by Jenna Black
She realized with a start that that was true. As reckless as Nate was, Nadia hadn’t believed he’d take the risk of hooking up with Bishop during the party if he didn’t have her around to make sure they weren’t caught. He took a risk every time he and Bishop were together, but nothing like doing it under the noses of the entire Executive class of Paxco and all the visiting dignitaries.
“During your disagreement with Nathaniel, did you by any chance see his valet, Kurt Bishop?” Mosely asked.
Nadia’s palms began to sweat, and once again she wondered if Mosely had somehow known all along exactly what had happened last night. “He was there,” she answered cautiously. “Nate wanted someone to serve as a lookout.”
“And was he still with Nathaniel when you made your grand exit?”
She ground her teeth. Mosely’s lips twitched with amusement, and Nadia hated that she’d given him the satisfaction.
“Yes. Yes, he was. And you already knew that, didn’t you?”
Mosely smiled benignly, and once again Nadia was tempted to do something imprudent.
“If you knew he was there, then you know that someone saw Nate alive after I left. Why are you questioning me instead of Bishop?” Not that she’d wish Mosely on Bishop, of course.
Mosely’s smile hardened. “Because Kurt Bishop is missing. Evidence suggests he stabbed Nathaniel to death and then fled the scene. I am trying to ascertain whether you might have been Mr. Bishop’s accomplice.”
Nadia’s mouth dropped open in shock. She was hardly Bishop’s biggest fan. As far as she was concerned, he was a bad influence on Nate, and there was a hard, bitter edge to him that made him difficult to like. But he would never hurt Nate.
“You’re way off target, Mr. Mosely,” she said. “I had nothing to do with Nate’s death, and I’m sure Bishop didn’t either.”
Mosely rolled his eyes. “Yes, yes, I’ve already heard about Mr. Bishop’s saintly innocence. The fact remains he is the prime suspect, and his refusal to turn himself in and account for his actions is most suspicious.”
Nadia didn’t find it suspicious at all. Mosely had already threatened to detain her, the daughter of a president and the presumed fiancée to the Chairman Heir. If he dared issue such a threat to someone of her station, God only knew what he would do to a nobody like Kurt Bishop. She refrained, however, from sharing that opinion with Mosely.
“Why would you suspect me of conspiring with Nate’s valet?” she asked instead. “What could I possibly stand to gain from Nate’s death? For that matter, what would Bishop have to gain?” Especially when they both knew Nate’s death would be temporary, thanks to the Replica technology.
“One assumes it was a crime of passion of some sort. Perhaps Nathaniel threatened to dismiss him and Mr. Bishop reacted violently to the news.”
Nadia shook her head. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Nathaniel’s Replica shares your conviction in Mr. Bishop’s innocence,” Mosely said. “I believe he will make his own attempt to locate Mr. Bishop, with the intention of helping him escape justice.”
If Nate’s Replica was just like the real Nate, then yes, he probably would. There was no way he’d believe Bishop was guilty, and he would do everything in his power to protect his boyfriend. Including reckless, dangerous things that could get him killed again.
“You are Nathaniel’s confidant,” Mosely continued, and Nadia shivered in premonition. “If you would agree to share with me whatever you might learn about his efforts to locate Mr. Bishop—or about any contact he might have with Mr. Bishop—then I would be inclined to release you into the custody of your parents.”
The blood drained from Nadia’s face as she absorbed the implications of Mosely’s words. “You want me to spy on him. To betray him.”
“He is a young and foolish boy, blinded by idealism. Bishop is a murderer, and he must be brought to justice, despite the stars in Nathaniel’s eyes. You wouldn’t be betraying him—you’d be doing him a favor. And he would never have to know.”
She shook her head. Even if she believed Bishop were the killer, she couldn’t betray Nate like that. The Nate she’d grown up with might be dead, but if she helped Mosely locate Bishop, she’d be betraying his memory. Not to mention his Replica, whom she’d one day find herself married to.
“I won’t do it,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t do it. Nate would never forgive me.”
Mosely folded his hands on the table and leaned forward, pinning her with his stare. “Let me make the situation perfectly clear. You will do this. You will learn Nathaniel’s every plan, and you will share them with me. For Nathaniel’s own good. If you refuse, you will spend at least a week at the detention center, where you will be questioned more rigorously about your involvement with the murder.”
“You can’t do that,” Nadia said in a horrified whisper. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Oh, I assure you, I can. The assassination of the Chairman Heir is an act of treason, and where cases of treason are involved, my department has the latitude to detain and question anyone we deem necessary. In truth, I am doing you a favor by allowing you to prove your loyalty to your state by helping us capture the killer.”
Nadia’s eyes filled with tears of hopelessness. “Please don’t make me do this,” she begged as those tears spilled over, though she knew better than to expect mercy from a man like Dirk Mosely. She couldn’t bear the thought of betraying Nate, but she was going to end up betraying him one way or another. She had no illusions that she could withstand a week of “rigorous questioning” without spilling everything she knew about last night’s events, including Nate’s true sexual preferences. Whatever she did, she would damn Bishop, and Nate would hate her for it.
Mosely stood up, still staring at her with baleful eyes. “If I walk out that door without your agreement, you will be transferred to the detention center within the hour.”
Mosely turned on his heel, striding purposefully toward the door.
Maybe he’s bluffing, Nadia thought desperately. But she knew he wasn’t. And if he sent her to the detention center, it would ruin not just her own life, but Nate’s and her entire family’s as well. A taint of that magnitude could never be overcome.
Mosely grabbed the knob and pulled the door open.
“Wait!” she cried, just before he stepped out of the room. “I’ll do it.” She felt like a pathetic coward for giving in, but she just couldn’t face the consequences of refusing.
Mosely turned back to her with a vicious smile. “You’ve made the right decision,” he said, then took his seat across from her again.
Nadia wished she could believe him.
CHAPTER THREE
After the unpleasant meeting with his father and Mosely, Nate hoped to go home and get his thoughts lined up, but of course things were never so easy when you were the Chairman Heir of a powerful corporate state. So instead of having time to rest and recuperate, he found himself running a gauntlet of press conferences, interviews, and debriefings.
The press asked the most intrusive and obnoxious questions, of course, focusing on the lurid details and constantly asking him how he felt about everything. He’d been Chairman Heir all his life, so Nate was used to the media circus. That didn’t mean he liked it, and as the day wore on, his responses grew rather more abrupt than was politically wise. When he got asked for what felt like the thousandth time how he felt about having been murdered and brought back to life as a Replica, he snapped.
“How the fuck do you think I feel?” he snarled, then batted the microphone out of his way, fighting the temptation to shove it down the reporter’s throat.
Nate’s press secretary gave him a dark look as his security detail tried to confiscate all the cameras that had caught his little indiscretion for posterity. Nate put the odds at fifty-fifty that the film would wind up on the net anyway.
Screw it. He might be a Replica, but he wasn’t a machine, and there was only so much shit he was prepared to swall
ow.
He left the press conference only to find a cluster of demonstrators waiting for him at the Fortress’s front entrance. The entrance was sealed off with a double set of gates, and the security forces were keeping the protesters well away from the gates and the street, but that didn’t stop Nate from seeing the signs being waved as his limo pulled out.
REPLICAS AREN’T PEOPLE.
ABOMINATION!
THE DEAD SHOULD STAY DEAD!
YOU WILL BURN IN HELL!
He suspected some of the stuff they were screaming and chanting was even worse, though he couldn’t make out the words. The protest was peaceful enough, and there was no sign that the crowd wanted to fight past the barricade and rush the limo, but their anger was a palpable force. Nate tried to look straight ahead and ignore it all, but it was still a shock to the senses.
Nate was used to being well liked. Even his scandalous behavior was usually treated as roguish charm by the press and the public. The vehemence of the crowd’s anger was more than a little unsettling, though perhaps he should have expected it. Even he had to admit that Replicas were a bit disturbing. The idea that anything he remembered in his entire life actually happened to someone else was going to drive him insane.
It was well past dark by the time he finally escaped and was able to drop the forced smile he’d been wearing all day. He still struggled with the idea that someone had actually stabbed him to death the night before. He could be an asshole sometimes, he knew that, but generally that wasn’t a crime punishable by death.
His bodyguards performed a thorough examination of his penthouse suite before allowing Nate to enter, but once he was inside, they retreated to the vestibule and he was finally able to close the door on the outside world. He had moved into the penthouse on his eighteenth birthday, a little more than six months ago. His father thought his eagerness to move out from under the same roof had been an act of rebellion, and it had. But more importantly, it had granted Nate the only modicum of privacy he was ever likely to have.
His knees feeling suddenly weak, his chest tight, Nate helped himself to a tumbler of expensive whiskey, closing his eyes and savoring the smooth burn as the alcohol slid down his throat. Technically, he was under the legal drinking age, but no one was going to refuse to sell to the Chairman Heir. His hands were shaking, his heart pounding. The pain and the panic he’d been fighting all day tried to swamp him as he finally had a chance to face them without an audience.
Nate gulped the rest of his whiskey, not caring that it was supposed to be sipped. He’d never developed a connoisseur’s palate, despite the expensive tastes he was expected to cultivate, and he didn’t make much of a distinction between the finest aged single malt and rotgut. They both contained alcohol, and that was all that mattered. He smiled tightly, thinking how his father sneered at his lowbrow tastes. The Chairman considered him to be about as cultured as a Basement-dweller, and Nate took pride in it.
The whiskey helped soothe away the panic attack, and Nate paced in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that fronted his living room, looking out at the twinkling lights of the city. He had a breathtaking view of what everyone still called the Empire State Building, despite the fact that it had been officially renamed the Paxco Headquarters Building. Usually, he appreciated the view, but tonight he was struck by how vast and dangerous the city was.
Kurt was out there somewhere, alone, hunted. Nate put his hand on the glass and closed his eyes, wishing he could sense Kurt’s presence, wishing some magic would flow into his body and show him where to find him. Surely, Kurt would contact him eventually, would reach out for the help only someone of Nate’s station could offer. All Nate had to do was wait and be ready when the time came.
He’d feel a lot more ready if he had some concrete plan for how he was going to help Kurt when he found him. Obviously, he would have to find some way to smuggle him out of Paxco. Even if Nate could find the real killer, Kurt would never be safe in Paxco again. He was supposed to be presumed innocent, but that wasn’t how things worked in the real world, and the stain would never wash off.
“Hurry up and contact me,” Nate whispered, as if willing Kurt to do it would actually make it happen.
Kurt had friends in the Basement, Nate reminded himself. Well, maybe calling them “friends” was a bit on the generous side, but he had connections. People who’d be willing to hide him and protect him from Mosely’s security forces, as long as he had money.
As soon as the thought hit him, hope surged in Nate’s chest. To survive in the Basement when he was being hunted, Kurt needed money. And Nate knew exactly where he could have gotten his hands on what he needed if he’d been daring enough to try for it.
Setting his empty glass down, he closed the drapes to protect from any unwanted watchers, then crossed to the bar with its impressive array of bottles and decanters. The floor of the bar was rich green marble, but the bar itself was of carved mahogany. Mahogany doors hid a minifridge from view, and beside the fridge was a decorative carved panel that looked like solid wood.
Nate felt along the sides of the panel until he found the little metal protuberance, then pushed. Something clicked, and the panel came loose in his hands. He laid the panel on the floor behind the bar, then peered into the thin vertical compartment the panel had hidden.
Ordinarily, the compartment held stacks of neatly banded hundred dollar bills. Real dollars, not company scrip. Scrip was the currency of choice for all legal transactions, and your ordinary Employee never laid eyes on a real dollar bill. But if you were going to spend any time in Debasement, you wanted the real thing. Oh, the black marketeers and sundry criminals in Debasement were perfectly happy to relieve you of your scrip, in epic quantities. But if you had real dollars, you could buy just about anything your heart desired. Without any official record of the transaction.
Nate, in his official capacity as Chairman Heir, had access to dollars that would make any Basement-dweller’s eyes gleam with greed, and he’d been squirreling them away ever since he’d gotten old enough to understand their significance. He and Kurt had always tapped into that supply whenever they’d made their illicit trips to Debasement together, so Kurt knew exactly where the stash was hidden.
His eyes told him that the hidden compartment was empty, but, like an idiot, Nate had to reach in there and feel around anyway. But no, there was not a single dollar bill left in the compartment. Which was good news. It meant that Kurt had enough money to buy his way out of Paxco. Human smuggling was big business in the Basement, and Kurt would know just who to contact.
The less heartening news was that Kurt hadn’t left anything for Nate. No note, no good-bye, no explanation. Kurt was a beginner at reading and writing—skills that weren’t highly prized in the Basement—but Nate had been steadily teaching him. Kurt could have managed a note, even if it would have been clumsily written and riddled with spelling errors.
For half a second, Nate wondered if he was being the most naive human being on the face of the planet. To anyone but Nate, the theft of all those dollars with no explanation would be evidence of the most damning kind.
Was there a chance Kurt was guilty?
Nate dismissed the thought. He didn’t care what anyone else thought. He knew Kurt, and Kurt hadn’t done this. He’d taken the money, but Nate could hardly blame him for that. Every second he’d spent at the apartment would have increased the danger that he would get caught. So Nate couldn’t hold it against him that he hadn’t taken the time to write out a letter of explanation.
But the thought that Kurt was now forever out of his reach, doomed to live the rest of his life in hiding, sat heavily on Nate’s shoulders. As did the realization that without Kurt’s account of what had happened on the night of his murder, Nate might never know who had really killed him.
* * *
By the time Mosely finally allowed Nadia to go home, the heat in her cheeks and the weakness in her knees told her she was running a fever, and she felt like she was at dea
th’s door. When she was escorted down to the security station’s lobby, her mother was waiting for her, sitting rigidly on the edge of a straight-backed chair, her chin held high and her eyes flashing with fury as she worked to maintain her fabled aura of superiority. No doubt she’d been sitting in the station’s lobby all day, but you’d never be able to tell by looking at her. Her makeup was still perfect, her hair neatly coiffed, her clothes unwrinkled. Nadia didn’t even want to think about how she looked right now.
Apparently, she looked as wretched as she felt, because as soon as her mother caught sight of her, the anger in her expression eased and a hint of concern entered her eyes. Nadia wanted to fling herself into her mother’s arms and sob, but of course the daughter of a president would never dream of doing something so undignified in public. No, Nadia’s eyes were merely watering because she was sick and exhausted.
“Please take me home,” she begged before her mother could say anything. “I need to lie down.” She sniffled loudly, playing up her illness in hopes of staving off a maternal lecture. She was rewarded by even more softening of her mother’s expression.
“My poor baby,” Esmeralda Lake murmured, reaching up to touch the back of her hand to Nadia’s forehead. “You’re burning up.” She glared at the two officers who had escorted Nadia, her face conveying the impression that she would hold them personally responsible for Nadia’s illness. Nadia noticed that neither of the men would make eye contact with her mother, both shifting awkwardly where they stood, and she suppressed a smile. Esmeralda might derive her status from her husband’s rank rather than her own, but she knew how to wield that status to devastating effect. Even big, bold, alpha-male security officers squirmed on the receiving end of her displeasure. Now, if only Nadia could somehow keep all that displeasure from being aimed at her.
Her mother put an arm around Nadia’s shoulders, and it took everything Nadia had not to lean into her and let the tears loose. She was holding on to her self-control by the most fragile of threads. Nate had been murdered. Nadia had been questioned like a suspect, threatened with a stay at Riker’s Island. Bishop was running for his life. And she had allowed herself to be bullied into spying on her best friend and future husband. It was all too much to handle, and yet somehow she had to hold it all inside.