by Black, Jenna
Dante scowled and looked like he was seriously considering turning around and heading for the exit. Nate wondered if he should have been a little less honest and a little more … conciliatory. But it was too late to change his tone now, so he merely held his breath and waited.
Dante let out a frustrated grunt and shook his head. “What is it you want me to do, exactly?”
Nate allowed himself to breathe again. “I was hoping you have or could get a contact inside the Tranquility Retreat. Someone who could get a phone to Nadia. I need a way to contact her, a way to warn her if … something goes wrong.”
Dante stared at him as if he was trying to read all of Nate’s secrets in his face. Nate kept his expression as bland as he could and made no effort to avoid eye contact. Sure, he was hiding things, but he had a good reason, and he didn’t feel guilty or apologetic about it. Ten to one Dante was hiding secrets of his own.
“I’m pretty sure I can get a phone to her,” Dante said after a long, silent standoff. “But you need to tell me what’s going on. What really happened when Nadia was arrested? How did she end up free and Mosely end up dead?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Then I can’t help you.”
Nate had hurt his own hand far more than he’d hurt Dante’s face when he’d punched him, but the memory did nothing to quell his desire to do it again. “You’d abandon Nadia to the wolves because there’s nothing in it for you? You’ll make a great spokesman for freedom and democracy, or whatever it is your resistance is hoping for.”
“I don’t personally know anyone at Tranquility,” Dante said patiently. “I’m sure the resistance leadership has someone there, what with all those Executives feeling relaxed and talkative out of the public eye, but they’re not going to help Nadia out of the goodness of their hearts. And believe me, they’re already far from happy about me having revealed our existence to the two of you. They won’t be looking to do you any favors. Unless doing you favors turns out to be beneficial to them. Like, for instance, if you give me some good inside information in return.”
Nate hated to admit it, but it made sense. Still, there was no way he was telling Dante and the rest of the resistance what he and Nadia had learned. It sure as hell wasn’t because he was protecting his father, but if news about Thea and the Basement experimentation program got out, there would be rioting at the very least, and very possibly a civil war. The government of Paxco needed an overhaul, big time, but that wasn’t the way to go about it. Still, there were plenty of things Nate knew that the resistance didn’t. There was a reason they’d planted a spy in his household, after all.
Nate wished the resistance weren’t so damn shadowy so he could know more about them—like who was in charge. Kurt seemed to think they were the good guys, and Nate trusted Kurt … But Kurt, like Dante, was just a foot soldier, and if the leaders of the resistance were preparing for some bloody coup, he wouldn’t necessarily know about it. And helping them in any way would be a bad idea. Not that that would stop him if it was the only way he could help Nadia.
“I can’t tell you what happened when Nadia was arrested,” he said, “but I do have information I’m sure your leaders would want. Give me proof that you’ve gotten a phone to Nadia, and I’ll make it worth your while. Their while.”
“You’re the Chairman Heir,” Dante said, regarding him suspiciously. “You’re really going to inform on the government you’re going to inherit someday?”
Nate searched inside of himself for moral qualms. This was out-and-out treason he was talking about. Surely it should bother him, at least a little bit. But how could he possibly feel bad about betraying his father when the man had had the original Nate Hayes killed? “You have no idea how much I hate my father right now. Anything I can do to make his life difficult is all right by me. If I thought your resistance would have me, I’d sign up in a heartbeat.”
Gee, he was just full of exaggerations today. He’d never been the most cautious person in the world, but that didn’t mean he was about to run out and join a resistance movement he knew so little about. But at least it sounded good, and Dante seemed satisfied with the response.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do. But you’d better have something good for me.”
Or what? Nate wanted to ask, but for once he managed to keep the smart-ass comment to himself. He knew exactly what inside information he would give Dante if he succeeded in getting a phone to Nadia. Since Nadia had strong-armed his father into destroying Thea, there would be no more backup scans performed or Replicas made. Thanks to the exorbitant fees Paxco charged for the service that was available nowhere else in the world, the entire state was dependent on the income from the Replica technology. Eventually, the Chairman would have to go public with the news that the state’s primary source of income had dried up forever, but he was going to put it off as long as he could. Nate had no clue what the resistance would do with the information once they had it, but he was damn sure they would want it. And if his conscience woke up and gave him a hard time, Nate could console himself that the information would have gone public eventually anyway.
“Work fast,” Nate said out loud. “Please,” he amended when he saw Dante’s annoyance at what had come out sounding like an order. “You have no idea what she’s had to endure already, and she doesn’t deserve any of this.”
“She’s the only Executive I’ve met who I’ve actually liked,” Dante said. “I don’t want her to get hurt any more than you do.”
Nate swallowed a caustic remark, wondering if all this restraint was going to give him an ulcer. He might not have a romantic interest in Nadia, but he’d been unofficially engaged to her since he was six, and she had always been his best friend. There was no way Dante, who had known her for about a week, was even half as committed to her safety as Nate was.
“Don’t contact me again,” Dante continued. “You probably got away with the stunt this afternoon, but I wouldn’t count on getting away with it again.”
“If I can’t contact you, then how am I supposed to know when Nadia has the phone? Or to tell you state secrets?”
“Let me take care of that. I’m a professional.”
Nate couldn’t hold back a soft snort. Dante might be a professional spy, but he was no older than Nate, and if he had a year’s worth of experience at the job, Nate would be shocked.
Dante made a face. “I don’t know what the hell Bishop sees in you,” he muttered.
Nate tried not to squirm or otherwise look uncomfortable. There was no reason to assume from that comment that Dante knew more than he should about Nate’s relationship with Kurt. He could easily have said the same thing under the assumption that they were just friends. If Dante knew about them, then Nate would expect him to have played the blackmail card by now. But it wouldn’t be good to have him suspect it, either, even if he didn’t know.
Dante paused a beat, likely waiting for a comeback, but Nate didn’t have one.
CHAPTER THREE
Four days at the Tranquility Retreat, and Nadia was climbing the walls. There were numerous ways she could occupy her time, but seriously, how many spa treatments could one person have? And Nadia considered playing bingo to be a form of slow torture, despite the retreat’s great fondness for the game. She wondered if the men’s retreats—of which there were considerably fewer—were equally boring.
The majority of the inmates were matronly women whose children were grown and who didn’t feel like they had a place in Executive society anymore. There were a few younger women suffering from some social disgrace or other, but there was no one even close to Nadia’s age. It wasn’t unheard of for teens to spend time in retreats, but it wasn’t all that common, either. Not that Nadia related that well to girls her age anyway, not having a great fondness for sycophants who were outwardly nice while secretly hating her for her exalted status.
She missed Nate. She missed Gerri. She missed her own clothes. She missed the city, and the freedo
m to go out when she wanted. She even missed her parents, angry though she was with them for sticking her here.
Every day, Nadia prayed that her mother would have a change of heart and would send for her. Not that she harbored any real hope of that. The soonest she was likely to get out was Friday, and the day couldn’t come fast enough. If her mother tried to keep her here for more than a week, Nadia swore she would stage an escape attempt.
At home, Nadia rarely went to bed before midnight, but here at the retreat, boredom was driving her to her bed a little bit earlier each night. After yawning her way through some ridiculous card game that required absolutely no skill or attention at the recreation center, Nadia fled the bingo game that was forming and returned to her room in the main building. It was barely nine o’clock. Too early to go to bed, but she couldn’t stomach any more “fun.” At least she’d gathered a stack of books from the library. Reading the dullest book in the universe was more fun than playing bingo.
Nadia’s room in the dormitory wing was pleasantly cozy. Or might have been, if it were more private and contained anything that actually belonged to her. Every time she set foot inside, she was painfully aware that someone had tidied up while she was gone, whether the room needed it or not. It was strangely disturbing to return to her room at night and find that someone had stacked the library books so that their bottom and left edges were all perfectly aligned, and that her bed had been smoothed out so you couldn’t see that she’d sat on it when putting on her shoes. At home, she’d never found the idea of servants cleaning her room even mildly invasive, but it was different here.
On her first night, Nadia had rinsed her bra and underwear in the sink and let them dry over the shower bar overnight. They were still damp in the morning, so she’d tucked them into a drawer that contained her spa clothes to hide them. When she’d come back from breakfast, the undies were gone, replaced by a fresh set in the ubiquitous spa blue.
Nadia made it till almost ten before boredom got the best of her and she heeded the siren call of her bed. She changed out of her tunic and pants, leaving them crumpled on the floor on the off chance it would annoy someone, and into the soft blue nightgown that had been left folded on her bed. She hated the feeling of being so firmly under control that she wore the clothes that were laid out for her like a little kid. She’d tried sleeping in her clothes one night, but couldn’t drift off. Then she’d tried sleeping naked, but that hadn’t worked, either. She felt too vulnerable.
She pulled back the covers and, to her shock, discovered a folded sheet of paper there. Nadia hurried to the door to make sure it was locked, because it would be just her luck if housekeeping was making another sweep at just this moment.
No longer feeling even remotely sleepy, Nadia grabbed the sheet of paper, eyes darting to the end to read the signature first. The note was from Dante, and he asked her to meet him at the fence at midnight. He’d drawn a rough map of the retreat and marked the spot where he wanted to meet, then told her to tear up his note and flush it.
Nadia read the note three times, looking for subtle nuances that would let her know what was happening. Had the recordings been found? Was Dante contacting her on Nate’s behalf in a last-ditch effort to save her before she experienced some kind of unfortunate accident? Surely if he’d gone to the trouble of smuggling this note to her and driving out to Long Island at this time of night, it meant something bad had happened.
Checking the clock, willing midnight to hurry up and get here so she could end the suspense, Nadia changed out of her nightgown and back into her spa uniform once more.
* * *
Nadia’s pulse raced with nerves as she slunk through the dormitory halls. There was no curfew at the retreat, and she was free to wander the grounds at any time of night she wished. However, wandering around for a clandestine meeting with a friend from the outside was very much against the rules. If no one saw her leaving, then no one could ask her where she was going and what she was up to. She wasn’t sure what the consequences of breaking the rules would be—it wasn’t like the retreat staff could out-and-out punish one of their paying guests—but they surely had something in place to discourage such behavior, and she had no wish to find out what it was.
There were no formal retreat activities available after 10:00 P.M., so most of the guests were in their rooms, either in bed or preparing for bed, as Nadia hurried toward the fire stairs that were the exit closest to her room. She wasn’t supposed to use them unless there was a fire, but there was no alarm, and the less time she spent in the hallway, the better. She winced at the sound the door made thunking closed, but no one came running to investigate.
Phase one of her nighttime escapade had been successfully completed, and Nadia felt a little calmer. The hardest part should be over. Moving as silently as possible in her spa moccasins, which really wanted to squeak with her every step, she made her way down the stairs until she reached the fire door at the bottom. There was an alarm on this door, but Nadia took advantage of a manual override and slipped out into the night.
The moment Nadia stepped outside, she realized she should have put on one of the sweaters the retreat had conveniently provided. It was late March, and the weather was usually temperate and comfortable during the day. Nighttime was a different story, and the spa uniform wasn’t exactly toasty warm. Nadia shivered, but she wasn’t about to press her luck by going back to get a sweater.
The walking paths around the retreat were all lighted, though only with small, dim bulbs discreetly marking the way. Nadia didn’t like the idea that someone looking out a window might see her in that dim light, so she avoided the paths, trying not to trample the flowers as she wended her way toward the rendezvous point Dante had marked. Her sneaking around would probably make her more conspicuous if someone spotted her, but there was no one out and about at this time of night, at least not that she could see. Every once in a while, she glanced over her shoulder at the main building, checking the lighted windows to reassure herself that no one was looking out.
Eventually, she came to the wall of trees that hid the interior of the retreat from view. It also hid the fence from the view of the guests, but for Nadia out of sight had never been out of mind.
The rendezvous point Dante had marked on his makeshift map was, naturally, a long way from the lighted, guarded front entrance. The wall of trees Nadia had to fight her way through was not as carefully pruned and weeded here as it was at the entrance, and she wished she had a machete-wielding guide to help her through. But the weeds and underbrush provided extra assurance that no one from the retreat would witness her clandestine meeting.
Nadia moved slowly through the trees, trying not to betray her location. There was no reason to suspect there was some kind of trap waiting for her, but after all that had happened to her in the past weeks, she didn’t think paranoia was at all unreasonable. She came to a dead stop as soon as she could see the fence through the trees, and she crouched down to examine her surroundings more closely while keeping under cover.
The line of trees ended about ten yards short of the fence, giving way to a strip of neatly mowed grass. Nadia feared she would be terribly exposed out there, but exposed to whom she didn’t know. There were no guard posts, and no one patrolled the perimeter of the retreat. The place might feel like a prison to her, but it wasn’t a prison. And there was nothing but woods on the other side of the fence, so there shouldn’t be anyone on that side who could see her. She stared into those woods until her eyes hurt, trying to find Dante in the darkness, but he either wasn’t there yet or was well hidden.
Taking a deep breath for courage, Nadia rose from her crouch and stepped cautiously onto the grass, ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble.
No sirens blared, no angry voices shouted at her to halt, and Nadia told herself there was such a thing as too much caution. She was going to give herself a heart attack if she didn’t stop jumping at shadows.
“Dante?” she called out, not daring to do so very loud
ly.
“Here,” Dante’s voice answered from the shadowed trees on the other side of the fence. She moved toward the voice as a weedy bush rustled and Dante emerged from it.
Her desire to rush forward and throw her arms around Dante was almost embarrassing in its intensity, the sight of a familiar face bringing tears to her eyes. Of course, there was a seven-foot-tall iron fence between them, so throwing her arms around him might have been awkward.
Nadia hurried to the edge of the fence, grabbing the bars that separated her from him to keep from doing something inappropriate with her hands. She barely knew Dante, and she wasn’t sure how much she trusted him, but she was ever so glad to see him, even if she worried that he came with bad news.
“Has something bad happened?” she asked without preamble, her voice coming out breathless as if she’d just run from the main building rather than walked.
Dante blinked in surprise. “Hello to you too. And no, nothing bad has happened.”
Nadia let out a shaky sigh of relief, her knees suddenly feeling wobbly. “Then what are you doing here?” she asked. Too late, she realized how rude her question sounded, and she mentally snarled at herself to calm down and think before she spoke. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that how it came out. I’m glad you’re here. I’m just … surprised to see you.” One thing she was sure of: he wasn’t here for a social call. He’d gone to too much trouble to arrange this meeting for there not to be weighty reasons behind it.
“No worries,” Dante said with a wry grin. “I don’t take offense that easily.”
Nadia raised an eyebrow at him and couldn’t suppress a hint of a smile. “That so?” She’d managed to offend him pretty badly on more than one occasion. Of course, she’d been trying to browbeat him into revealing his true identity at the time, so one could argue she’d been working pretty hard at it.