17. Chapter 17
17
HER
I lay motionless on the bed as I had for most of the day and night. I was vaguely aware of the sun rising and setting and rising again, that the week had begun, and that I should be getting up, getting dressed, and going to class. Ha. It was as if my body refused to respond to normal stimuli, just as it unconsciously refused to shower or remove the clothes I’d worn for two days, as if even the last things I’d worn in his presence were a memory worth keeping. The housekeeper rotated in and out, her offerings and admonitions largely ignored. But at some point, as I knew it would, the door opened and it wasn’t the housekeeper. And when it finally did, I squeezed my eyes shut. My ears. My mind.
“This is me looking out for you, Loulou. I know it doesn’t feel like it.”
“You know nothing,” I spat into my pillow.
“Don’t you understand? They were going to the police about you, and even if I could find the money to keep you off the auction block, which is no guarantee, they threatened to sue. A court case would destroy you publicly,” my father said. “They have no compassion, no remorse.”
“But they can’t prove that I did anything.”
“They can prove enough. And worse, they can suggest it. Don’t you see? It’s not about what you did or didn’t do. It’s what they can convince people you did. You could lose everything I know you’ve worked so hard for. I know the kinds of things they would say about you, sweetheart. Horrific, vile, disgusting things that would devastate you and devastate me to hear them.”
“They could take all your money,” I said, my voice flat. “That’s all you care about. It isn’t about me at all.”
“Being homeless and destitute with no way to support yourself? That isn’t about you?”
I could hear him coming closer.
“Those Egyptian cotton sheets you’ve been lying on for two days didn’t fall off a truck, Loulou. That computer, those clothes, that roof over your head—nothing comes cheap in this life. I thought I taught you better than that. Then again, I thought I taught you better than—” He stopped himself before he crossed the Rubicon. “Than lying to me. Than going behind my back, to do things the world would never forgive you for.”
“Things they’d never forgive me for, or things they’d never forgive you for?” I asked him coldly.
That seemed to take him aback, and for the first time, I turned my head, still resting on the pillow, to gaze at him. I was calm, clear-visioned, though my eyes still felt heavy and leaden with tears, shed and unshed.
He looked exhausted, which was no surprise. But more than that, he looked … guilty? Devastated? Anxious? Confused? Like somebody who might listen to what I had to say, finally?
For the first time in a long while, I sat up. “He did it for me, Daddy.”
“Loulou—” He fumbled for words.
“To protect me. I know it, and deep down, you know it. So don’t you dare stand there and pretend you don’t.”
Something flickered like a lit match behind his eyes and then was gone.
“It doesn’t matter why he did it, Loulou. He’s a slave, so all that matters to the law is that he did it. And this isn’t about him. This is about you and my doing what’s best for you.”
“You don’t know what’s best for me!” I shouted, leaping up from the bed. “Did you ever even bother to ask me what I want? No, you didn’t. You never ask me what I want! Because if it isn’t a fucking prom dress or diamond earrings or a trip to St. Barts, you don’t care what I want! You just think it’s the same thing you want! Well, it isn’t!”
“Loulou, you’re only eighteen. I don’t think you know what you want, and I don’t think you can begin to comprehend what you’re up against. Now I’m asking you to please appreciate that I’ve been in this world thirty years longer than you have and that I know how it works.”
“The only reason it works like this is because you allow it.” My voice was icy, precise.
“Loulou, if you’d just listen—”
“No, Daddy. No. Listen to me.” My heart was racing, the adrenaline coursing now. I’d never spoken to my father like this, ever. I’d never had to. We’d always seen eye to eye, mostly. The good daughter and her doting father. Simple, and now not. “A man risked everything to protect me, your only daughter, and in return, you’ve condemned him to torture and death. No, don’t delude yourself. You aren’t doing this for me. I don’t need it. I don’t need anything from you. He taught me—well, he taught me so many things, but above all, he taught me that I’m stronger than you think. And that I can handle so much more than anyone thinks. And whatever I have to endure—imprisonment, slavery, the worst slander and disgrace, no matter how awful, how vile—isn’t worth a good man’s life.” My voice was calm, crystalline, almost oracular in its precision. “You’re wrong, Daddy. It may take a hundred years, or it may take a thousand, but when the coming generations look back on us, you’re the one who won’t be forgiven. Not by the world and certainly never by me.”
I’d grown up without religion, like most people these days, but I’d read the Bible as I eagerly read everything. And I had been not only astonished to find that I believed in God after all—not that God, per se, but a god—but that there were things in that book that were beautiful, things that people had taken comfort in for millennia for good reason, and that shouldn’t have ever been abandoned or lost. And I thought of it now, of the Book of Isaiah, which talked of wolves lying down with lambs, babies, and snakes sleeping peacefully beside each other, and of a little child who shall lead them. At the time, I could almost believe all of it, except for that. The child I had been couldn’t imagine leading. Wanting for nothing, there was nothing and no one to lead, no cause to fight for.
“Loulou.” He cleared his throat.
I turned away. “Leave me alone.”
“I didn’t.” The words, vague as they were, stopped me cold.
“You didn’t what?” I whipped my head back.
“I couldn’t—” He took a deep breath and I waited, heart hammering. “I didn’t send him to the mines.”
My pulse pounded in my ears. Auctioned, then. To a farm? A factory? A testing lab? Some other abominable house of horrors? “Then is he—”
My father’s face had changed. Before, he’d been exhausted, a slumped, spent shell of a man. Now he looked pained; his face contorted as if this admission felt just short of a cardiac event. “I haven’t auctioned him, either. I’ve sent him—somewhere where he won’t be hurt. And Loulou?” He sighed. “I don’t expect you to ever forgive me.” He turned to go.
And suddenly, my body reawakened. Awash with the sense of—what was it? Time. Time. Time renewed; time regained. I sank into the mattress, the wave of relief that crashed over me pulling me under like the strongest tides.
Because I wasn’t a child anymore. I wasn’t helpless. And leading wasn’t even half of what I was planning to do.
“Oh, Daddy, I—”
“That’s enough.” He managed to force some customary sternness back into his voice. And somehow, that was comforting, too. “I’ve already told you more than you should know. This is the last we’ll ever discuss this. Is that clear?”
I nodded, blinking at my father. My tears of sorrow had retreated just long enough to reappear as tears of relief. Nothing more needed to be discussed. Because for today, it was enough to know that neither of my men was lost. Not yet.
HIM
On my second night at Langer’s, I met the girls.
They were both gorgeous, though far apart in age. The first was no older than me and probably younger, with tawny skin and long black hair, athletic, almost tomboyish, with a loud, merry laugh. The second was older, maybe even in her thirties, though her face had a timeless, ethereal quality. She had pale skin, light blue eyes, and short, wispy, ash-blond hair that created a halo effect around her face. The first wore a tiny floral bikini; the second wore a white one-piece with gold accents and a plunging neckline that showed off the sides of her tits in a way that attracted every eye in the room but somehow managed to still look classy.
These girls moved playfully around Langer’s thirtieth-floor rooftop hot tub like baby otters, the neon lights of the rooftop terrace and the surrounding towers lighting up their bodies in purple and orange and white. They made light, intelligent conversation. They laughed. They joked. They were not conditioned or submissive. They were not brainwashed. They wore actual jewelry, not a slave bracelet in sight. But still, something was wrong.
And worst of all, I was going to be forced to try to figure out what it was after three glasses of top-shelf bourbon, water jets massaging my aching body, a veritable buffet of prescription pain pills courtesy of Langer’s private physician, and yet another cocktail in my hand.
“I knew you secretly liked the finer things,” Langer had said earlier as he handed me the glass.
“Oh, it was never a secret,” I said, to Langer’s approving nod.
The problem was, I’d now wasted forty-eight hours on the finer things, and while I wasn’t going to pretend I didn’t prefer them to being chained up in a storage room thinking I was about to be sent to my death, none of it had brought me closer to Maeve, who the prospect of finding was the only glimmer of hope amid the smoking, bloody wreckage of the last few days. Or helped me forget about the girl who would have to get up and go to class today as if nothing were wrong, to sit at her desk and open her o-chem book at the empty desk next to the empty chair, one that probably looked as much like a memory—or like a dream—to her as it felt like to me.
It all still applies. Nothing’s changed.
She was right, I supposed. Nothing had changed. Except for the fact that we were never going to see each other again.
There was virtually no chance she knew where I was. If her father was smart, he would tell her I’d been sold to the mines. If he was really smart, he would tell her there’d been a cave-in and I was already dead. Anything to lessen the chances she’d try to find me.
I wondered if she had found my message yet.
Across the hot tub, I locked eyes with the younger girl, who had been following my gaze. It stopped at her shoulder, where she wore a long, jagged scar, which she’d appeared to try to cover up with makeup the color of her tawny skin, most of which had now been washed away. She quickly turned. I felt my eyes glaze over as I collapsed into the not-unpleasant muddle of meds, liquor, and the rare privilege of being able to turn my mind off.
Forty-eight hours earlier, the owner of the city’s most coveted downtown penthouse condo found me bruised, bloodied, and drugged-up, standing slumped in front of the elevator like a package of misdirected goods. My first stop had been to “Mr. Langer’s personal physician” to get my wounds treated, and while the pain meds, steroid injection, and God knows what else the doctor had given me were verging on blissful, they were well on their way to knocking me flat on the floor.
Langer snapped his fingers in front of my eyes. “Holy shit, kid, anyone in there? Looks like Dr. Waxler sure gave you the good stuff. He always does.”
“Yes, and I’m ever so grateful for your kindness, sir,” I mumbled, staring at the floor.
“You can cut out that servile shit right now. I know you don’t mean a word of it.”
“Okay, then. Go fuck yourself.”
“That’s better.” Langer crossed his arms. “So what the fuck happened over there, anyway? I leave you alone and you get yourself almost killed defending your lady’s honor? Fucking hell. I thought you were supposed to be smart.”
“Yeah, I thought so, too, so I guess that means we’re both idiots.”
“Well, you look like complete shit, anyway, so I assume you’ll want to sleep it off before I give you the grand tour.” He glanced around the bare entryway, looking puzzled. “You don’t have any belongings or anything?”
I bristled. “For fuck’s sake, I am a belonging. You and I both know that’s the whole reason I’m here. Now if you don’t have any more stupid questions, can you please just throw me in whatever dank, rat-infested cellar you have ready for me and just let me sleep off these meds before you get started on whatever unspeakable torture you’ve got planned? Thanks.”
Langer gave me another bemused look. “Well, I hate to disappoint you, but this is a condo, so there is no dank cellar, and the exterminator I had in last week should have taken care of the rat infestation in your bedroom, but—”
“Hold on,” I cut him off. “I don’t understand.”
“What, about the rat infestation, or—”
“About anything!” I growled through my mental fog. “You don’t have to give me a bedroom. You don’t have to give me any of the shit you offered. I turned down the deal. Remember? I’m only here as a slave, so just fucking treat me like one. It’ll probably make both of our lives a lot easier.” The irony of trying to order someone to treat me like a slave wasn’t lost on me, but it didn’t matter at this point. My body was bone-tired, my brain fuzzy from the opioids, and both were firmly refusing to play any more of Langer’s bullshit mind games. Being ordered to scrub the floor might be a relief. At least menial chores never pretended to be anything other than what they were.
“Hey. Kid. Come inside, sit the fuck down—on the sofa, not the floor because apparently, we need to specify that now—and listen to me.”
I obeyed, and as zoned-out as I was, I couldn’t help but inhale a little as I stepped for the first time out of the alcove and into the massive two-story living room, which was mostly air, its floor-to-ceiling glass windows gazing imperiously down at the entire valley sprawled like a carpet in front of them, with those mountains, ever-unreachable, still winking on the horizon in a rosy haze. I collapsed onto the leather sofa, apathetically accepting that I wouldn’t be able to get out of it ever again. I wouldn’t look Langer in the eyes.
“When I told you I didn’t want or need a slave, I meant it, and nothing has happened in the past week to change my mind. Everything I offered still stands. I know you think I’m a lying, cheating, amoral scumbag, and you’re mostly right, but on this, I’m keeping my word. Are we clear?” he asked.
I nodded because what else could I do? If Langer was or wasn’t keeping his word, I’d find out soon enough.
After that, he showed me to my bedroom suite, which, besides featuring the same stunning floor-to-ceiling view, was of a size equaling spaces I’d only ever shared with ten other people. Through it all, Need to look for Maeve, kept running through my brain. But so far, all I’d been able to determine was that she wasn’t hidden in the shower, which was my next stop before I slept like a corpse in the bed for the next twelve hours, woke up with a start to face a flame-colored sunset hitting me in the face, took some more meds to quell the pain going off in my shoulder like an alarm, and, when I emerged from the bedroom, found a pile of packages deposited in the alcove. I got the suspicious feeling they were for me. In the kitchen, I found that Langer’s personal chef had arrived—the only personal chef in town, or probably the country, who wasn’t a slave—and was asking me what I wanted to eat.
“Uh.” I’d been too tired to even think about food for hours and hours, and I stared vacantly at the guy for a minute and a half before answering with the first thing that popped into my head, something I’d barely known about a few days ago. “Tacos?”
And that’s what I got.
A little later, Langer himself emerged from the bar area with a highball glass in his hand. “Well, that’s a little better, but you still look like a fucking bear attacked you,” he remarked, looking at me—still dazed, blinking, now well-fed but still wearing my torn-up and bloodied T-shirt and shorts—up and down. “I want you in the office at some point, and you can’t show up like that. I’ll send you shopping later, but for now, I took the liberty of having my personal shopper send over some stuff.”
“What? Like clothes?”
“What, would you rather it be a leash and collar? Yes, like clothes,” Langer said with an eye roll before making his way toward the door I assumed led to his study. Langer had a “personal” everything, it seemed, which allowed him to handle nothing himself while still orchestrating everything precisely. Oh, to be able to live like that. “In the meantime, I’ll be finishing up some work. But the girls are on their way.”
“The girls?”
He just smiled and disappeared.
Look around , a stupid voice in the back of my head told me. What the fuck was that going to accomplish? It wasn’t like I was going to find my sister tied up and gagged under Langer’s bed or something. Still, I managed to open up a few doors and poke around anyway. I’d need to know the layout of the place for the future, and it was something to do until I was lucid enough to figure out a more intelligent plan. Plus, I was curious.
It was also that curiosity that prompted me to cautiously approach the younger girl, who called herself Lemaya, in the kitchen as she cheerfully poured us drinks in the outdoor bar—bourbon for me (I’d never tried it before, but fuck, that stuff was good), champagne and raspberry liqueur for her. She explained that, for the time being, she worked for Langer’s research and development division.
Wait. Lemaya? I knew that name. Had Maeve mentioned it? Shit, I thought for the hundredth time, if only I still had her messages to refer to. Because my brain sure wasn’t any help right now.
“But I’m going to school to become a vet tech,” she was saying meanwhile. “For now, I’m helping Resi out with her research. They gave me a place to live and pay all my expenses, and once that pays off, the company is going to pay all my tuition, everything.”
“Oh yeah? What research? Drinking champagne in a rooftop penthouse?” I asked, trying to put her at ease with a smile. Thank God even on the meds, I could still do that. “If only that could be in all our job descriptions.”
She melted a little, giggling, and slapped me flirtatiously on the arm. “Well, it’s a perk, no doubt. She invites some of us here sometimes to hang out, and of course, for such a rich guy, Max is pretty chill. I like his vibes.” She shrugged as if to ask, any more questions?
Yes, one. “Resi?” Another name I’d been hoping to hear.
“She’s Max’s head of R and D,” she said. “We’re helping disrupt slavery. They need my help because—” She caught her tongue as if she were afraid she’d told me too much.
Good. That meant there was something to tell. And that she knew there was something to tell.
And all at once I knew who she was: the slave girl who had been teaching Maeve English. The one who had suddenly disappeared.
I looked her up and down as she swallowed, raising her chin a little defiantly as if daring me to say something. There were always signs for those of us who knew what to look for: scarring, lack of eye contact, referring to people as “sir” who clearly didn’t deserve it. She had the scars, at least. Of course, she hadn’t done any of the rest, but maybe she’d been told not to. Maybe she’d been living like a free person for a while. Maybe she was like Maeve and her owners didn’t want her but hadn’t freed her, and that was why Max was using her for the chip experiments. But if so, what was she doing here ? Max clearly wasn’t doing any research in this penthouse tonight, other than maybe an experimental bikini probe.
Before I could decide whether to risk blowing my cover and asking her more, the door to Langer’s study opened, and Lemaya’s hair whipped around dramatically as she returned to the hot tub with her drink, as if she were passing the torch to him.
I just stood near the bar, which was silent but for the ice popping in my glass. Fuck the pills. Without them, I could have figured out a way to ask her about Maeve without getting either of us in trouble. But maybe I could ask the blonde when the time was right.
“Your sister isn’t here,” said Langer.
I wished I were as good at sneaking up on people as this guy was. I turned. He was dressed for the hot tub, with a towel over his arm. Rapidly, I looked back toward where Lemaya had disappeared, sorry she hadn’t stuck around long enough to let me see the expression on her face when Max mentioned Maeve.
“What?”
“She isn’t here,” he repeated. “With Resi, I mean. I showed Resi her picture after you told me about her.”
“I didn’t tell you about her.” I didn’t think I had, anyway. I wouldn’t count on the reliability of my memory right now.
“You mentioned a freed girl named Maeve, and I pieced together the rest.” His eyes narrowed as if he were genuinely concerned about my sanity. “Remember, I told you to assume I know everything about you. Anyway, I’m sorry she’s missing, and I’ll see if there’s anything else I can do, but right now all I can tell you is that she isn’t with us.”
He’s lying , I thought immediately, because I always did. Maeve had named Resi in her messages. Whoever she was, wherever she was, she had to have Maeve somewhere. Even if it wasn’t with the rest of the girls.
“Come on, Max. What are you really doing over there with those girls?” I asked even as I realized I was showing my hand yet again. I knew I’d regret it as soon as the words left my mouth.
“Just like Lemaya said. Employing them.”
That sure wasn’t what Maeve had implied. Then again, there’d been a language barrier between her and the other girls, and she had mentioned something about being paid. Fuck. And that still didn’t explain why Langer said she wasn’t here. She had to be here. Because the alternative—that I’d come this far and cost myself this much for a dead end—was unthinkable.
“Look, the booze and pills have you loopy right now,” Langer said. “You’re not thinking clearly. I can tell just by looking into your eyes. Later this week, when I give you a tour of the office and the labs, you’ll see everything. And you’ll understand you have nothing to worry about.”
Nothing to worry about? As usual, I had one million things to worry about, but I couldn’t remember what half of them were right now. And my shoulder was practically screaming for those water jets.
Plus, there was still the blonde to ask about Maeve.
And the time to do it might be now because as soon as I got in the hot tub, she started running her angel-soft fingers up under the new turquoise board shorts I’d taken out of one of the packages, while my traitor dick reacted predictably. Over her shoulder, I could see that Langer had joined us on the other side of the tub with Lemaya, who must have decided she liked more than his vibes, given everywhere her hands and mouth were.
Employing them. How stupid did Langer think I was? It was easy to assume from her enthusiasm that she was doing it all by choice, but I knew better.
“You’re a million miles away, sweetie,” the blonde said gently. The fingers that grazed my jawline and tilted my face toward hers were surprisingly soft, even though they came alongside stiletto-shaped nails the hue of glazed vanilla. And so were the fingers that zeroed in, somehow, on exactly the place between my dick and balls that I would have liked a girl’s hand to be under the right circumstances—which these were anything but. “What are you thinking about? Or should I say, who are you thinking about?”
Something about the way she spoke made me think she already knew. Which was ridiculous. Wasn’t it? Fuck these drugs. I was so off my game, and I needed to get her goddamn hand off my junk. It wasn’t the first time a free woman had tried this kind of shit on me when she thought backs were turned. The problem was, sometimes they weren’t.
Lost in shitty memories and a dearth of good ideas, I knew she could probably feel my heart rate increasing even through the haze of the meds.
“Shh. It’s okay. I was a slave, too, a long time ago,” she whispered. Startled, I followed her hand as she pulled back one side of her white swimsuit, revealing not only part of her nipple but a trail of burn scars on her torso, long and flat, like a cattle prod or even a clothes iron, winding all the way down past her waist. Now that I looked closer, I saw it. Cosmetic surgery or makeup had dulled some of it, but there was no mistaking what it was. Looking across at the entwined figures of Langer and Lemaya, a similar sight greeted me. A real Michelangelo of pain , Max had called the late Gerhard Langer. Whatever else he was lying about, it seemed he hadn’t been lying about that .
What kind of topsy-turvy world had I fallen into where people with these kinds of scars ruled the goddamn universe from a thirtieth-floor penthouse? The one Langer was trying to create with Project White Cedar? I had a feeling I was going to find out.
“I take it you work for Resi, too?” I asked the blonde.
A weirdly joyful smile spread slowly over her face as she lifted her upper body out of the water, and it only took a second for me to realize my mistake.
“Tresa Hahn,” she said, pointing to herself girlishly. “So sorry I never introduced myself. Of course you never introduced yourself, either.” She giggled. “But I know who you are. There’s no mistaking that pretty face. You look just like your sister.”
My stunned reply was cut off, out of nowhere, by a pain as excruciating as any I’d ever felt as she sank all five of those glossy, pearly fingernails into my balls and wrenched them forward, jerking my whole body toward her. Tears leaked out of both eyes as I clamped down violently on my lip to bury my scream.
She pressed her forehead to mine, smoothing back my damp hair. “Oh, baby, I’m sorry,” she whispered as I silently mewled through each eternal second. “I hate making bad first impressions. But you need to stop asking questions.” She held me in her claws for one extra second before lazily releasing me, only to have my back hit like a brick against the tile edge of the tub, where I slumped, gasping. “If you don’t, remember this feeling because little sis is going to get something ten times worse.”