16. Chapter 16
16
HIM
N eedless to say, when the door was thrown open at first light—or what would have been had there been any light—the face that appeared was not the one I’d dreamed of last night; the one serene image that finally allowed me—along with the pain pills, maybe—to close my eyes and sleep for a few minutes. Rather, it was one that bore just enough of a familial resemblance to Louisa to make it, unfortunately, impossible to hate. I’d tried.
Seeing my master, I scrambled to my knees, since that was as far up as I could get. It was agony kneeling on the hard concrete floor, and now I was weak and almost shaking from a day with no food, little water, and mere minutes of sleep. Pretty much everything hurt, of course, but my re-torn shoulder had swollen nearly double and frozen stiff. Even moving it slightly brought white-hot, searing pain, so I tried not to.
But Louisa’s father didn’t look well, either. Every ounce of vitality he’d regained in recent weeks had vanished. He was hollow-eyed, wan, and unkempt as if he’d slept fully clothed. If he’d also been bruised and bleeding, we wouldn’t be too far apart.
After snapping on the bulb, he just stood there, looking at me, who, though my head was bowed, watched him through the sticky, bloody, matted strands of hair in my face.
At least I wouldn’t be in suspense for long. So what would it be?
Oh. The swift backhand across the face. Solid choice.
The blow hit its mark precisely. Even in his disheveled state, Louisa’s father, athlete that he was, was by no means physically weak, and I gasped as I struggled to stay on my knees. Shooting pain and the taste of blood filled my sinuses, blurring my vision and stealing my breath. I doubled over, placing my hands on the floor to steady myself; such an amateur, childlike thing to do. Wainwright-Phillips roughly grabbed me by my injured shoulder, hauling me back to my knees, and I bit back a whimper of pain at the stabbing of a thousand invisible knives. Gulping for air, I still averted my eyes. Why? As if it mattered now. It was just that they’d fucking trained me so well .
“I trusted you.”
The phrasing surprised me. A slave’s transgression, to an owner, was frustrating, infuriating, and occasionally even disappointing, but it was rarely a deep, personal betrayal. To my master, though, it seemed this was.
“After nearly twenty years, you still haven’t learned your place,” Louisa’s father continued. “And I certainly haven’t helped by being so lenient with you. I should have known something like this would happen when they said you were potentially dangerous. But I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought three years of hard labor in the fields must have taught you your lesson. I thought a hands-off approach would show you that I trusted that you could be a good slave, one who would make me proud. Obviously, I was wrong.”
Well, yeah. He was. About pretty much everything.
“I’ve read that slaves can’t change their fundamental natures and that once past the event horizon, can’t be corrected. I didn’t believe it. It seems I should have.” He began to pace what little square footage the storage closet contained. “Did you think of me at all and the trust I placed in you? Did you think of her ? What this would do to her reputation?”
What did he mean, did I think of her? Fuck, of course I thought of her. More often and more thoughtfully than her own father seemed to think about her most of the time. But that observation certainly wasn’t worth sharing, at least if I wanted to keep all the teeth in my head.
“You of all people should know how hard she’s worked to make a life for herself, one that I tried and failed to give her. You’ve seen it. You helped her do it, which makes it all the more mind-boggling to me.” He paused. “So what do you have to say for yourself, boy? This is your one chance to speak, so choose your words wisely.”
My vision was still blurry, my weakened hands digging into my thighs through the torn fabric of my shorts as if I just needed something to cling to while I rifled through the far reaches of my brain for anything I could possibly say that would help. But I didn’t find anything, so I might as well tell the truth.
“I did, sir,” I said. “Think of her, I mean.”
Well, whatever Wainwright-Phillips had been expecting me to say, it clearly wasn’t that. His stern mask, as it often did, slipped for a second before reappearing.
“The bottom line is, you violently attacked a free person and at the very least, your fixation on my daughter, whatever else it may be, is wildly inappropriate if not downright dangerous. Anyone else in my position would be trying to determine whether anything more than what I saw tonight happened between you. But frankly, I’d rather not know.”
Except the way he said I’d rather not know sort of implied I already know . And really, how could he not? Up until now, he may have been oblivious, but he wasn’t stupid.
“I wonder,” he continued, taking a step closer, prompting me to try not to flinch. “When I told you I would see that you were rewarded, did I give you a reason to think I didn’t mean it?”
What? Was he kidding? There was every reason to think he didn’t mean it.
“I know you probably think I’m a complete idiot, but I’m not. I know you’re far above what I’ve had you doing. I knew that when I bought you, and what I’ve seen of you, up until now, has only reinforced that. I had plans for you: greater responsibility; more autonomy; a better life. I wanted you to be happy here. I really did. But before I gave you that, I needed to be sure you could be trusted. You’ve not only violated that trust, you’ve lit it on fire.
“To be honest,” he continued, “I blame myself for letting you be in such close proximity to her so often. I should have never let the two of you be alone unsupervised. But hindsight won’t help mitigate the damage. The Killeens will not let this go. They are absolutely ruthless when they feel they’ve been wronged, and they want you on your way to a mine tomorrow, or they’ll get the police involved. And you know what that means for Louisa if they do.”
Of course I did. Just the same as she knew what getting caught meant for me. And we’d done it anyway because … why? Well, for starters, because we were idiots. As if he needed to rub that in.
“And don’t think quietly paying a fine is going to make it go away, assuming I can scrounge up that money somewhere. They’ve also threatened to use the civil courts.” He meant they’d sue, something that never happened in Europe but did here, and if they did, they’d take him for all he was worth. And that would be the end of his deal with Langer, the end of any chance he had to claw his way back to the top. But amazingly, that seemed to be only his secondary concern.
“If they file suit, never mind the financial damage, this one incident will be blown up into things that have no basis in reality. They’ll rip our entire family to shreds when we can least afford it, and worst of all, they’ll publicly throw my daughter’s life and future to the wolves. And above all, my first obligation is to her.”
Funny that he should only realize that now .
“However, we both know that what they want would be a tragic waste of your gifts, and as angry as I am, I can’t allow that to color my judgment.” He looked away as if he were gazing out the nonexistent window. “Purely from a practical standpoint, the world is better served with you above ground, and my daughter—” He choked on the words. “My daughter has also spoken up on your behalf.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. He didn’t have to tell me that. He probably shouldn’t have told me that. But for some reason, he had. When we first met, I had thought he almost deserved a chance. If nothing in the interim had ever happened, maybe that would still be the case.
“That’s why I’ve worked out an alternative solution—courtesy of Max Langer.”
My head hadn’t snapped up so fast in front of one of my owners since I was a child. I forced my eyes down to the bare concrete again, my heart pounding so fast I was certain Wainwright-Phillips could hear it.
“Mr. Langer has offered to pay the Killeen boy’s medical bills—for my family’s sake, hopefully not his funeral costs—plus a significant sum in exchange for their keeping quiet and pursuing no further action. And in return, I’ll lend you to Mr. Langer. Permanently.”
The implications of this—what it meant for me, for Louisa, Maeve, and for the future—were almost incomprehensible after forty-eight hours of this funhouse of pain and anguish. And Wainwright-Phillips was still talking as if from the other side of an underwater tunnel.
“After all this, I doubt you’d be foolish enough not to rid your head of any further thoughts of my daughter, but if you are, rest assured I’ll be confiscating her phone and computer and monitoring all her other communication channels. And don’t forget I’ll still have the capability to track your whereabouts. If I find that you’ve tried to contact her in any way, I can and will revoke the deal. The mines are not off the table. You’re being given a chance to atone for the damage you’ve done to my family. If I were you, I’d work very hard to keep on Mr. Langer’s good side. Do not squander this opportunity as you won’t get another one.”
He paused again. Oh, shit, I was probably supposed to say something. I opened my mouth.
“Do not thank me, boy,” he cut me off. “This is entirely Mr. Langer’s doing. You have him to thank that you’re ever going to get another chance to see daylight. What you will not see is this house again or anyone in it, except for perhaps myself and then purely for business. Other than on paper, I’m completely washing my hands of you. Your future is effectively his to decide. And that’s far better than you deserve.”
I drew in a ragged breath. “Am I—”
“Are you going to be flogged? That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?”
Actually, it wasn’t even near the top of the list.
“The answer is no. Not on my orders, anyway. And—” He cut himself off as he often did when he seemed tempted to treat me too much like a person. When he felt too compelled to say something like, You’ve suffered enough. Slaves could never be allowed to think that they’d suffered enough.
He looked at me expectantly. Wait, he was still going to let me speak?
“How much time do I have, sir?” I asked.
Of course Wainwright-Phillips would be appalled to know the one and only reason I was asking. To know that I was praying to something that yesterday I’d been convinced I didn’t believe in for just one chance to say all the things to that fearless angel that I was too much of a coward to say last night. How could I have been so foolish as to think I’d ever get another chance to say them? To ask for more time? There was never any more time when your time wasn’t your own.
“One of Mr. Langer’s security team is outside the door as we speak. As soon as I leave, he’ll show you to the car.”
My vision blurred. I looked down at my hands and nodded.
All right, then. That’s how it will be.
By the grace of whatever, I’d been spared the mines. And yet it barely registered. All I could think about was that Louisa was right. She’d entered my life as merely a voice, and she’d exited that way, too. And like countless times before, she’d been braver than me, braver than anyone ever gave her credit for, brave enough to say what I couldn’t. And now, because of my cowardice and stupidity, she’d exit not only not knowing that I loved her but not knowing that she’d accomplished the impossible: proven, definitively, that I was capable of love.
At Erica’s, I’d heard a phrase I knew I’d read before, and it soon turned out I had. Five years ago, soon after the professor had ensured my literacy was up to an acceptable level, he’d handed me a stack of books he felt an educated person should be familiar with and ordered me to read. Shakespeare and Dickens in English; Goethe and Hesse in German; Hugo and Dumas in French, plus—much to my frustration— poetry , in all of them. Because literacy, I’d quickly discovered, wasn’t the same as comprehension, and I was pretty sure Louisa had caught onto that when we’d started exploring her bookshelf. It didn’t help that there was almost no real Luxembourgish literature, as tiny as the country was. But as a teenage slave, lately erased from and restored to the world, I simply lacked the cultural context to understand it, in any language. It wasn’t because of the inferiority of my fundamental nature , as Wainwright-Phillips had said, but simply that I’d been raised by those who already believed in it.
Maybe someday, I’d hoped, when I was older and wiser, I’d go back and the meaning would just fall into place as easily as the hydrogen and oxygen molecules did in those endless chemical reactions I’d spent thousands of hours poring over in the lamplight after the professor had gone to bed. Maybe someday was now.
And this was why my eyes, under my matted hair, scanned the room—the shelves—one more time. Time. As predicted, my luck had run out, but surely—even restrained, weakened, in pain—I was still good enough to find a second. Because that was all I needed for this.
Meanwhile, Wainwright-Phillips was preparing to sweep out of the room like he usually did. He stopped, though. Softened his voice. “Look at me, boy.”
At first, it seemed he meant to grab and tilt my head up, as he did. Instead, he let me raise my gaze on my own. For a second, our eyes met.
“In this world, there are some things that simply cannot be, no matter how much we want them,” he said. “I’ve come to understand that more than you probably know. And in time, so will you.”
I dropped my eyes again as he paused, just for a second, on the knob.
“Good luck.”
Then he was gone.