floor.

“Well, just be sure to be home in time to get ready for dinner because I have big news to announce,” he blathered on. “You may as well know that Max Langer and I are formally announcing tonight that I’m going to become a partner in his new venture.”

So that was it. That was how he planned to save us all. By hitching what remained of his splintered, broken-down wagon to, of all people, Corey’s boss. I took a deep breath in an attempt to sound slightly less hysterical than I felt. “Daddy, don’t you know that his old partner dealt in slaves? Is that really the reputation you want in this era of corporate social responsibility?”

“Well, I can see your scholarship money is being well-spent at that college,” he said lightly. “I love that you have strong convictions, sweetie. I did, too, at your age. But you have nothing to worry about. In fact, Max is planning on disrupting the whole industry of slavery. He says that era may be coming to an end, and who knows? He’s a genius. Maybe he’s right.”

“So … what, we’re going to free all of ours?” I couldn’t help it.

Daddy chuckled as if I were just too precious for words. “Six months from now, when this pays off, it’ll be the start of a better life for all of us. You can live in the dorms next year. We can start going on vacations again. You can finally have that new Chanel bag and a car.”

As if any of that stuff mattered. “I just want us to be happy. Like before.”

“Thisdoesmake me happy, sweetheart,” he said. “Providing for you and Mom, that is. I know you’ve had to endure a lot of hardship recently, and you deserve it.”

Endurance?Hardship?The fuck did he know about those? He was speaking an archaic language, meant to communicate with a version ofmefrom a previous lifetime, a Louisa obsessed with pink-and-green dorm decor, who would go to homecoming with a guy like Corey and come home crying because another girl wore the same one-thousand-dollar dress.

“Besides, I would never doanythingthat my little Loulou objects to. I promise.” He kissed the top of my head.

“You said it would pay off,” I said. “But what if it doesn’t?” He seemed not to have heard, so I asked again. “Daddy? What if it doesn’t pay off?”

He spoke carefully. “That’s not anything you need to worry about. It’s not going to happen. The only thing you need to concern yourself with right now is school. I mean it.”

“Daddy, I’m eighteen. I’m an adult now. I know I don’t always act like it, but I can handle this. I need to know what we’re up against.”

He set the cup down on the counter as if it had suddenly grown heavy. “Then we sell off everything, starting with the house. And the slaves.”

It wasn’t really the basement.

It was an entirely separate wing of the house, a bunker, really, a windowless slab of concrete built in the desert where lower floors were expensive and totally unnecessary, except to allow maximum separation from the bright and beautiful parts of the home. Maximum ignorance, on my part, of everyone who was forced to inhabit it. And maximum chances, in the time it took to traverse from the main house to the other wing, to allow me to turn back from making a horrible mistake. One so all-consumingly awful that just thinking about it during my lecture, after chewing the erasers off not one but two mechanical pencils, I mounted another attack on the cap of a ballpoint pen. When you got right down to it, there were at least a million reasonsnotto make the trip down those stairs, and onlyonereason to go.

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