Page 60 of Never Broken

“Loulou, I need you to check on your mother, please,” my father whispered from a few places down.

Fuck. Mom’s cocktail hour had started around eleven this morning, so it wasn’t surprising that halfway through dinner, she’d gone missing from the table. That meant as usual, Daddy wanted me to go look for her and make sure she hadn’t passed out on the floor of the powder room in a disgusting puddle, especially not during a party with our entire family fortune on the line.

It likely also meant going into the garden, which was why I wasn’t, yet. Not until I’d spoken to my boy. Not until we’d figured out a plan.

But how? Time was running out. If I didn’t find the gardener,hewould findus.And the video would find Daddy. And then it would be too late. And worse, I didn’t know if my boy had even seen my message yet. I didn’t know if hewould.

Twilight swallowed the sunset’s final glow. Candles flickered in tall glass holders, the firepit crackled, and the poolshimmered, reflecting the firelight and the darkening azure sky. Roasted tamales, peach salad, and chile-crusted branzino with squash puree all made their appearances, the housekeeper no doubt seizing the chance to remind everyone that her master had once had enough money to send her to a high-end culinary academy.

The terrace helpfully had its own bar and kitchen, which meant the slaves didn’t have to go back and forth to the house every time someone wanted something. It also meant I was acutely aware of his whereabouts every single second of the evening but still couldn’t risk saying any more to him but athank you, even when he’d served me another champagne cocktail as I stood amid a group of my father’s friends’ kids, or when I’d watched that bold handshake with a man rich and powerful enough to be an effective supervillain was one of the most reckless—and dare I say, sexiest—things I’d ever seen. But it wouldn’t matter how sexy it was when my father opened his phone to see a softcore porn video starring his daughter and his slave.

One thing was clear: this couldn’t go on. Now that dinner was in full swing, my boy was as rapidly in and out of the kitchen as the other slaves, and I couldn’t exactly go chasing after him, pulling him away from his duties andmyselfaway from the table. Come to think of it, had he—or the other slaves, for that matter—had a moment’s rest all evening, or anything to eat? And why the fuck had thatnevercrossed my mind at a party before?

So yes,thatwas all agonizing, butsurelyit couldn’t be more so than having to store all the lovely Santa Fe art you’d just bought while waiting for your 1.2 million-dollar home remodeling job to finish, which was the one currently bedeviling the woman sitting next to me, totally oblivious that my focuswas completely and entirely elsewhere. I made polite noises and pushed back my chair. But before I could leave, I stopped.

“I mean, who would have thought that the most expensive part of a rocket would be the part you throw away?” asked Langer, who had hardly touched his branzino, the plates for which the slaves—except for one—were now quietly clearing away from the dining table. The glow of the soft tabletop candles and overhead lanterns obscured Langer’s icy blue eyes as he held forth. “When I decided to invest in Orbital Dynamics, they told me they thought they could make spaceflight affordable by reusing those parts. Problem is, they sent up five of them and only two of them came back, and the ones that came back had their fuselage gutted like a herring by space debris. Now they tell us it’s going to take months to repair, which you have to admit kind of undermines the whole concept. And the other partners are talking about cutting their losses, after twenty years and billions invested.”

“So what you’re saying is that it’s not economically feasible to send up these rockets?” asked one of Daddy’s colleagues in dismay.

“Not if you want them to come back,” said Langer, leaning back in his chair.

“It’s pretty obvious,” said Corey a few places down, prompting some heads to turn. Much to my relief,hewas expending most of his effort that evening sucking his boss’s dick and had temporarily left off worrying about his own. “If we can look at the data from the rockets that came back intact, we can see where the holes were made. If the fuselage is destroyed, logically that’s the part whose structural integrity should be reinforced.”

It suresoundedsmart. All across the table, more heads spun to look at him. And at the very end, one of the slaves—guesswhich one—had paused with three plates balanced in his hand and was clearly listening, too.

“What do you think, kid?” asked Langer, noticing immediately.

“What would he know about it?” snapped Corey. “We’re talking about rocket science, not how to load the dishwasher.”

His boss ignored him and nodded at my boy.

I sat down.

Every other slave I had ever met, at this point, would have given him theOh, it’s not my place to say, sirroutine.

But if it wasn’t clear already, we were not dealing with every other slave.

“With all due respect, sir—I mean, Max—your intern here has a fantastic idea,” he said. “For losing both all the rockets you have leftandyour remaining stockholders.”

Corey’s face turned an unattractive shade of eggplant. My father practically choked on his wine. “Excuse me?”

Langer held up his hand, shutting my dad up yet again without a word. Holy shit, did money ever talk.

My heart pounded as I reached for my glass of ice water and downed it in a gulp, not daring to look. But it didn’t matter. I could have stared right at him if I wanted to. Everyone else at the table was staring at him, too. They were mesmerized. Even the slaves had stopped, whatever they were carrying juggled precariously in their hands.

Even the gardener’s threats now seemed minor compared to what was happening. Desperately, I tried to catch his eye, but the glare from the lanterns and candles made it impossible. I had to tell him to stop, to be careful, to havesomeinstinct for self-preservation. Jesus, we were already fucked enough tonight. But still balancing the plates, his gaze remained fixed on Langer, the only one there who’d permitted him to speak to him normally. But that wasn’t theonlyplace he was looking.

“Go on.”

No, no, no?—

But wait. Did he have a plan? He usually did. And maybe this was part of it. Maybe?—

I stared at the bones of my cold, half-eaten branzino, and listened closer, heart pounding, trying to figure it out.

“Well, first, let’s assume the lost rockets actually did get hit and didn’t just run out of fuel and fall out of the sky because some boy genius on your payroll forgot to carry the one,” he said with another veiled glance at Corey, the look on whose face would have been hilarious if it weren’t so homicidal. “Forget about the fuselage. You know it can take it. You look where the holesaren’t. Think about the rockets that didn’t come back.”

Beside Corey, his parents—how ironic to have such a dyspeptic-looking mother when his father owned an empire of high-end restaurants—began to murmur angrily. His father pushed back his chair.

---