by Black, Jenna
In the old days, there was a good chance he would have blown the meeting off and weathered the storm of his father’s temper later. Pissing off his father had been one of his favorite pastimes, after all. That was before he knew his father could murder him in cold blood without missing a beat. And before Nate realized how badly he was shirking his duties as the Chairman Heir.
Long habit had Nate arriving at the Paxco Headquarters Building—formerly known as the Empire State Building—about a half hour late, despite what had started out as reasonably good intentions. Nate had vowed to himself that he would start being a more responsible heir and spend more time at work, learning the ropes so that he’d have a clue what he was doing when he became Chairman. He hadn’t quite lived up to that vow yet, but he was still reeling from everything he had learned about his father’s secret activities and about his own murder.
Nate didn’t feel like prolonging the inevitable, so he didn’t even stop by his own office before heading up to the top floor. He fully expected to be kept waiting even though he was already late, and when his father’s secretary told him to go right in, a chill of unease traveled down his spine. Maybe his father had decided to dispense with the mind games, now that he and Nate had all their cards on the table.
Nate dismissed the possibility as soon as it crossed his mind. The day the Chairman stopped playing mind games would be the day he died. Letting Nate come in immediately when he was used to having to wait was just one more, designed to put him off balance from the start.
The Chairman was standing in front of his floor-to-ceiling windows, holding a steaming cup of coffee in one hand while gazing out at the city majestically. The Empire State Building had once been the tallest building in the world, and though many other buildings had eclipsed it in size, the view from the top was still spectacular. Not that the Chairman was really admiring the view; he was just posing for effect.
The Chairman held the pose for a handful of seconds before taking a seat behind his desk. Usually, he had papers scattered all over his desk, but today it was meticulously neat, the dark leather blotter free from its usual clutter.
As was no doubt his father’s intention, Nate’s eyes were drawn immediately to the stack of stapled papers sitting in the middle of the blotter with a thick gold pen perched on top. The print on those papers was small, and Nate wasn’t very good at reading upside down anyway, but if he had to guess, he’d say they were contracts of some sort.
“You wanted to see me?” Nate said, hoping he sounded more nonchalant than he felt. His every instinct told him that something bad was about to happen, and the satisfied glint in the Chairman’s eyes reinforced those instincts.
“Yes,” the Chairman said with a predatory smile. “Please, have a seat.” He gestured toward the pair of chairs in front of his desk.
Nate didn’t want to sit, and if it weren’t nine o’clock in the morning, he might have invited himself over to his father’s liquor bar for a drink. Not that the delay would have gotten him anywhere. He forced his feet forward and lowered himself into a chair.
“What’s this about?” he asked. He tried not to stare at the pile of contracts, not wanting to give the Chairman any satisfaction.
Nate’s father leaned back in his chair and took a sip of coffee before answering. “You know that we’ve been hosting a delegation from Synchrony since Monday?”
Of course Nate knew that. He might be a little lax about his duties, but he wasn’t living in a cave. He frowned. “I think I heard about that in the news somewhere.”
Nate was pleasantly surprised to find he could still make wise-ass comments, considering what he now knew about his father. It felt almost normal, except for the way he tensed up on the inside after the words were out.
“I thought maybe it had escaped your attention, seeing as you failed to attend the dinner and cocktail party that were held in their honor. Did your majordomo misplace your invitation?”
Nate snorted in disdain. He attended at most one out of every five social events he was invited to, and most of those were only brief appearances, photo ops for the press. His father could hardly be surprised that he had chosen not to attend a dinner or cocktail party with a bunch of visiting dignitaries.
“If you called this meeting just to scold me for not coming to the party—” Nate started, leaning forward as if to rise to his feet.
“Of course not,” the Chairman said. “I know from experience that would be about as useful as scolding an infant for wetting its diaper.”
Nate gritted his teeth against the urge to defend himself. His father certainly had some justification for thinking of Nate as childish and irresponsible, and if he was going to turn over a new leaf, he would have to start getting more involved in both business and social politics. He settled back in his chair once more and waited for the Chairman to continue.
“As I’m sure you know—despite an astounding lack of firsthand experience—events of this sort are rarely the social occasions they appear to be to the general public. Chairman Belinski and I have had some very fruitful meetings about how to strengthen the bonds between our two states.”
Nothing surprising in that. Paxco had been courting Synchrony for some time, hoping to improve trade relations and gain better access to Synchrony’s low-cost, high-quality tech products. Paxco had sunk all of its R&D and manufacturing money into the Replica project, and now that Thea was gone, the Chairman must be desperately looking for new revenue streams to tap into. Most of the Synchrony tech was designed with military applications in mind, but it could easily be adapted to civilian use.
Of course, Paxco and Synchrony had already taken a significant step toward becoming bosom allies when Chairman Belinski’s niece had married into one of the top Paxco Executive families. It had been at the wedding reception for the happy couple that the Chairman had ordered his hatchet man to stab Nate to death because he’d overheard an incriminating conversation.
“You know,” Nate said, unable to keep his mouth wisely shut, “I don’t actually remember the wedding, seeing as you had me murdered and I only remember events up to my last backup, but I’m pretty sure one did actually take place and that it does create a bond between our states.”
His father’s smile was hard and cold.
“An apt observation,” the Chairman said. “There is nothing that unifies two states better than a marriage. And it just so happens that Chairman Belinski has a marriageable daughter. And I have a marriageable son.”
The blood drained from Nate’s face so fast it left him dizzy. He’d have leapt to his feet and shouted a protest, only he was afraid his knees wouldn’t hold him. The Chairman turned the stack of contracts around so that Nate could read them and see the words “marriage agreement” featured prominently at the top.
“I’m engaged to Nadia,” Nate said, but his voice came out sounding thin and tentative.
“Not by any legal definition of the term. Nadia Lake is too young to sign a legally binding marriage agreement. Agnes Belinski, however, will turn eighteen a week from Saturday. At 12:01 on that morning, she will sign her copy of the agreement, and your engagement will be official.”
Nate was shaking his head, his pulse racing. “You’ll destroy her,” he said, hardly able to absorb the cruelty of his father’s decision. Nate and Nadia had been unofficially engaged since he was six and she was four. Partially to scandalize people, and partially to help camouflage his sexual preferences, he’d given the press and the rest of Executive society the impression that he was already sleeping with her. And she’d just been a victim of a media storm that had her family hiding her away in the equivalent of a medieval convent. Everyone would assume she had done something terrible. Something so shameful that the Chairman could no longer countenance letting her marry his son. She would be seen as damaged goods, and no respectable Executive would be willing to marry her. Ever.
“Perhaps the two of you should have thought of that before you forced me to destroy the heart and soul of
our economy,” the Chairman said acidly. “As long as we had the revenue from the Replica program, you could marry within our state. Now, however, I have no choice but to use your marriage in a more politically advantageous manner.”
The explanation was pure bullshit. The Chairman’s intention was to punish Nate and to ruin Nadia’s life.
“I won’t do it!” Nate said, mining the fury that lay beneath his dismay. He stood up and found that his knees would hold him after all as he glared down at his father. “You can’t drag me to the altar at gunpoint.”
The Chairman, unaffected by Nate’s declaration, rose from his seat. “You will marry Agnes Belinski, or I will have you put in reprogramming to correct your sexual deviance. I’ll make certain Miss Belinski will still be waiting for you when they’re done with you. And I will, of course, suggest to the public that your deviance is due to Nadia’s inability to inspire you to correct your behavior. I don’t think that will do her marriage prospects much good either, do you?”
It took everything Nate had to hold himself together. He felt like he was literally going to explode, and he wanted to ram his fist through his father’s face. He should have known something like this was up as soon as he’d heard the Belinskis were visiting.
“Shall I call security to take you to a reprogramming facility? Or will you sign the contract?”
Nate wished he could believe his father was bluffing. Wished he had the guts to storm out of the office without signing the papers. But the Chairman was right. If Nate’s sexual preference was revealed, it would destroy Nadia’s reputation as surely as breaking the marriage agreement would. And he would come out of reprogramming a changed person, his spirit crushed. The only person Nate had ever known who’d gone through reprogramming had come out the other end a shell of himself, a broken man who was no longer interested in men—or in life in general. It had been years ago, but if Nate remembered correctly, the guy had checked himself into an upstate retreat within three months of returning to society, and he’d been there ever since.
“You can’t do this,” Nate said, but the words came out sounding more like a question than a statement. “The recordings…”
The Chairman raised an eyebrow. “What about them?”
“We won’t let you do this.” But the uncertainty in his voice undermined any chance of being convincing.
“You’re suggesting the two of you will release the recordings if I change the marriage agreement?” The Chairman sounded in equal parts amused and condescending. “Here’s the thing about blackmail, son: it only works if I believe you’re going to follow through on your threat.”
Nate tried to dredge up some fire and conviction. “I’ll do whatever it takes to protect her.”
“And you think releasing the recordings would protect her?” His father actually had the nerve to laugh. “Blackmail is like chess—you have to look past your next move and all the way to the end game. So let’s say I refuse to honor your demands. You then have to choose whether or not to release the recordings. What’s the upside to releasing them?”
Nate couldn’t have answered if he’d wanted to, his teeth clamped together so tightly his jaw ached. But his father wasn’t really interested in what Nate had to say anyway. This was a lecture, not a dialog.
“You’d probably get a little glow of satisfaction from sticking it to me, maybe even feel proud of yourself for proving me wrong. But I can’t see anything else good coming out of it, and that’s not whole lot of upside when you know releasing the recordings will cause riots at least, a war at worst. Now what’s the downside? Other than those thousands of people who might die if the worst happened?”
This time, the Chairman made no pretense of waiting for Nate’s response.
“The downside is that once those recordings are out, I no longer have any reason to keep Nadia alive. No reason to keep your boyfriend alive, either. So tell me, Nate: are you going to release those recordings?”
Nate was speechless, his mind searching desperately for a way out, a way to counter his father’s relentless logic.
“Nadia’s blackmail worked at the Fortress because with her life and yours both already forfeit, there wouldn’t have been much of a downside to releasing the recordings, and—in her starry-eyed worldview—there would have been the upside of stopping Thea’s experiments. I had reason to believe she would think that releasing the recordings was the ‘right’ thing to do. I don’t believe either of you would think that’s the case now.
“You’re going to sign the marriage contract,” the Chairman concluded, “and you’re going to do it now. We won’t make the announcement publicly until Agnes has come of age and signed as well, but I have already scheduled some time with Esmeralda and Gerald Lake to inform them of the change in plans.”
“Please—”
The Chairman picked up the phone. “If you haven’t started signing by the time I get security into this office, you’re going into reprogramming.”
He hit two buttons on the phone before Nate grabbed the pen. His hand was shaking with rage as he signed the contract, but he refused to accept the defeat. He had a little more than a week before Agnes would be old enough to sign the contract herself and seal their fates and Nadia’s. Somehow, he would have to find a way to get out of it before then.
There was no way he was changing his father’s mind. However, Chairman Belinski might be another story. Nate would learn as much as he could about his would-be father-in-law. And then he would find a way to convince the Chairman and/or his daughter that he was not the great catch they thought him to be.
CHAPTER FIVE
Nate left Headquarters as soon as he escaped his father’s office, his resolution to be a good heir blown out of the water. How could he possibly get anything done when the whole course of his life and Nadia’s had just been changed for the worse? Knowing that Nadia, his best friend, would one day be his wife had been a blessing. She knew about his secret life, and despite the expectations of Executive society, she had never condemned him for it. Certainly she’d never called it “sexual deviance,” as the Chairman just had. He’d never loved her as a man was supposed to love a woman, but she would have been the perfect wife for him, one who would never judge him or reveal his “shameful” secret to the rest of the world. Nate knew next to nothing about Agnes Belinski except that she had an old-lady name and had not made a good impression on the media, either with her looks or her demeanor. He didn’t have to know her to be certain she’d be far less accepting of him than Nadia.
But as bitter a pill as Nate had to swallow, it was nothing compared to the devastation the change of marriage plans would bring to Nadia’s life. The public humiliation she would suffer was something he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy. And it wasn’t the kind of thing that would blow over someday when the media found something more interesting to harp on. Her reputation could have been rebuilt after the scandal of her arrest, though not without difficulty, as evidenced by her stay at the retreat; but a second scandal, especially one of this magnitude, was a death blow.
Nadia wouldn’t be able to set foot in public without the media rubbing their hands together with glee as they dredged up her history. Not that she’d have much cause to set foot in public anyway. Executive society would ignore her as if she didn’t exist. She wouldn’t be welcome in anyone’s home, would receive no invitations, no visitors, no friendly phone calls. The ostracism would be complete, and Nate could only pray that she wouldn’t be bustled off to one of the upstate Executive retreats, never to be seen again.
Nate seethed for the entire ride back to his apartment, but there was a fair amount of dread mixed in with his fury. Someone would have to tell Nadia the news, and he feared that task would fall to him. Nadia would be allowed visitors at the retreat for the first time later this evening, and Nate had already made arrangements for a car to get him there the moment the gates opened. He’d assumed he’d be sharing the visiting hours with her parents and maybe her sister, but after his
father told the Lakes about his change of plans … Nadia’s mother would be too devastated by the news—and too angry at Nadia, even though none of this was her fault—to go through with the visit. And if Esmeralda stayed home, her husband and Gerri would, too. Leaving Nate as the only person who could tell Nadia that her world was coming to an end.
Unfortunately, Nate had once again underestimated his father’s capacity for cruelty. When Nate entered his apartment, he was immediately accosted by Hartman, his majordomo.
“The Chairman called,” Hartman told him, and Nate’s insides froze.
“Whatever he wanted, I don’t want to hear about it,” he said, giving Hartman his fiercest glare. Hartman often seemed to be at a loss for how to handle Nate’s petty rebellions, but he apparently had no doubts this time. When Nate strode away, Hartman followed on his heels.
“I’m afraid he was quite insistent, sir,” Hartman said.
“Ask me if I care.” Nate wondered if he should indulge his new enthusiasm for punching people by bashing in his majordomo’s nose. That would shut him up.
“Oh, you’ll care all right,” Hartman said ominously, and Nate came to a stop with a curse so foul it made his majordomo wince.
“What is it, then?” he snapped, feeling like he would go crazy if he heard any more bad news.
“Your father invites you to join him for a private dinner with Chairman Belinski and his daughter this evening.”