Never Broken (The Unchained #1)

Chapter 1

1

HER

I t was 2 a.m., and I yawned and stared at the little orange pill in my desk drawer—half dying to use it, half hating it was even there.

Here I was, heiress of a corporate empire, daughter of societal privilege, top of the Class of 2024 at the secondary school of the New North American Union elite. And I couldn’t even figure out a way to stay awake long enough to finish one goddamn chemistry chapter, let alone prevent myself from flunking out of college and—since my father couldn’t exactly help me anymore—losing my chance to become a doctor, build a life, and actually make a difference in the world. Or at least start figuring out how.

So here it was, decision time: either pop this pep pill down my throat or guzzle a macchiato.

The macchiato was looking like the winner. Fewer side effects, and I could order a slave to bring it up to my room.

However, here was my other thought: that the toilet was just a few short steps away in my en suite bathroom, and that to be safe, maybe the pill was better off there.

Before I could decide whether to flush the pill or hit the intercom to call a slave, my phone saved me. My friend Juliette was blowing it up. The smug little vibrations came one after another—first, some cartoonishly chiseled college guy grinning and guzzling a lager, then the obligatory selfie of her and him tossing ping-pong balls at each other and grinning like the drunk, horny idiots I wished to God I had the luxury of being right now.

But that wasn’t my world, much as I had once hoped it would be.

With a sigh, I stared at the phone, which was still buzzing obnoxiously. Saving me? Right. If anything belonged in the toilet —

Juliette

Where are u?? This mixer is lit

Louisa

Studying

It’s kind of the point of college, remember?

Maybe I’d feel better about spending all my time in college studying instead of partying if it had been the college I wanted . I’d wanted to go east, but the university here in Phoenix had offered me a better academic scholarship—one that at that point I not only wanted but needed. Plus, it had a good scholastic reputation, not to mention a handful of faculty that had so far managed to evade being fired or arrested for being radical enemies of the union. And it had been crowned one of the union’s top ten party schools. The best of all worlds, right?

Or, for someone who was currently missing out on all of it, the worst.

I huffed a long curl off my face, closed the drawer, flipped the phone upside down, and turned back to my organic chemistry book. Sometimes my fellow pre-meds seemed to proudly rack up all-night study sessions the way some girls racked up drunken hookups. It didn’t seem fair that after nearly a semester, I’d notched exactly zero of either . But as my eyelids drooped, I knew tonight would be no exception. Suddenly, pills and macchiatos and intercoms all seemed like too much work.

I slammed the book and rested my head on its cool, glossy cover. My long, thick, not-quite-brown curls were a bitch to care for most of the time, but they did offer an awfully good natural pillow. Even though I needed to take my contacts out, I actually allowed my eyelids to close for a split second.

Juliette

U there?

No . I sprang up at the vibration. My midterm was looming over me like a thunderhead, and I, who had gently breezed through secondary school, was barely scraping by with a D. If I didn’t pass, I could kiss my academic scholarship—and my dreams of ever getting the hell out of my parents’ house, let alone becoming a doctor—goodbye.

Louisa

Sorry, fell asleep for a second

Juliette

U need a pick-me-up, girl

I prescribe some Vitamin D

She sent another sly pic of a pair of distressed jeans that may have outlined a guy’s bulge if you squinted. Not like my mind wouldn’t have gone there anyway, even if it hadn’t.

In any case, that wasn’t on tonight’s menu. There wasn’t any good D within ten miles of our neighborhood unless you counted one of the well-shampooed corporate types that Daddy had had over for cocktails earlier in the evening to try to convince them that he was still relevant to the union’s corporate elite, even though he was unemployed and buried under an avalanche of debt. The suit had to be thirty at least, but perhaps the time had come to consider that I was, well, desperate.

And desperate to get out of this bland, depressing, financially nosediving snooze factory I currently called home, which required graduating, so maybe my pick-me-up would have to be some Vitamin B: Benzedrine. Impulsively, I opened the drawer again and picked up the pill, turning it over between my fingers. My classmate Corey, an engineering major and family friend on a never-ending quest to prove he had everything about college figured out—and to nail me—had slipped it to me after my last lecture. “Every guy in my fraternity uses it,” he’d whispered. “There’s no reason to suffer.”

It was only later when I’d looked up the brand name that I realized it was meth. He was offering me meth. I didn’t know what was worse: that he’d thought I’d consider taking it, or that I actually was .

I dropped the pill and slammed the drawer shut again. I’d rather suffer. The last thing we needed in the Wainwright-Phillips family was another addict: my mother and my brother, Ethan, wherever he’d disappeared to, had that taken care of, thank you very much. Instead, my mind drifted down to the kitchen and to the brand-new artisan espresso machine with twenty-seven different settings, the one Daddy had brought home last week, accompanied by a full-color booklet packed with arty, luscious photos of all the drinks you could make. Lattes, cappuccinos, Americanos … Daddy had explained every single one of them as he unboxed the machine, trying to coax a smile. “Only the best for my Loulou,” he’d said, nice enough not to add: Only the best, as long as it’s cheaper than letting your addiction to daily store-bought espressos keep draining what remains of the puny allowance that’s all I can afford to give you since your brother relapsed, your mom started drinking, and I went off the deep end and flushed away our family fortune.

Ugh. I used to obsess over a perfect cup of espresso, but even that didn’t thrill me anymore. All it did was remind me of how Daddy had made me live at home instead of in Choate Hall, the newest, shiniest dorm on campus, complete with private bathrooms and kitchenettes and even a rooftop pool, situated right next door to the student center and only a block down from Frat Row, and the dorm whose brochure still sat sadly lodged in the rack on my desk. Juliette—who had never been my closest friend, though we’d become closer after learning we’d wound up at the same school—had even spent all summer ordering coordinated pink-and-green furniture to decorate the suite we planned to share. Together, we could see it: late-night streaming TV binges, spa parties, and a revolving door of toned, glistening frat boys chilling on neon floats. For a safety school, it was actually starting to sound pretty great.

Then, with Daddy’s decree, it all went up in smoke. I’d told Juliette that my mom’s recent knee surgery meant someone needed to be there to help her get up and down the stairs. And it was no lie that Mom sometimes needed help navigating steps, though it was usually after one too many vodka martinis. Anyway, Juliette probably already suspected the truth. But if the other members of the Scottsdale glam squad found out my family was having money problems, they’d drop me like a bad stomach virus.

But that didn’t really matter. The only thing that mattered was becoming a successful doctor, at which point I’d be able to get the hell out of here and go somewhere far away from the union, somewhere where I could actually help people and make a difference. And where I wouldn’t have to rely on Daddy or his money—whatever was left of it—any longer.

Sighing, I stuck the phone in a drawer next to the pill and turned back to A Primer on Organic Reactions by Edgar Malchow, who was lucky I still had eight months to go before I could gleefully toss him on top of a bonfire. No matter how long I stared at his neat little elements and symbols, I never seemed to be able to rearrange them into anything but alphabet soup.

It didn’t seem fair that I should only start floundering now when the stakes were so high. Over time, I’d learned to expect to do well in school because I always had. Calculus had come just as easily to me as English literature. That’s why my GPA was so high, my teachers all said, because I was smart on both sides of my brain. It seemed perfect. As a doctor, not only would I be able to diagnose people, but I could explain everything to them, too, in a way that wouldn’t leave them feeling hopeless and scared. Thanks to a girls’ summer science camp in Chicago a few years ago—when Daddy could still afford things like that—I fell in love with the idea of helping people that way, and it was why I thought I’d love pre-med. The problem was, pre-med didn’t love me. So far, I’d hired tutors; been to the study sessions; and even searched online homework help boards, hoping for that face-slapping eureka moment. I knew I wasn’t dumb. I knew I had it in me. I just had to study harder, stay up later. I couldn’t afford to let my eyes close for even a second. There was too much at stake.

So that settled that. The winner was Vitamin C: Coffee.

Except it wasn’t. Despite poring over that manual for an hour, the only thing I’d figured out how to make was a mess. Pathetic. No wonder I was flunking o-chem. Some med student I’d make. How was I supposed to understand the inner workings of the human nervous system when I couldn’t even use a simple coffee machine? But I had to stay awake somehow .

Luckily, I could enlist a slave to figure it out for me. There was always one on call, engaged in busywork while waiting to spring obediently into action when someone buzzed the intercom. Tonight, it would either be Daddy’s old valet or the pretty green-eyed brunette maid. I hoped it would be the valet because the maid was seriously starting to get on my nerves. She had the kind of teasing little wrinkle next to her mouth that guys seemed to love but that I myself could never manage without looking demented, and said “Yes, Miss Louisa” in a way that made it abundantly clear that she thought my orders weren’t worth following. Of course I could punish her. But for what? You couldn’t really punish someone for a look or a tone of voice—well, you could, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t. And I was certain she knew that, which was exactly what made it so aggravating.

If the maid answered, I’d pretend I’d rung by accident.

Mind made up, I reached for the intercom. Just before my finger pushed the button, though, I stopped when the words of Erica Muller, my Slavery Studies 101 professor—whose paper, I remembered with a groan, I was also supposed to have started on tonight—echoed somewhere in the back of my somnambulating brain.

“Federal regulations require that each slave receive at minimum four hours of sleep a night, and studies show that two-thirds of slaves receive considerably less than that. And yet lawmakers, terrified of losing campaign contributions from the pro-slavery lobby that put them in office, have voted fifteen times in a row to keep?—”

But God, that triple macchiato was sounding better and better the more I thought about it. Besides, could the average slave be any less sleep-deprived than the average college student? Talk about unfair. Where were the activists lobbying for me ?

I hadn’t even wanted to take that class, anyway. Everybody knew that Erica Muller had been a wanted fugitive decades ago for planting bombs under police cars as a member of the Slave Liberation Army. Nobody was exactly sure how she’d managed to get the charges dropped. Most of her compatriots had been arrested and sent to the mines. But there seemed to be somebody trying to get her fired and/or arrested every few months or so for being an enemy of the union. Up until he’d died, it had usually been one of Daddy’s old golf buddies, Gerhard Langer. A German-born, copper-mining magnate, he was a member of that very same pro-slavery lobby Muller railed against—and a member of one of my university’s Board of Regents, like his tech-mogul son, Max, was now.

For now, the progressive majority on the board protected her, but Professor Muller herself had stated in class that it was probably only a matter of time before she got ousted. “Luckily, we still technically have free speech in the union. I plan to enjoy it while it lasts,” she’d said, standing at the front of the lecture hall that morning in her loose, oatmeal-colored natural-fiber shirt and pants, frizzy graying hair falling across the frames of her wire-rimmed glasses. Why did it seem like hopeless frumpiness was somehow a key requirement in the fight for social justice? Another good reason to keep away from the anti-slavery crowd. Muller might have had relatively free rein in progressive academia, but in more conservative circles like medicine, views like hers could still get you fired, expelled, blacklisted, ostracized—hell, Daddy himself would disown me instantly.

Besides, ultimately, Muller was just a kook. Slavery had been here for a century, and it wasn’t going anywhere. It was all in that week’s lecture notes, sitting patiently unopened in the corner of my desk. When the hard times of the 1930s had dragged on for two decades, hitting the middle classes as badly as the poor, somebody got the bright idea to start emptying out the prisons, then letting people sell their children temporarily, either to pay off debt or just to keep them from starving.

In a few years, nobody was starving. We and our allies had won a would-be world war with barely a shot fired. Then the boom times came, and New North America decided slavery should be more than temporary. The New European Union and all the allied regimes followed suit. Not to mention, those first slaves had started breeding more slaves, and by now, in 2025, they’d swelled to a third of the world population, a figure I’d memorized because Professor Muller had helpfully informed us it would be on the exam.

So they must have been happy. They were housed and fed, which had to beat starving or dealing drugs to survive. Sure, there were some low-class sadists out there who tortured them—they still made the news every now and then—but respectable people like my parents weren’t among them. Our housekeeper had belonged to Mom’s family since both were children, and I’d grown up among other loyal and affectionate slaves I knew for sure had never been tortured or sleep-deprived.

Hmm. Maybe that could be the topic for my paper.

I pressed the button.

“Hey.”

I snapped my finger back as if I’d been burned.

The fuck? It was a boy . Well, a young man, to be more precise. In any case, definitely not the maid or the valet.

But that made no sense. Our former army of slaves had dwindled. As far as I knew, my parents now only owned four. Two females: the housekeeper—who also cooked and managed the others—and the maid. And two males: the old valet and the creepy gardener that I avoided like rush-hour traffic.

Not only did this bold, flippant voice clearly not belong to any of them, but it barely sounded like a slave at all. He could be new, I supposed, but Daddy couldn’t even afford my daily espresso anymore. How the fuck could he afford an entire human being? On the other hand, who else would be answering the slave intercom this time of night, but a slave? And there weren’t any other men in this house, unless?—

Oh. Of course. The suit. He must have stayed later than I’d thought. What was his name again? Benji? Bennett? I chuckled a little at my own sleep-deprived stupidity. Well, if he was in his cups and wanted to have a little fun, no reason I couldn’t toss the ball back. So what if he was a bit … mature?

Cautiously, I pressed the talk button again. “Hello?”

“Didn’t we do this already?” The reply came instantly. Okay, he had a good voice. Kind of low and slow, but not too much of either. The kind of voice that made my insides feel all soft and deep and velvety. And with a lilt—no, not a lilt. An accent . A New European accent, from the sound of it, though not from any country I recognized, and?—

Wait. Benny was from New York, wasn’t he?

Did that mean?—

It couldn’t.

No slave would dare .

But I had to find out for sure, right?

I cleared my throat, trying to sound disapproving. “Is that any way to talk to me?”

“Sorry. Didn’t we do this already, miss?”

An accent it was, but slight, and New York was nowhere in the mix. More like Berlin by way of Paris by way of … California, maybe? And even more shocking, a sense of humor. The last time the valet had cracked a smile was probably three decades ago. The same more or less went for the others. Humor was not generally something that fetched a high price on the auction block. Obedience, physical strength, and occasionally looks—that was what counted.

“Make up your mind yet?”

“Huh?”

“About what you wanted.”

“What?” I was speaking in monosyllables, but I was exhausted and delirious and quite frankly, shocked. Nothing about what was going on right now made sense.

“You must have wanted something. A glass of water, maybe? A turndown? Or maybe a back massage?”

“From you?” Actually, my back was killing me, and so was the thought of how good a cute boy’s hands might feel pressing firmly, deeply, maybe even a little bit roughly into those knots. But he didn’t need to know that. Whoever he was. And how the hell could I be so sure he was cute?

Beats me. But I was.

Anyway, I shouldn’t be engaging with him at all. Sure, he was just joking around with me. No harm there—at least if he’d been some cocky frat boy in my class. From a slave—and what else could he be?—it was bold, unacceptable, dangerous insolence.

On the other hand, nobody else was around to hear. “What do you know about massages?” I asked before I could talk myself out of it.

“Okay, I admit, nothing. But I could probably figure it out. They say it’s all in the wrists.”

“I don’t think you’re allowed to touch me.” Don’t think ? If he was a slave, touching me could get him thrown into a pit mine.

“Come on, nobody would see.”

“Oh, sure.” I snorted. “And give you an excuse to get your hands on me?”

“Who says I want my hands on you? I don’t even know what you look like. Come down here and show me, and then I’ll decide.”

“Why should I come down there? I wanted a macchiato. You’re supposed to make it and bring it up to me.”

“Oh, so you did buzz for a reason.”

I scoffed in irritation. “Yes. Now can you please get me some coffee?”

“ Please ,” he repeated, savoring the word like chocolate—the kind of chocolate slaves, even well-treated ones, rarely got to taste. “I don’t hear that word too often. I like the sound of it, coming from you. Say it again.”

“Not a chance.” Why did my face feel so—oh, fuck. I was blushing . He was flirting with me, and to my astonishment, I was kind of—just a little—flirting back. This was crazy. I had to stop it, now. “Forget the please . I’m ordering you to get me a coffee.”

“Can’t. I’m busy.”

“Busy?” That was a word that didn’t seem to be in a slave’s vocabulary. “Doing what?”

“I’ll give you a hint—my hands are wet.”

“With water?”

He laughed. And not a fake chuckle designed to humor a master’s stupid, unfunny joke. A real laugh, like a real person, and for some reason, a warm, strange thrill shot right through my body. What the hell was going on with this guy—no, not guy. Slave. Slave.

“Sure. If that makes you more comfortable.”

“You know what would make me comfortable?” I asked.

“Let me guess. A good f?—”

“Don’t you dare .”

“Foamy espresso. Why, what did you think I was going to say?”

“Nothing,” I said quickly, face on fire now. “Foamy espresso. A good foamy espresso. That’s what I want.” I cringed, wondering why the hell I was still enabling this, even as I waited breathlessly for his next remark. My room, like every room in the desert foothills, was air-conditioned, but it felt like the temperature had shot up twenty degrees.

“Oh, you mean this?”

From the speaker came a high-pitched grinding noise, then a gurgling that was unmistakably the sound of, uh, foamy espresso being poured into one of Mom’s tiny, hand-painted china cups. So he’d figured the machine out easily and he couldn’t have possibly been in this house for more than a day. My mouth watered; I could practically smell it. Damn him.

“Ah, organic Ecuadorian caramel macchiato,” he said as if he were leisurely sitting back in a chair and sipping it. “The last one in the house.”

I gasped. “You’re not allowed to drink that.”

“Who’s going to stop me? You won’t come down here, and there’s nobody else around.”

“I can tell Daddy. He’ll have you whipped.” I mean, he could, but he wouldn’t. Not for that . Plus, I couldn’t imagine a stupider thing to go tattling to him about.

“Or you could come down here and do it yourself.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” I’d never whipped a slave—never even seen it done. Daddy kept a switch and a cane around but rarely touched them himself, and I certainly never had. For anything beyond that, we had always hired a handler, who was discreet enough to do his work well out of earshot of us.

“Come on. You’re not curious about me?”

“Hardly.” Curious? The word hardly seemed adequate, when literally the only thing I could think about right now was throwing open the door, sprinting down the stairs, and glimpsing for myself just what this mystery guy—mystery slave? —looked like. Of course I was curious. I’d never before been so thoroughly overwhelmed with curiosity about anyone. And even though I still hadn’t a clue what he looked like, the flush in my face and the tingling in my thighs was leading me to suspect that curiosity wasn’t all it was.

“Miss?” I realized I’d stopped talking, and here he was, suddenly being all proper. Still, there was a challenge here and something else I couldn’t put my finger on. Sarcasm? Bitterness? No, danger.

That was it.

Danger.

A massive, blinking red warning sign. Slave: do not approach.

“Okay, I lied,” he said, almost sincerely, like he was afraid he’d disappointed me.

Disappointing? This? That would be the biggest laugh all night. In all of five minutes, I’d been revived, struck dead, and revived again.

“There’s some coffee left,” he said. “You still want it?”

“I—” Yes. Yes, I did want it. Desperately. “Forget it,” I said and released the button.

I sank back into my desk chair, staring at the door, flushed, heart rattling, even a little out of breath. I flipped open Malchow, but at this point, even a triple macchiato wouldn’t be enough to help me concentrate. I’d had no pills, no caffeine, and yet for the first time in months and months, my whole body felt awake, and it had nothing to do with chemistry.

Or maybe it did.