by Jenna Black
“This is Nadia Lake,” she said, “and I need to speak to Nate right now!” She practically shouted the words, terrified that Nate was once again lying dead, this time somewhere in the Basement. The thought that the Chairman could simply create another Replica if this one was dead was no comfort.
“He hasn’t risen yet this morning, Miss Lake,” the butler said, sounding taken aback by her near hysteria. “Is this urgent?”
Nadia swallowed hard to stop herself from answering with Nate-like sarcasm. “Yes, it’s very, very urgent,” she said with exaggerated care. “Please wake him up.” Feeling like an immature little girl, she crossed her fingers and prayed he was there to be awakened.
“One moment please,” the butler said, and she wanted to punch something as he put her on hold.
She was in danger of hyperventilating, so she forced herself to sit down on the edge of her bed, close her eyes, and take a few deep breaths. It was embarrassingly hard to manage. When the phone line went live again and Nate’s crusty-sounding voice said “Nadia?” she burst into tears.
“Nadia!” he said in alarm. “What’s wrong?”
What was wrong was she was an idiot, she thought as the tears continued to stream from her eyes and her throat squeezed so tight she couldn’t talk. She’d let her fear for Nate run away with her, calling him without once pausing to think about what she would say if she reached him. She had no good way to explain why she’d been so frantic and why she was bawling like a baby now.
“I was—” she hiccuped, then had to pause a moment to let another wave of sniffles pass over her. “Worried about you,” she finished lamely, swiping at her swimming eyes and shaking her head at herself. Surely Mosely had had people following Nate last night, thanks to the tracker. If Nate had been killed, Mosely would have known it and wouldn’t have ordered her to find out what happened. Her guilty conscience had made her leap to the most guilt-inducing conclusion, and she had acted without thinking.
Even if the worst hadn’t happened, she knew her fears for Nate hadn’t been completely unfounded. There was no way he would have let someone open his locket without a fight.
“Are you all right?” she asked, glad to hear that her voice at least sounded a little calmer.
Nate hesitated before answering, and Nadia couldn’t help thinking she was acting strange enough that even someone as generally oblivious as he had to be wondering what was wrong with her.
“Why do you sound so worried?” he asked. “They told me you were nearly hysterical.”
Yes, of course they had. And she’d confirmed it by bursting into tears when he answered the phone. Of course, she also noticed that he hadn’t answered her question. Was it possible he knew about the tracker after all?
Nadia dismissed that thought with an impatient shake of her head. Nate was not a subtle person. If he was pissed at her about something, he’d come right out and say it. But it wasn’t as if she could explain any of that to Nate. Not unless she were willing to come clean and tell him the truth.
“I just … had a bad feeling,” she said, and almost started crying again because the lie was so lame. And because she was so sick of lying. Her head felt thick and sluggish, and she was utterly exhausted from the aftermath of all that adrenaline flooding her system.
“What aren’t you telling me?” There was more than a hint of suspicion in his voice now, and she couldn’t imagine how she could come up with a satisfying explanation for her behavior. Her throat was so tight and achy she couldn’t force any words out. Her mind flailed for a plausible explanation even as waves of guilt and self-loathing crashed over her.
“I think you have some explaining to do,” Nate said into the silence, and there was a distinct chill in his voice.
She let out a shuddering sigh. “Yes, I do,” she said, though she still had no idea what to tell him. The best she could do was stall for time and hope she could find a way to explain away her behavior. “It’s not something I want to talk about on the phone. Can I come over?”
Nate cleared his throat. “I’m, uh, a little under the weather,” he hedged.
She swallowed to keep from asking him what was wrong, knowing he wouldn’t answer. “Can I come over anyway? I really, really think we need to talk. In person.”
Nate made a sound between a groan and a grunt. “Okay. I’ll get myself out of bed as soon as I find a crowbar.”
His quip struck a false note, the tightness in his voice belying his attempt at humor. Nadia closed her eyes, dreading what that tightness portended.
“I’ll see you soon,” she said, then hung up the phone before she started crying again.
* * *
After getting off the phone with Nate, Nadia couldn’t force herself to eat. The scent of eggs that had been enticing only a few minutes ago now made her stomach turn.
Unfortunately, leaving the tray untouched would inspire questions she didn’t want to answer—and would insult the entire kitchen staff—so she had to at least make it look like she’d eaten. What was one more lie, after so many?
Nadia lifted the dome off her plate, eying its contents and wondering if she could flush them without clogging the toilet. The eggs and bacon would go down easily enough, but she’d have to tear up the toast. She unrolled her napkin to get a knife to use to scrape the plate.
Something dropped out of the napkin before Nadia had even reached the silverware. It hit the side of the tray and bounced to the floor. Frowning, Nadia put the napkin down and slid off the bed, bending to pick up the little envelope that had fallen.
The envelope was unsealed, and there was a hard lump in its center. Mystified as to what it was and how it had gotten into her napkin, Nadia opened the envelope and shook its contents onto her palm. She unfolded the torn piece of paper that fell out and found a familiar piece of circuitry in its center—the tracker she had planted in Nate’s locket, now crushed and broken.
There was a message printed on the paper in big block letters, the handwriting awkward and childlike: MAK HIM STOP LOKING 4 ME OR ILL TEL.
There was no signature, but then there didn’t need to be. There was only one person it could be from.
“What the hell…?” Nadia muttered as she stared at the tracker and the note. How had Bishop, of all people, gotten hold of the tracker? Surely if he and Nate had been reunited last night, Nate would have mentioned it. And if Bishop knew about the tracker, then shouldn’t Nate know about it, too? But there was no way he’d have been half so civil on the phone if that were the case. Nor would Bishop be threatening her with exposure, come to think of it.
She couldn’t lie to Nate anymore, she realized in a moment of startling, breathtaking clarity. There was no story she could concoct to explain her behavior this morning. No story he’d believe, anyway, not after she’d roused his suspicions as thoroughly as she had. If she kept lying to him and he knew it, then that would be the end of their friendship. He wouldn’t be able to trust her anymore, and you couldn’t have a real friendship without trust.
So her choices were to tell him the truth and lose his trust or to lie to him and lose his trust anyway. And whichever way she lost his trust, she was never going to win it back.
Taking a steadying breath, Nadia came to a decision. If she was going to lose Nate’s friendship no matter what, she’d rather do it by telling the truth. No matter how much that truth was going to hurt or what it might cost her.
* * *
Nate felt like he’d been run over by a truck. Several, actually. And it wasn’t that far from the truth.
Dragging himself home from Debasement last night had been torture of an epic level. Angel’s thugs had worked him over so thoroughly that it hurt even to breathe, and Nate had been half convinced he was going to pass out and be trampled as he dragged himself out of the private room and through the jostling crowd outside. He hadn’t seen Angel again, but he had noticed several of the bouncers keeping an eye on him, and he had no doubt if he didn’t get out as fast as they wanted, they�
��d be doing the fists-and-feet tango again.
He’d swallowed a handful of aspirin before collapsing into bed once he got home, but they barely even took the edge off the pain. A handful of hours of fitful sleep had served to make every muscle in his body stiffen up, but when he examined himself in the mirror before taking a shower, he saw very little evidence of what he’d been through last night. There was some mottled bruising around his ribs and lower back, but nothing that looked like it should hurt half as much as it did. And as far as he could tell, nothing was broken. At least he wouldn’t have to go to the hospital and try to manufacture an explanation for his injuries.
The shower loosened up his stiff muscles, and Nate self-medicated with another handful of aspirin and a double espresso. Then he dressed in pajamas and a robe while he waited for Nadia to arrive.
Usually, he was happy to see her. She might not be the love of his life as he pretended to the outside world, but she was his friend, and would have been even if their parents hadn’t chosen them for one another. But there had very obviously been something wrong when she called this morning, and a nasty, suspicious side of him felt sure he’d heard guilt in her voice. He was still reeling from the shock and pain of what sure as hell looked like Kurt’s betrayal. If Nadia was guilty of something, he’d almost rather not know.
Nate groaned and collapsed into a chair, closing his eyes and laying the back of his head against the cushions. It felt like there were ten-ton weights sitting on each of his shoulders, pressing him down into the chair, making it hard to move. Or breathe. Or think.
Kurt would not have done this to him, his mind kept insisting. And yet …
No one but Kurt would have known the significance of that room at Angel’s club. No one but Kurt would have known about the locket. No one but Kurt would have known his true identity—and revealed it to Angel.
“But why?” he asked the empty air, unable to come up with a single explanation.
His brooding was interrupted by Nadia’s arrival. Nate asked his butler to show her into his sitting room, then tried to brace himself for whatever was to come. Hard to do, when he was already so miserable.
Nadia looked pale and wan when she stepped into the room. She’d tried to cover the dark circles under her eyes with makeup, but it hadn’t worked, and she’d chewed all the lipstick off her lower lip. Nate’s sense of foreboding grew stronger as he forced himself to his feet. His entire torso groaned in protest, and he winced.
“What’s the matter?” Nadia asked, quickly crossing the distance between them. “Are you hurt?”
She knew. He didn’t know how, but there was no other way to explain her panic on the phone this morning or her instant assumption that he was hurt.
“You know what happened last night, don’t you?” he asked, taking a step back from her. A little voice in his head told him he was being ridiculous, suspecting Nadia of … Well, he wasn’t quite sure what he suspected her of, but it was something bad. Nadia was his best friend, and one of the nicest people he’d ever met.
Yeah, and Kurt was his boyfriend, but that hadn’t stopped him from having Nate savagely beaten. And maybe worse.
Nate expected—or at least hoped for—a hasty denial, but that wasn’t what he got. Nadia looked away from him, her eyes squinched in misery, her teeth working away at her lip again. She shook her head, and her voice was small and tentative.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “Only that something did, and it was bad.” She squared her shoulders and raised her chin, meeting his eyes with what looked like a Herculean effort. “I want you to hear me out,” she said. “Listen to the whole thing before you react.”
Nate’s hands curled into fists at his sides. “What the hell have you done?” he asked from between his clenched teeth. Adrenaline pumped through his veins, speeding his heart, making his breath come short. His body still ached from the beating, and somewhere beneath the fury lurked a mother lode of hurt. The fury was infinitely easier to manage, so he focused on it, fueling it and glaring at Nadia with a kind of ferocity he’d never have guessed himself capable of.
For some reason, he’d expected Nadia to quail in the face of his fury, maybe because he felt so overwhelmed by it himself. Nadia was nice enough that some people mistook her niceness for weakness, but Nate had never been one of those people before. It showed something about his own mental state that he made the error now.
Instead of being intimidated by his fury, she seemed to draw strength from it. She stopped chewing on her lip, and her body went rigid as a hint of fire flickered in her eyes.
“I ask you to hear me out before you react, and you’re reacting before I say word one? Don’t you think you owe me a little more than that?”
“Depends what you’ve done,” he growled. “And it sounds like you’ve done something pretty shitty.”
A fine tremor made her hands shake, but the look in her eyes told him the tremor was of anger, not of fear. “You selfish, spoiled, entitled bastard!” she snarled at him, and she looked like she wanted to slap him. “After everything I’ve gone through because of you and your stupid little games, you’re going to condemn me without even listening to me? How dare you? I’m not one of your servants, living to fulfill your every desire. I have my own life, my own needs, my own issues, but you never have given a damn about that, have you?”
She whirled away from him, heading for the door. Without thinking about it, he reached out and grabbed her arm, hauling her back around to face him. She raised her hand as if to slap him, but even in her fury, she was still too damnably nice to do it, and she soon let that hand drop to her side.
“Let go of me, Nate,” she said, and some of the anger had drained from her voice, replaced with resignation and something he might almost have labeled despair. “You never bothered to listen to anyone before, so there’s no reason I should expect you to now. Bishop and I were both right to keep you in the dark.”
Bishop and I? Did that mean Kurt and Nadia were in this together somehow? Whatever this was? But that seemed impossible. They had never done more than tolerate each other, and that tolerance was colored with dislike and sometimes even contempt. No way they were working together in some crazy plot against him.
Then again, it seemed that everything that had happened to him since the night of the reception had been impossible.
“You know where Kurt is,” he said, squeezing her arm a little harder, making sure there was no way she could pull free from his grip.
Nadia’s shoulders sagged, the starch seeping out of her spine. “You didn’t really hear a word I just said. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“I heard you,” Nate snapped. “You’ve done something you’re ashamed of, and you’re telling me it’s all my fault. Forgive me for knowing bullshit when I hear it.”
“You don’t know a goddamn thing, Nate,” she said, but she sounded more tired than angry. “As far as you’re concerned, the whole world revolves around you and what you want. Hell, if you thought about other people half as much as you think about yourself, you might even have been able to figure out what was going on, or at least have a good guess.”
“What are you talking about?”
She met his eyes. “Have you forgotten I was taken to the security station and held for fifteen hours after your murder? Have you forgotten that I was the last known person to have seen you alive, and that Dirk Mosely personally interrogated me? Did you ever take even half a minute to think about what I might have been through, what he might have done to me, what he might have threatened?”
Nate opened his mouth and drew in a breath to protest, but no words would form in his brain. He’d known Nadia had gone through hell the day after his death, and he’d felt a kind of formless pity for her. Mosely was a sadistic bastard, and he wouldn’t have gone easy on Nadia just because she was a teenage girl. But she was the daughter of a president, for God’s sake. She was Nate’s fiancée, at least to all intents and purposes. Surely Mosely would
n’t have dared do anything … awful.
Nadia shook her head again, and this time when she tried to pull her arm free, his grip loosened. But she didn’t head for the door.
“No, you never did think about it,” she said, each word biting into his conscience.
Nate’s fists clenched at his sides. “If that bastard hurt you—”
Nadia threw her head back and laughed, but there was no humor in the sound, and the look in her eyes was wild. She turned away from him, and he thought she was going to storm out. But she didn’t. She turned back to him, folding her arms across her chest and staring up at him with fierce intensity.
“What will you do if he hurt me?” she asked. “Burst into his office and punch him out?”
Nate wasn’t sure he could see himself being quite that aggressive, but … “I would demand his resignation. Maybe even press criminal charges. If he’s hurt you, he’ll pay.”
Nadia pinched the bridge of her nose as if his responses were giving her a headache. “And this is why I kept my mouth shut as long as I did.” She dropped her hand away from her face and looked at him earnestly. “Nate, he’s the chief of security, and he’s investigating the assassination of the Chairman Heir. He wouldn’t be doing … what he’s doing if your father hadn’t given him free rein. If you go in there playing the white knight, all you’ll do is piss him off. And it’s me and my family who will pay the price.”
Nate couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It was true that the Chairman was capable of being a monumental hard-ass. He had hired Mosely, after all, and never showed any signs that he was bothered by Mosely’s reputation. But he wouldn’t let his favorite hatchet man prey on the daughter of a top Executive. Not when that daughter was also Nate’s bride-to-be.
