Page 54 of Never Broken

Our next two messages got sent nearly simultaneously.

773496S6

Free you?

How long is that going to take?

And what if someone catches on?

773541N0

Nondikass

Someone’s coming, I have to go

But she didn’t go. Instead, more dots appeared, then disappeared, like she was trying to tap out an answer to my questions as fast as she could before she got caught.Someone’s coming, Maeve. Hide the phone, for fuck’s sake.Had someone…? Was she…? I could only stand there in the dark, frozen to the spot, heart racing, watching those goddamn dots, waiting for them to stop, waiting for a message, anything. But they just kept pulsing. My pulse hammered in my throat.Say something, Maeve. Please.

Suddenly, the dots disappeared. Then, one final message appeared:

773541N0

He’s here

HER

Upstairs, I opened my textbook.

Sure, it seemed ridiculous to return to alkenes and alkynes now, but he’d never let me hear the end of it if he found out I hadn’t studied. But I might as well have been back to square one. The formulas on the page just swam. All I could see, all I could hear, all I couldfeel,was the gardener’s sneer, that sickly light, that awful tablet clutched in his grubby hands.

He’d given me until midnight. Even offered me a deal, of sorts. A nauseating, horrific, impossible, unthinkable deal. One I could never make in a million years, which I’d told him before sprinting upstairs and straight into a long, scalding-hot shower that I hated to have to take because it washed all the good stuff off with the bad.

But as bad as the deal was, the alternative was worse. For me, it meant ruin. For the slave boy? Death.

And I knew that if I didn’t go to the gardener tonight to give him my decision, he would come for me. And as repulsive as that was, it was also my only saving grace. That he was so blinded by four years’ worth of lechery that he was going to try to hold out instead of going straight to Daddy and losing his only bargaining chip.

It gave me time to think of a plan to destroy him.

Because if I couldn’t, hewouldexpose us. It was only a matter of time. But how should I do it? Should I go to Daddy and try to?—

No, no, no. Every single choice was wrong. Catastrophically wrong. Maybe it was too late to doanything.And plus, what if hedidn’thold out? Maybe he’d been to Daddyalready. But no. The gardener got banished to the far reaches of the property atparties, so maybe he wouldn’t be able to reach Daddy. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to reachme. But I couldn’t count on that.

And what about my boy? I had to tell him, and I had awayto tell him, now, I thought, staring at my phone. Didn’t I?

Or maybe, I should first try to figure out what the gardener meant bykeep his word.Was it possible that?—

No. It was impossible. When it came down to believing a disgusting old pervert versus the magic boy who got me loving chemistry and who had kissed my forehead as gently as a prayer, it wasn’t really much of a competition.

Right?

So heart pounding in my ears, I swiped open the messaging app and selected “Albert Einstein” from my contacts. Took a deep breath and started typing.

The gardener saw

Deleted.

Someone knows

Deleted.

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