Never Broken (The Unchained #1)

Chapter 5

5

HER

I should have known when the knock was five minutes late.

From my desk littered with chemistry notes, I shouted, “Come in,” in the most annoyed voice I could conjure up. The nerve of that little trollop actually trying to clean my room while I was in it. I’d have to move my study session elsewhere, or I’d never be able to concentrate with her passive-aggressively slamming her mop and bucket around, clogging up my nostrils with that acrid cleaning solution she always used.

Of course, when the door opened, I instantly knew I’d never be able to concentrate anyway.

Worse, I couldn’t possibly be feeling and looking less sexy in my flannel pajama pants with the frayed bottoms and gray camisole, complete with a toothpaste stain over the nipple. But that was what I was wearing when, instead of a pouty-lipped maid, the guy of my very ridiculously inappropriate dreams loomed tall in the doorway instead, wearing one of those soft, thin T-shirts with the buttons at the neck, one that seemed to inexplicably fit him despite having come out of a communal bin and clung artfully to his collarbone, his biceps, and every single infuriating place I’d made up my mind to never, ever look.

I gasped and practically leaped out of my chair, banging my hip on the side of the desk. Smooth as usual. “What are you doing?” I demanded. It was a totally stupid question and yet somehow, at the same time, the only appropriate one to ask.

“Oh, this is your room?” he asked evenly, expression unreadable, setting down the vacuum and bucket full of cleaning supplies. “I had no idea.”

I rolled my eyes. “I find it very hard to believe that you don’t have this place memorized by now. And where’s the maid?”

“I told her she looked like she could use an hour off.”

“I wish she’d take a month,” I scoffed, folding my arms in a closed-off posture that was the exact opposite of how I really felt when I was around him. Like my entire body was blossoming, stretching toward his light and heat and complete and total forbiddenness. “But why are you here?”

“There are just some things I find irresistible,” he said darkly, his stunning amber-gold eyes under those long lashes still averted from mine ever so slightly—but I knew that didn’t mean he wasn’t looking.

I swallowed.

“And chemistry is one of them,” he finished.

Same here.

“I know you didn’t ask your dad if I could tutor you.”

“But I?—”

He held up his hand. “I don’t want to hear it. I know. So I’m going to show you.”

My mouth went dry. Of course I’d decided not to ask my dad, to pretend that the request had never been made. There was too much risk that he’d say yes, and I didn’t trust myself around the boy for a second—to say nothing of him . Not asking for permission—though it still left me saddled with o-chem—removed a temptation I was desperate to dodge.

Except now here he was anyway. Was the universe trying to tell me something? If so, the universe must hate me. The same way it hated Rebekah Roth.

“So are you here to tutor me or clean my room?”

“That’s up to you,” he said. “And me. See, I have a deal for you: I tutor you for an hour. If you haven’t started to understand o-chem after that, I’ll clean the room, and you don’t have to deal with you-know-who. If you do, you clean the room. Either way, it’s win-win.”

“But I don’t know how to clean the room.” Really? That was my best objection?

“I’ll teach you that, too.”

I was too mesmerized by the way the sunlight from my bedroom window was making his hair glimmer to think about whether his proposal made any goddamn sense.

Half in a daze, I pulled the white wicker chair over to my desk and collapsed back down into my own, flipping open the dreaded book to the even more dreaded chapter. “Thing is, I understand what the chemicals are and where they go. I just don’t understand why they—” I turned back when I realized he hadn’t budged from the spot on the carpet where he stood, just outside of my room.

“May I sit down?”

This boy was breaking my brain, and we hadn’t even started yet. He had talked his way into my room with a deal worthy of a real estate mogul, and now he was waiting for permission to sit in a chair. But a kid who had grown up in slavery had probably been scolded countless times for sitting on the furniture without permission. It was probably automatic. Or maybe it was just a test.

At least he hadn’t added miss .

I gestured to the chair next to mine. “Sit,” I said with a sigh. This was going to be harder than I thought. Never before had I worked side by side with a slave like this, and I hadn’t the first clue how to go about it. And on top of that, he was my tutor, which meant he was calling the shots. I had to speak up now. “Going forward, if we keep doing this? Y-you shouldn’t ask for permission. For stuff like that,” I added hastily. I blushed deeper. That hadn’t sounded right. God, I was bungling this. For the first time, I realized why most free people were assholes to slaves—it was a hell of a lot easier than trying to treat them like fellow human beings. “Okay?”

I thought I saw a smirk flicker across his face as he sank into the chair. “You’re the boss.”

Holy hell, was I going to regret this.

An hour later, it was official. I was distracted.

Distracted by the tendons in his bare forearm moving under his scarred skin as he scratched down formulas and the way his calloused fingers curled around the fountain pen my father had given me for my high school graduation, beneath that engraved metal chain he was made to wear because of course they had to remind him and me, every single second, that he wasn’t really a person. Distracted by the way he bit flakes of skin off his sun-chapped lips when he was concentrating; by how, when he racked his brain for some obscure word in English, he’d rake his fingers through his sun-streaked strands of golden hair and claim not to know—and then a second later, magically come up with it and pronounce it perfectly, too. Distracted by the way he had, in the course of an hour, jokingly crowned me everything from a slow learner to a remedial student, to a late bloomer, but clearly didn’t mean any of it. I wasn’t sure why I knew he didn’t mean it. The way he looked at me, maybe. The way he was patient , like even if it took me until the end of the goddamn world to get it, he’d still be there waiting. Or even if I never got it.

Or maybe it was how, when I got a problem right—and shit, I actually did get a few, thanks to him—he’d flash me a smile. A real smile. Like his first smile. One so beautiful and sunny and life-affirming that it left me convinced—for a split second, at least—that I loved o-chem as much as he clearly did.

Idiot. You’re digging your own goddamn grave. And his.

And yet here I was, refusing to throw down the shovel.

In fact, I leaned back in my chair, awestruck. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you—you’re amazing.” I slapped a hand over my face. “The chemistry. The chemistry is amazing. I mean—how good you are at chemistry. That’s amazing. I mean—shit. I should just stop.”

“No, please, go on. I’m really enjoying this.”

Of course I couldn’t see his face behind my hands, but I could imagine what it looked like.

It was true. This boy was magic, but I shouldn’t be saying it. No one should be saying it. Slaves weren’t magic . They weren’t even people.

Keep reminding yourself of that, dumbass. Maybe the five hundredth time will be the charm.

“Anyway, thanks,” he said. “You wouldn’t know it from reading Malchow, or listening to that brilliant and enchanting boyfriend of yours I had the pleasure of meeting the other day,” he said, and my heart clenched at how he glanced down at the fresh, self-inflicted scab on his arm. I was wondering if he’d bring that up. I’d certainly spent a good portion of my day and night thinking about that thin, perfect trail of ruby-red blood. “But o-chem isn’t that hard.”

“That’s easy for you to say.”

“But it’s true.”

I sat back in my chair and rolled my eyes.

“It’s not really science or math,” he explained suddenly, endearingly, as if this were a field theory he’d formulated while washing dishes and had just been waiting to tell someone. “They think it is—even the people who write the textbooks—but it’s not.”

“It’s not?”

“No, it’s just logic. But for some reason, people think it’s like reciting pi to the hundredth decimal place or something.”

“Let me guess: you can do that, too.”

He closed the book, and now it was his turn to lean back in the chair. “Hell, I could do that before I even learned to read.”

“What, at age four?”

“Try fourteen.”

I sat straight up again, peering at him. “Fourteen? I don’t understand.”

He laughed lightly. “What, you think they send us to school?”

I sputtered for an answer, feeling my face flush. “No, but you—you’re so smart ,” I said again lamely. “All of this,” I added, gesturing helplessly to the book on the desk. “The math, the vocabulary, the?—”

He grinned. “I’m even more amazing now, yeah?”

“Not that amazing,” I shot back. “Anyway, how did you learn to read?” I was going to regret asking. I was going to regret all of it. Because the more I knew about him, the more I wanted to know. And I shouldn’t want to know. There wasn’t supposed to be anything about slaves to know.

And he was about to tell me.

“Let’s say someone bought me who recognized my ‘potential.’ Someone at the university in Heidelberg.”

“Heidelberg. Is that where you’re from?”

“I’m from Luxembourg,” he said, with more than a little indignant pride.

Remember that. Get it right. As if I’d ever before cared in my life where a slave came from.

“And he just decided to… teach you quantum chemistry? For fun?”

“Okay, ready for story time?” he said, sliding his chair an inch or so closer to me and leaning forward melodramatically, resting his scarred-but-still-somehow-perfect forearm on the desk. I never wanted it to leave. “When I was thirteen, I got sold to this huge factory farm in Romania. It’s not a high-end gig, to say the least. It’s criminals and chronic runaways and slaves nobody else wanted to buy; ones that would have ended up in a mine otherwise.”

So how had he ended up there? I had a feeling I wasn’t going to get that part of the story. This boy had a serious knack for withholding absolutely everything but the precise information he wanted to share. It didn’t make me want to know it any less, though. It just made me want to press harder, on places it was dangerous to press.

“When you get sold to one of those places, it’s almost always for life, and by life, I mean until they work you to death, which usually takes a year or two for most people. If you’re strong and you can deal with the punishments and rations and quotas, you can make it longer.”

“How long did you make it?” I asked quietly.

“Three years.”

A brief silence hung over us.

“Then?” I was almost afraid to keep asking.

“I’d got one of the overseers to teach me how to fix the farm machinery, so I could get out of the fields sometimes. It was a privilege, believe it or not. Until I got my arm caught in one of them. Severed it at the shoulder.”

I gasped.

“Almost. Needless to say, I thought the next and last thing I’d see would be the inside of a shotgun barrel. But they decided to try to fix me up, so they had some hired goon do it using instructions he found on the internet.”

I was dumbstruck by the way he shared the abject horror of his past, as casually as I recalled slumber parties and trips to the mall with my friends. “But owners aren’t allowed to kill slaves,” I protested with a gasp. “It’s the law. And you shouldn’t have been sold for farm labor, either. Not at thirteen. My professor?—”

I stopped short, remembering what Erica Muller had said in class last week. If they can do the work of an adult, they’ll be made to do it. It doesn’t matter what the law says.

“Why you?” I finally asked softly.

He smiled and glanced away as if he could see the conflict raging in my head but had decided to let me ride it out alone. “The owner’s wife, well… she liked me, let’s put it that way. I used to talk to her through the fence. She slipped me sweets and stuff sometimes, and I would joke about how she should run away with me,” he said, then added, “Just to make her laugh,” as if somehow that would matter to me. It did, of course.

“What kind of sweets?” Though I instantly hated this woman, I adored that younger, shyer version of him, trying out his charm, maybe blushing exactly like he was blushing—just slightly—now. But then again, it was kind of warm in here.

“Namur pralines,” he replied when a curious expression crossed my face. “It’s a Luxembourgish thing. I asked her for them. Anyway, she intervened. So by some miracle, it worked, but needless to say, I still can’t rotate that arm all the way,” he said, and oh. He was going to show me because of course he was, pulling up the sleeve of his shirt to show me the long, deep, jagged surgical scar snaking around his shoulder. “After that, they sent me to one of those discount auctions, hoping to make back some of what they spent on me, which wasn’t much. That’s when he came in. We were all standing there in pens, and instead of looking in our mouths or feeling up our junk, he walked right down the line and started quizzing all of us. We all thought he was crazy, but he knew what he was doing. Looking for a diamond in the rough. I must have passed the test. He took me to Heidelberg, had the hospital there stitch me up properly, and six months later, I was reading Shakespeare.”

“Six months ?”

“I know. I didn’t even think I could do it that fast, but it turns out anyone can, assuming you just never had the opportunity and don’t have some learning disability. Eventually, he made me take all these tests, including this aptitude test—one that they give to students here. I forget what it’s called.”

I threw out the name.

“That’s the one. I scored in the ninety-ninth percentile. Of course, to send it in, you can’t put a number in the ‘name’ field. He had to make up a fake name for me.”

“What was it?”

He laughed. “Nice try.”

“But I don’t have anything to call you.”

“Not my problem.”

It seemed odd that this should be the first time this particular issue had bothered me, but except for a nanny we’d had for a year or so when I was a kid, I’d never interacted closely enough with a slave to care . Not that some fake name he’d only used once would be better, but it would be something—and illegal. Slaves were kept nameless for a very good reason.

I just wished I knew what it was.

“Look, you have to admit, he gave you an incredible gift,” I remarked.

“Some gift. I probably dragged his drunk ass home from every bar in Heidelberg at least once. I practically wrote his last paper myself—and got it published—when he was too wasted to even get out of bed. Not to mention, he used to develop explosives for the military, and he’d take me to the testing range and make me light the fuse.”

I gasped. “You could have been killed!”

“Better me than him, was his logic.”

“Well, fuck him, then. But in the long run, it could only be a good thing, right? Somebody educated you. Educated slaves are worth?—”

“It could only increase my market value, right?” he finished, and my heart dropped.

Idiot girl. He was a person, not a fixer-upper house. And anyway, no matter what amount of money exchanged hands for him, it’s not as if he would be seeing any of it.

“You’re right, though. It’s the only reason my master did it. To increase his profit margin. He didn’t give a shit about me. Only what I could do for him.”

“But still,” I said, persisting against my better judgment. “He gave you?—”

“He gave me this,” he said, nodding with contempt at the scarred skin crawling over his forearms and almost up to his shoulders. “It’s the only thing I have to show for the thousands of hours he spent teaching me. I would have been better off in the fields where he found me.”

“Don’t say that.” He’d be dead , for one thing.

“It’s true. What, am I going to get a scholarship? Go to university? Win the Nobel Prize?”

“But—”

There was a storm cloud forming in his amber-gold eyes. “You’re going to argue with me about this? I couldn’t even—” He turned away suddenly.

“What?”

“Nothing.” His eyes flashed again. I’d seen them flash before, but not like this. With pain, yes, but it was beyond pain. It was something I couldn’t ever begin to fathom. Something I wasn’t equipped to fathom because nobody had ever thought I’d need to be equipped.

And in its face, there was nothing to say, so I stared intensely down at the page of the notebook in front of me as if written in it were the most fascinating story I’d ever read.

I’d done nothing but study for the past year, but I’d never felt more ignorant.

I should ask him, I knew. He wasn’t allowed to lie to me or dodge the truth. If I demanded to know his entire history, from the day he was born to this exact second, he would be required to tell me. And good God, did I want to know all of it. I was in.

“You can tell me, you know,” I said into the pages. Then I looked back over at him, embarrassed, expecting him to have turned away for good, fed up with my ignorance and nosiness and just ready to move on. To my shock, he was staring back at me, those brilliant eyes a mix of confusion and wonder, like I’d just said the last thing in the world he’d expected to hear.

And all at once, it terrified me. The silence, our closeness, the unspoken everything . Our hands, resting on the desk, nearly touching, and if he’d been anything other than what he was, I might have already reached out to. To offer the comfort he so badly deserved and seemed, astonishingly, to have never been offered. It was just an inch between us, only an inch, and I could know exactly what those calloused fingers would feel like under my touch.

He followed my gaze, noticing exactly where I was looking—and very likely what I was thinking. Ah, fuck. I swiftly hid my hands under the desk, and he turned around, staring at the sunburst-shaped wall clock.

“It’s getting late,” he said, changing the subject, then turned back to me with a smirk. “Shouldn’t you be cleaning?”

I groaned, having forgotten about that part of the deal.

“Look, I’ll make it easy for you,” he said, rising from the chair. “I’ll vacuum, dust, empty the wastebaskets, and make the bed out here while you do the bathroom.”

“But I don’t?—”

“Slow learner, I said I’d show you.”

I sighed. Frankly, I’d rather keep doing o-chem, if it was all the same. But he wasn’t about to let me back out of the deal.

I didn’t do a half-bad job, if I did say so myself. Of course I accidentally spilled bleach all over the tile and had to mop that up before I could even get to the shower or the mirror. By the time the vacuum stopped in the other room, I was ready to drop, and I’d only been cleaning for fifteen minutes.

He spent three years toiling in the fields, you big baby.

“Not bad for a first try,” he said when he popped his head in and glimpsed the sparkling bathroom tile, mirror, and tub. He began gathering up the supplies and replacing them in the mop bucket. “Just think, next time we’ll have you doing something crazy like putting your own dishes in the sink.”

Well, it was official: story time was over. It was going to be snark from here on out. But before I could say anything, the intercom buzzed.

“Excuse me, miss.” It was the housekeeper, clearing her throat ever-so-politely. “It’s fifteen minutes past the time when I would have needed all the outdoor furniture cleaned off and rearranged, the terrace swept, the table set?—”

I took my finger off the button. “It’s for you,” I said to him with a smirk.

As soon as he’d left, I slammed the door, sat down, buried my face in my pillow, and screamed. Then I got up, went to my computer, and typed “slave welfare” into the search bar.

It was time to start my paper.

HIM

Getting what I’d come for had been the easy part.

First, distracting Louisa with a cunning bit of wit while subtly directing my eyes to her laptop password, then coaxing her out of the room and running a quick internet search to discover that the Salt River Boulevard address was a warehouse bought two years ago by Langer Enterprises with the intention of turning it into a lab/manufacturing plant for Project White Cedar—some kind of “revolutionary” thirty million-dollar biotechnology that Langer was assuring investors would disrupt the slavery industry. Learning that last year, the property had been transferred into Keith Wainwright-Phillips’s name. Even getting the printout—a last-minute stroke of genius to use the vacuum cleaner to disguise the noise—hadn’t been hard. And even though I got affectionately whacked with a wooden spoon by the housekeeper when I arrived late for my usual bullshit evening chores, she still let me polish off some leftover banana pudding, so she couldn’t have been that upset.

No, I could have done all that with my eyes closed—and had, many times in my past.

Louisa. She was hard. Actually, so was I, but in an entirely different way.

Damn her for knowing exactly where to place those tiny little moles. Besides the one on her cheek, she had one centered perfectly above her left tit, and if that weren’t bad enough, the air conditioning kept making her nipples poke out of that tight little camisole she had on. And then she had the audacity to top it all off with that pile of curly hair she kept nervously running her delicate, manicured little fingers through. I loved them there, of course, but I wanted them somewhere else.

She had to know what she was doing, right? She couldn’t be that innocent. Or maybe she was. Maybe she genuinely had no fucking clue that those hands in her hair were the cherry on top of a giant ice cream sundae behind double-paned glass—one my starving self wanted to smash open, grab, throw down on the bed, and give the orgasm of a lifetime.

But to my dismayed surprise—and my dick’s—that wasn’t even what I was thinking about the most. What I was thinking about the most—and what I wanted to think about the least—was how she had listened.

I hadn’t meant to talk. I hadn’t meant to bring those years up at all. Usually, I pushed them down into the far, far reaches of my psyche, where they couldn’t crop up at inopportune moments and make me want to burn things or collapse into a broken heap on the floor. Yes, she’d said some ignorant, spoiled, artless things. Things that made me want to stop talking because she didn’t deserve to hear them, and that she wouldn’t understand if I told her, and that I wouldn’t be so stupid as to imagine for a second that she’d care about. Things that reminded me that she had no reason to be different from all the other free women of my past who had held my fate in their manicured hands—a sweet, cuddly pet they could feed, tease, play with, and kill with one word the second I acted up.

But I’d kept talking. Because she wasn’t feeding, teasing, or playing. She was still . All except for her huge gray eyes, wide not with pity but with horror. As if what had happened to me actually mattered to her, when sometimes it didn’t even matter to me . I was just a slave, after all, and if slaves could feel, we wouldn’t get treated like this.

Right.

It was almost enough to make me want to tell her the whole story. Almost.

Not to mention, I’d bet that hand on the desk wouldn’t have felt anything like a slave girl’s hand.

Okay. Stop right there. That’s it. Abort the mission. I was done. Finished. Stage One had been achieved, right? I was there to use her, and I’d used her. It had taken all my boldness, all my cunning and skill, but I’d used her. And now it was time to throw her away.

But. What if I kept using her and just didn’t?—

No, you dumbfuck. Not only would she catch on—because she was fucking smart, definitely not in chemistry, but in other ways—but the more I went back, the more tempted I’d be by the information at my fingertips, information that could help me find my sister, and the greater the risk of getting caught. A slave found to be plotting against his master would be flogged and sold, if not to the mines then somewhere just as bad. But whatever beating I got couldn’t be worse than the beating I was already giving myself for having gotten too caught up in this whole tutoring debacle and nearly forgetting what it was I had actually come here to do.

And yet, the next day, here I was climbing the stairs. Here I was with my hand on the knob. Here I was waiting for the door to open.

She was wearing a sundress today.

HER

Louisa Wainwright-Phillips

Slavery Studies 101 Section 2

Balancing Necessity and Compassion: Enhancing Slave Welfare Legislation in the NNAU

While it is an established fact that the institution of slavery is necessary for the functioning of the society and economy of the New North American Union, it is also becoming increasingly evident that laws intended to safeguard the welfare of slaves are few and laxly enforced. The existing legislation, when properly applied, can indeed provide a measure of care for slaves. However, more needs to be done to ensure these laws are followed and to introduce additional measures that genuinely protect the well-being of slaves within the system …

I collapsed like a corpse into bed after drafting my paper, working on autopilot, knowing that if I stopped for even a second to reflect on what had just happened, I’d have no hope of accomplishing anything ever again.

I was ninety percent convinced he wouldn’t come back.

Actually, I was at least half-convinced that the whole afternoon had been a dream. It was only when I pulled back a leaf of my notebook the following morning and glimpsed the strange, spiky, foreign male handwriting left on my study notes—and felt my heart do somersaults when I did—that convinced me it hadn’t been a dream.

But when three rolled around, I couldn’t pretend a part of me wasn’t relieved he hadn’t shown. Sure, it was just tutoring. But in actuality, it was a runaway train careening straight off a cliff. I knew it. Did he know it? And why was I even thinking about whether he knew it? For the last time, he wasn’t supposed to know anything, and I wasn’t supposed to care.

And this was exactly why I was in such deep fucking trouble.

But that didn’t mean I hadn’t still spent twenty minutes staring into my closet just in case , only to come up with nothing more inspired than a yellow sundress. Then again, none of the “bold fall fashion trends” I’d seen in the magazines that year seemed appropriate for this particular situation.

When the knock came, I toppled over the desk chair in shock. But when I opened the door to find him leaning patiently on the frame, he gave me a knowing smile, polite enough not to ask about the noise.

He kept coming.

If the housekeeper—or even worse, my parents—had grown suspicious about why he and the maid had swapped cleaning duties, they hadn’t spoken up. Most likely, nobody cared as long as the work was getting done. In reality, he and I always split the cleaning, and to my amazement, I was actually kind of enjoying it. I knew it was absurd, but even graduating with a near-perfect GPA and being honored for Best Hair in the senior yearbook hadn’t engendered the same kind of absurd pride as having scrubbed my own toilet spotless.

The tutoring was the real gauntlet I was running.

As my midterm approached, he insisted we couldn’t waste a second getting down to business, and I agreed, even though there was nothing I’d like better than to waste many seconds on him—to ask more, to know more. I just wanted more . But he seemingly had no more interest in telling me—not surprising, given that my responses the first time had been so stupid and clumsy it was a miracle he’d ever come back.

But he did come back, to drill me over and over again on substitutions and eliminations and rearrangements so ruthlessly and precisely that I sometimes forgot he’d been awake for ten hours already. He was exacting, he was strict, he was simply unfair . What had that professor done to him, anyway?

I looked down at his hands. Oh.

“You’re a sadist,” I sputtered, throwing my pencil down the fifth time I’d got a problem correct, and he made me walk him back through the steps and explain why it was correct. And they were always the hardest problems, too—ones he should be congratulating me for solving, not busying himself finding new ways to torture me with.

Exasperating, infuriating, impossible boy.

“What?” He flashed me an innocent smirk. “This isn’t pain. It’s fun.”

“Yeah, for you ,” I burst out. “That’s the goddamn definition of a sadist.”

“Hey, I promise, when we’re done here, you’re not only going to be able to do o-chem, you’re going to like it.”

“Impossible.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Wanna bet?”

“What are the stakes?”

“Doesn’t matter.” He shook his head, laughed, and slyly turned back to the textbook. “I already won.”

The nerve . I would have whacked him on the arm, but with him, it wouldn’t be a whack on the arm. It would be a touch, it would be forbidden, and it would mean something. So I didn’t.

Still, amid this body-and-soul torture, I progressed, which was frankly remarkable given that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from him —his shimmering forelock of hair flipped carelessly over to one side, his veined biceps under his thin, always-clinging T-shirts; his raw, rough, scarred but somehow still inexplicably perfect hand curled around my expensive pens; his body heat radiating inches away from me; him, him, him —for more than a few seconds at a time to even remember where we were, or what we were, or that every second we were together felt like the second I might decide to throw my life away forever. And yes, somehow, amid it all, I was learning o-chem.

Miraculous boy.

On Thursday, though—just before I was about to open my desk drawer to suggest we share something I really, really shouldn’t have bought—he became human again.

He yawned. Then he yawned again, and his long eyelashes started to cast even longer shadows on his face. Then it was all yawns. He was trying to stay alert, I could tell, but I was irritated. Seriously, how could he be tired this early? My mind and body still felt completely awake and abuzz because of course they did. Look what I was sitting across from.

But he couldn’t shake it. It was dragging him down like an invisible tide.

“How much sleep did you get last night?” I bit my lip, thinking of Erica Muller’s lecture from a few weeks ago, about how much sleep slaves were supposed to get versus how much they actually got. But surely that didn’t apply to?—

“Let’s see,” he said thoughtfully, dropping the pencil and leaning back in the chair. Story time again. “My day started at five, where I was told I had to help the gardener clear and chop up fallen tree branches that blew in from the neighbor’s yard, followed by the valet informing me that your dad had decided that all three of his cars needed washing, waxing, and buffing. By then it was almost dinner, which ended up being late because the valve in the dishwasher was fucked and nobody noticed, so the maid and I had to spend an hour mopping water off the kitchen and pantry floor before it soaked into the cabinets and got mold everywhere. And then I was told to repair it, which required ordering parts from the hardware store, but they sent the wrong ones, so I have to wait and work on that again today. And that’s all on top of my regular duties, which I can’t go to bed without finishing, so I didn’t get started on them until four and finished at around two.” As if on cue, he yawned again, body unfurling in the wicker chair, stretching one long, sculpted arm over his head. Fuck, I hated when he did that because of course it made the hem of his T-shirt rise minutely to reveal a tiny sliver of those abs . Those abs I’d give a kidney to see in all their glory. So by hate , I meant love , naturally. “So, three hours?”

“But the law states that you’re supposed to get at least four hours a night,” I protested. “Not to mention, under New European law, you shouldn’t have been sold for farm labor at that age, either. I’ve been researching this for my term paper, where I talk about closing the loopholes and adding more government oversight. If we had just done that, your life could have been?—”

I clamped down on my lip. When I saw how he was looking at me, I couldn’t do much else.

“No, keep going,” he said. “I defer to the expert.”

“Oops,” I said in a tiny voice. “Sorry.” I wanted to crumple myself up and throw myself in the wastebasket.

He was still smiling a little, thank fuck. Maybe the biggest miracle in all of this was that he didn’t completely fucking hate me. “Oh,” he said. “One more thing: I’m behind schedule again today.”

I slumped in my chair. “Because of being here?”

“Yeah.”

I buried my face in my hands.

“Which is the highlight of my day, of course.”

Like an idiot, I blushed inwardly. “Really?”

“Well, yeah. It’s the only time all day I get to use the furniture.”

He was joking. But also not.

“Take a nap,” I said resolutely. “In my bed. Right now.”

“Under the covers?” he asked, arching an eyebrow.

I swallowed. “If you want.”

His reply wasn’t exactly the standard slave line when invited to take liberties: Oh, miss, that wouldn’t be proper, blah, blah, blah.

“Damn, I thought you’d never ask,” he said, pulled back the down comforter, tossed aside Pillow Mountain, and before my eyes, arrayed his rather large, rather long, rather exquisitely sculpted body on the bed in its place, practically purring. Noticing me staring, he patted the space next to him slyly. “Room for two.”

“In your dreams,” I said as if the entire inner workings of my body hadn’t suddenly erupted like a fire hydrant just thinking about that. Clearly, this was a terrible idea. He wasn’t supposed to be allowed on any furniture, let alone my bed . He was also, I reminded myself, a person, not a dog. Anyway, there was no changing my mind now.

“No one comes up here this time of day except the maid, and we’re already doing her job,” I said, rising and moving toward the door.

He went rigid, just for a split-second, and I knew I wasn’t the only one who had suddenly remembered where we were and what we were, which was as far as it was possible to get from two ordinary kids shamelessly flirting while pretending not to.

“I’ll keep the door open a crack and watch, just in case. And wake you up in plenty of time,” I reassured him, suddenly convinced that the worst thing that could ever happen would be him deciding this was a terrible idea, even though I already had.

“You won’t have to,” he said matter-of-factly, his sanguinity regained. “I’ve got an internal alarm like you wouldn’t believe.”

“I always wished I had one of those.”

“Spend three years getting kicked awake and you would.”

Fuck. Like by now, I couldn’t have guessed that.

He yawned again, and I watched that body relax and sink into the bed, muscle by gorgeous muscle untensing in turn. “Hey, I could get used to this,” he said with another yawn.

“Don’t,” I said immediately. “This is a one-time offer.”

“If you say so,” he said with a half-smile, raising one arm over his head casually to rest on my favorite furry pink throw pillow. A small sigh escaped his lips as if this perfectly normal bed were some kind of luxury spa treatment. Then again, I’d never even spared a thought for the kinds of beds the slaves slept on.

“What do they make these sheets out of?” he asked.

Beds very unlike mine, evidently. “Nine-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton,” I said as I came back toward the bed.

He shook his head in bemusement. “I have no idea what that means.”

“So, Albert Einstein, there is something you don’t know. It means it’s expensive.”

His eyes flicked back mischievously. “Maybe you should charge me by the hour.”

I grabbed a pillow from the floor and threw it at him, prompting his laughter. “Half an hour is all you’re getting. And you couldn’t even afford that.”

I sat back down. I’d let him settle down without me looking. No one enjoyed being stared at going to sleep, after all. Instead, I opened some dumb email from a clothing retailer promoting white skinny jeans and reread it ten times, and when I looked back some time later, his eyes were closed, his long, light lashes casting shadows on his milky skin, his lips slightly parted. He could have been pretending, but I didn’t think so. His breathing was even. Peaceful.

And it only made me that much more curious. As silently as I could, I wheeled my desk chair closer.

A shaft of afternoon sunlight from my open window seemed to bless him uniquely, playing with his golden hair. It was the same light that made his metal bracelet shine, held as it was slightly over his head, out of the covers. The one bearing his number, the one that thanks to Erica Muller, I knew would have been assigned to him at birth and was the closest thing he had ever had to an official name.

Stalker was the word going through my head as, my heart rate picking up, I returned to my desk and quickly pulled up the website for the international slave registration database. I hesitated for a second before rapidly typing in the number from his bracelet and hitting “return.” I closed my eyes and held my breath as the page loaded. Although I’d long known the site existed, I’d never been even remotely curious enough about a slave to look one up. But right now, my very fingers were buzzing with anticipation about what I might find.

And all of a sudden, there he was: 773496S6. My 77349S6: nineteen, male, blond, literate, right-handed, and born into slavery in Luxembourg City.

The front photo was older, since he looked noticeably younger, though every inch as stunningly gorgeous—more so in the photo’s stark relief, which highlighted his high cheekbones and exquisite jawline. God, this boy could be a fucking aristocrat if he hadn’t been a slave. Hell, maybe he was—European nobility had fallen victim to the hard times, same as everybody else. His ancestor might well have been one of them. Bolstering that theory was his expression, which, at least in this photo, was one of boredom and superiority, as if he’d had infinitely better things to do that day. And below the headshots were?—

Shit. His abs. I lowered my laptop screen, stealthily glancing behind me. But he didn’t stir.

Still, I thought it safer to click away—for now. But I sure had a date with them later.

However, I even forgot all about that when I saw the photo of his back. Just a puckered roadmap of destruction and pain—three years in the fields had left barely an inch left untouched by the whip. Feeling ill, I clicked away from that photo, too, not daring to glance again at the peaceful, angelic figure sleeping behind me. I was starting to regret logging on, though I couldn’t stop now.

Three former owners. First, a private home in Luxembourg, where he’d lived until he was twelve. After that, I couldn’t make much sense of things. It said “remanded to the government,” then something about an auction. Then he’d been leased to something called Biofields SA and sent to Romania—the factory farm.

I couldn’t forget that photo of his back. According to Erica Muller, farms that used slaves were barely a step up from the mines. If he’d spent three years at one of them and survived, he was stronger than I could possibly imagine—and not just physically.

But now I was angry . And as weird as it seemed, ashamed of my own kind. How the hell could a family who had owned and raised him since birth sell him to a place like that? Didn’t they have any affection toward him at all? He’d been a child . Surely my parents would never dream of being that cruel toward?—

But they had. At least, my grandparents had. They’d sold off the housekeeper’s children right before my older brother was born— because he was born. And I’d never paused for even a second to think about how the woman must have grieved.

The same way my own parents must have grieved when Ethan disappeared.

Ethan. Scottsdale’s favorite golden retriever. Tattooed, chestnut-curled, golf-betting, guitar-riffing party boy. A complete and total fuckup in the best possible way—or, when it came to my father, the worst. As hard as Daddy rode him to achieve, he couldn’t solve Ethan’s dyslexia or ADHD, and it was no surprise when he went the opposite way, turning to drugs and ultimately doing two stints in rehab in the most expensive facility in the union. Both times, he’d relapsed and after a few months, disappeared. The first time, he came back. The second time, he didn’t.

We last heard from him two Decembers ago, when he’d called to ask for money. My father had refused, of course, while my mother cried silently into her triple appletini. He was now off the grid, off the radar, out of our lives unless and until he came back clean.

And that was why my father had given up and let our fortune slip away, and why my mother drank—because losing a family member felt like a thousand knives stabbing you all over your body every second of the day.

I knew because I’d felt it, too.

And so the housekeeper must have, times two. All while getting up at five every morning to cook breakfast, clean up after me and my brother’s stupid messes, and attend to our petty cares.

They aren’t like us, my father had reassured me once, when he’d sold my favorite slave, a playful teenage nanny who for a year or so had taken over caring for Ethan and me while the housekeeper attended culinary training. I’d called her Cupcake because she was always hiding them around the house for us, and even though Daddy subscribed to the theory that slaves shouldn’t have names, even demeaning ones, he hadn’t objected.

Then she was gone. They get over it.

How?

And what about the kids ? Slave children were legally treated the same as adults in almost every way, I’d also been shocked to learn in class. If the slave boy— my slave boy—had been sold to the farm at thirteen, if Erica Muller could be believed, he would have worked twelve-hour days, been fed barely more than gruel and water, and given zero medical attention. And shackles, chains, beatings, and floggings to keep him in line—and worse punishments, ones that required a trigger warning in class. Having heard the remarks that came out of his mouth, I knew he would not have been spared them. Overseers weren’t as easily charmed as farmers’ wives.

At fifteen, blessedly—or not-so-blessedly, to hear him tell it—he’d been sold to Professor von Esch in Heidelberg. I knew the story after that, more or less. My father’s name was at the end of the list of owners, but he hadn’t gotten around to adding much to the file.

I scrolled down to the Known Family section, heart rate picking up.

He had one living family member: a sister. Clicking on the sister’s number brought me to another page, where a beautiful blond seventeen-year-old girl—same sun-bleached hair, worn in a pixie bob around her heart-shaped face, and same amber-gold eyes, bigger and with longer lashes—greeted me. But unlike her brother, she didn’t look bored. More like curious, dreamy, surprised, sad—maybe even a little mischievous. She had two former owners, the first one the same as the boy’s, then a riding school in Belgium. But the page said location unknown , and there it stopped.

For both: mother deceased, father unknown.

Hands trembling, I opened my desk drawer again to look at the package of Luxembourgish pralines I’d ordered from a specialty website. In the face of all I’d just seen, they seemed inadequate. Lame, almost. But still. Maybe they’d make him smile. And his smiles were?—

Well. When he woke up, I’d tell him I’d just happened to find them at a store near campus. Yeah, that was it. Then we’d share them. Perfect. Normal. Not obsessive in the least.

And then I’d rewrite my paper again.

Mind made up, I clicked back to the boy’s page, where his owners, dating back to his childhood, had written comments. Reviews, really.

Positives: Bright, attractive, charming, sensitive, curious …

Negatives: Defiant, mouthy, willful, manipulative, moody, lazy …

I hid a smile. Sounded about right.

Then I reached the very bottom, under the heading Warnings.

DANGEROUS: Documented violent attack on an owner

A stirring from the bed behind me. Immediately, I slammed the laptop shut. I spun my chair around, trying to look casual.

“Hey,” he said. “What were you doing?”

“Nothing,” I replied quickly. “Homework.”

He smiled. “You’re a shit liar.”

Yep, there was that signature charm. Fuck it all. It was too good to be true. I knew it. I knew it.

“No, really, what?” he pressed.

“Ordering a ‘live, laugh, love’ sign for over the desk,” I muttered through gritted teeth. “Look, it doesn’t matter, okay?”

“Come on, you can tell me.”

He slid off the bed and came to my side innocently. No, he wasn’t a dog, but right now—in contrast to what I’d just seen—he was like a puppy with a bone. Ears up, tail wagging. There was another “negative”: stubborn.

“I really do have homework to do, and I think you’re due downstairs.” I was dying inside as I said it, but it had to be said.

“What?” He looked bewildered, and I didn’t blame him.

I thought once more of the pralines in the drawer.

“But we—” he began.

“Go.” I clenched my jaw harder, turning my back, staring intently at the tiny cactus in the pink ceramic pot on my desk like it was the most fascinating thing I’d ever seen. “It’s an order.”

He followed it.