by Black, Jenna
“Why were you hoping to talk to him?” Nadia asked as soon as the waitress moved away.
Athena’s blue eyes narrowed shrewdly as she regarded Nadia, her head cocked slightly to the side. “Do you mind me asking what your relationship is with Nathaniel these days? I don’t suppose we’d be having this conversation if you were still his intended.”
Nadia held her chin a little higher. The last thing she wanted to do was talk about her troubles with a total stranger. Even if that stranger had intrigued her. “Forgive me for being blunt, but that doesn’t seem to be any of your business.”
If Nadia had said something that blunt to an Executive out in society, the reaction would have been one of affront. There were subtle ways of avoiding conversation that were much more elegant and decorous, but she was done with being elegant and decorous. She reached for her glass of ice water, taking a drink to stop herself from apologizing.
To her surprise, Athena grinned at her. “A no-nonsense kind of girl, hmm? I like that. Reminds me a bit of what Ellie was like before that rat bastard husband of hers destroyed her.”
Nadia choked on her mouthful of water, practically dropping the glass on her lap as she coughed. No one talked about the Chairman like that. Especially not to complete strangers. Nadia hastily put her glass down and held her napkin to her lips, trying to stop coughing.
Athena clucked her tongue. “You’re not the only one who can be blunt. You’ll find a lot of the fine manners you’ve been taught aren’t terribly useful here.”
Nadia nodded to indicate she understood. Her throat still itched, and the coughing fit had brought tears to the corners of her eyes. She was incapable of saying anything out loud.
“You’re right that your relationship with Nathaniel is none of my business. I was asking because I wondered if there was a chance you would speak to him in the future. I certainly won’t have that chance, but I promised Ellie I would do everything in my power to get a message to him.”
A shiver traveled down Nadia’s spine. Athena’s face had gone grim and serious, no hint of her bright smile remaining. “But why would she have needed you to get a message to him? In ten years, she made no effort to contact him, not even once. If she had something she wanted to tell him—”
“Rat bastard husband, remember?”
Nadia wondered if lack of sleep had stolen her ability to think. She had no idea what Athena was getting at. She shook her head, unable to come up with a coherent question.
“It was the price she paid to avoid being arrested for treason,” Athena explained, which only served to make Nadia more confused.
“Wait, what?” she asked, shaking her head again in case that would make her brain start working properly. “Treason?”
Athena frowned. “Why do you think Ellie spent the last decade of her life here? What does society think happened?”
“Umm. The rumor is that the Chairman cheated on her and she was so angry she locked herself away and refused to ever talk to him or Nate again.” A rumor the Chairman himself had confirmed only the day before. Although it suddenly occurred to Nadia that if she agreed with Nate that Dorothy was an impostor, that made the rest of the Chairman’s story equally suspect.
“Hmpf!” Athena snorted. “Leave it to him to cast himself as the cheater and still make himself come out looking better than Ellie.”
“So that’s not what happened?”
Athena shook her head. “Not hardly. It was Ellie who cheated. She and Rat Bastard had a polite arranged marriage, and they didn’t hate each other. They got along well enough to produce the required heir, and after that they were married in name only. But Ellie wanted more out of life, and she fell in love. Rat Bastard was hardly celibate himself, but when he found out about the affair…” Athena’s lips twisted in something between a sneer and a snarl. “Just sending her off to a retreat for the rest of her life wasn’t punishment enough, not for him. He wanted her to suffer. So he told her that she was never going to see her son again. He said he would argue that cheating on him was an act of treason, and he would have her arrested if she ever made any attempt to see or even contact Nathaniel. She thought that maybe when they declared her terminal, he might relent. But no.”
Nadia could hardly believe what she was hearing.
Treason.
Could the Chairman possibly have made a charge like that stick? If Nadia recalled her history correctly, Henry VIII had used similar charges as excuses to kill off inconvenient wives, but that was rather a long time ago. Surely such a charge wouldn’t stick in modern times.
But if Nadia had been in Ellie Hayes’s shoes, she very much doubted she’d have been willing to take the risk. Any reasonable person would agree that adultery was not treason, but the Chairman had ways of making reasonable people act unreasonably. After all, he’d been planning to torture and execute Nadia on a specious treason charge, and she saw no evidence that he wouldn’t have gotten away with it if she hadn’t managed to blackmail him.
“All these years…” Nadia said wonderingly under her breath. “All these years, Nate was convinced his mother was a selfish bitch who abandoned him. He thought she didn’t love him enough to stay around and face her difficulties with his father.”
Athena nodded. “That’s what Rat Bastard wanted him to think. He wanted to build up the barrier high enough that Nathaniel would never bother trying to see through it. He’s not a man you want as your enemy.”
And yet that’s exactly what he was to Nadia. It might have been her parents who had officially banished her to the Sanctuary, but it was the Chairman who had put them in the position where banishment seemed like their best option. Would he be satisfied with his revenge? Or would he want more?
Nadia shook off her worries about any future escalation of the Chairman’s revenge. Her chief worry now was what would happen to Gerri if she went looking for the recordings. She regarded Athena Lawrence’s open, friendly face, wondering if it would be foolishly naive of her to take anything the woman said at face value. For all she knew, the woman was clinically insane and was making up the whole story. Or was just someone who had an ax to grind with the Chairman and wanted to cause strife in his family.
But if anything she said was true, then she could potentially be Nadia’s ally. An ally who’d lived at the Sanctuary for years and knew all its ins and outs. Who might be able to help Nadia formulate a plan to slip through the Sanctuary’s security and get to a phone. She didn’t quite dare imagine an escape attempt, not when she had nowhere safe to go and no access to money, but if she could at least talk to Gerri and warn her not to touch the recordings, maybe her imprisonment wouldn’t seem quite so terrible.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” Nadia said, “how did you end up living here?”
Athena’s smile turned crooked, and even bitter. “The man Ellie loved was my brother. I helped cover for the affair. My brother died in Riker’s Island after the Chairman had him arrested on a trumped-up embezzlement charge. My family knew the true story and knew that I’d helped Ellie and my brother meet. They decided the whole disaster was my fault, and they sent me here. It didn’t all shake out until more than a year after Ellie was sent away. I don’t think the Chairman ever realized I was sent to the same retreat, or he would have looked for some way to have me moved elsewhere so Ellie wouldn’t have a friend.”
Nadia didn’t know what to say. Even before the murder of the original Nate Hayes, she’d known the Chairman was a ruthless man and that he was not afraid of using and abusing his power. But though she’d thought herself a realist, she’d had no idea the depth of the corruption in his soul.
“Don’t feel too sorry for me,” Athena said. “At least I ended up here instead of in Riker’s Island, like my brother. And it’s not so bad, really, once you get used to it.”
Nadia doubted she would ever get used to it. The living conditions were beyond reproach, and she remembered Dante’s barbed comment about how luxurious life in a retreat would seem to a powerless
Basement-dweller, living in squalor and deprivation and danger. But no amount of creature comforts could change the fact that she was a prisoner here, even if no one would ever admit it in those words. As an Executive, and as the presumed future bride of the Chairman Heir, her life had never truly been her own; but at least before, she’d had the illusion of freedom. Now, even that was gone.
“I imagine it’s harder on someone your age,” Athena said, giving her a motherly smile of sympathy. “But it gets better. You have my word on it.”
Nadia tried to return the smile, but she suspected the expression looked more sickly than anything. Their lunches arrived, saving Nadia from having to respond. The bacon cheeseburger looked and smelled delicious, but there was an odd combination of hunger and nausea in her stomach that gave her pause.
How long did she have before Gerri acted? Was she already too late? How could she sit here and indulge in a hamburger when her sister’s life was in danger?
“What’s wrong, dear?” Athena asked, her fork poised above an elegant salad. “You’ve gone quite pale.”
Nadia tried to pull herself together. Tormenting herself with her fears wasn’t going to help anything. She had to do something more productive than that, had to channel her energy into figuring out a way to salvage the situation. She didn’t have time for her usual caution, nor did she have time to sit and contemplate Athena’s potential motives.
She needed help; she needed it now; and Athena was the only person she could imagine might give it to her. Swallowing her misgivings—and ignoring her food—Nadia clasped her hands together in her lap, leaned over the table, and spoke in a voice low enough she could be sure no one overheard.
“I have a desperate need to contact someone on the outside,” she confided. “And I mean desperate as in life or death.”
Athena nodded and frowned sympathetically, but Nadia could tell at once that she was having the typical adult response to a teenager saying something was life or death. The same response Nadia’s own parents had had, that had kept them from letting her talk to Gerri before she was carted away.
“I swear I’m not exaggerating,” Nadia said. Her voice rose, and she forced herself to lower it once more. She didn’t know what might happen to her if her words were overheard, especially by a member of the retreat staff, but she didn’t want to find out.
“Look,” she continued, “my sister has reason to believe I have blackmail evidence on the Chairman.” The spark of renewed interest in Athena’s eyes suggested Nadia had chosen the right course to pursue. “It’s not what she thinks it is, but I’m afraid she’s going to try to use it to force the Chairman to reinstate the agreement between our families.”
Athena leaned forward conspiratorially. “What is it you really have?” Her eyes were alight with the thought of sticking it to the man she called Rat Bastard.
“I can’t tell you,” Nadia said, because while she was throwing caution to the wind, she didn’t dare let herself go too far. “I can tell you that I recorded him saying something incriminating, but I have to leave it at that. The problem is, the Chairman knows I have the recordings and knows I have them hidden. Right now, there’s no way he can find them. But my sister can, and I’m terrified that she’ll lead him right to them. I have to find a way to contact her and warn her away.”
The skepticism was back in Athena’s eyes. Nadia realized how outlandish her story sounded. Hell, for all Athena knew, Nadia had been shut up in the Sanctuary because she was a pathological liar.
“I have to get to a phone,” Nadia concluded. “I thought maybe someone who’s been here as long as you have might have some idea how I could do it. I don’t care if I get caught or get in trouble, as long as I have a chance to make that call first.”
Nadia swallowed hard, fighting back a rising tide of panic as her fears resurfaced one by one, tightening her chest and making a trickle of sweat run down her back. She was calling attention to herself, and one of the uniformed servers was heading toward the table. Her untouched burger was getting cold, and Athena had done nothing more than rearrange her salad on her plate as she listened to Nadia talk. Their eyes met across the table.
Athena shoved a forkful of salad into her mouth. Then she reached over to pat Nadia’s hand, looking relaxed, if a little bit sad. Nadia’s stomach was doing flips, but she took her cue from Athena and forced herself to take a bite out of her burger.
“Is everything okay over here?” the server asked. Her name tag identified her as “Susan,” and she had the overly bright smile that Nadia was beginning to think was a prerequisite for retreat staff.
Nadia’s mouth was so dry she could hardly chew, and the lukewarm burger felt like a lump of clay. Fortunately, Athena answered for both of them.
“We’re fine,” she said. “We were talking about Ellie, and it made us both a little sad. But life goes on for the rest of us, so we’ll talk about something else from now on.”
Susan gave them both sad eyes, then patted Nadia’s shoulder. “If you need anything, please don’t hesitate to let us know. And we do have grief counseling available, if you—”
Nadia managed to swallow the lump of burger and shook her head. “Thank you, but like Athena said, we’re fine. I was very young when I last saw Mrs. Hayes. I’m sad about what happened, but I don’t need a grief counselor or anything.”
Susan nodded and patted her shoulder again. Nadia had to fight her desire to pull away. “All right, honey. But if you change your mind…”
Nadia nodded solemnly. “I will definitely let someone know.”
She let out a sigh of relief when Susan wandered away.
“They mean well,” Athena said with a roll of her eyes.
“Uh-huh.” Sometimes, meaning well just wasn’t enough. Knowing her stomach was going to protest, she took another bite of her burger, figuring if she ate, it was less likely there’d be another well-meaning intervention.
“Getting to a phone will be quite a challenge,” Athena said, looking at her salad with great intensity as she speared a cherry tomato. “The staff are forbidden to bring phones with them to work here, so you’d have to get to one of the land lines in the business offices.”
At Tranquility, sneaking into one of the offices would have been hard, but not impossible. But here, where there were key cards and curfews and security cameras …
“It can be done,” Athena said. “Not without getting caught, though.”
“What happens if I get caught?”
“They deactivate your key card for a while so you can’t get out of the residence hall. No library, no gym, no movies, no classes. Nothing. And they’ll deliver food to your room, because you can’t get to the dining hall. Depending who’s on duty at the time, they might also confiscate any books or paper you have in your room. It’s death by boredom, and it’s no fun.”
“Sounds like the voice of experience.”
Athena grinned, but neither confirmed nor denied Nadia’s guess.
“So if I’m willing to pay the price, how would I go about sneaking into one of those offices to use the phone?”
Athena grinned again. “Well, if you happen to be lucky enough to know someone who knows the master override code for all the card readers…”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Waiting was pure hell. Nadia knew that every second she delayed was one more second for Gerri to get her hands on the recordings. But regardless of how urgently Nadia wanted to warn her sister, there was no way she was getting to a phone at the Sanctuary during the day. In fact, Athena had suggested she wait until 3:00 A.M. to have the least likelihood that anyone would be up and about to stop her. So she struggled her way through the day, trying not to act as if she wanted to crawl out of her skin.
She retired to her room shortly after dinner, which she could barely manage to choke down thanks to her nerves. And that was when the true waiting game began.
She had too much time to think. Too much time to imagine what Gerri might be up to, and to deride her
self for not telling Gerri the truth in the first place. As long as she was dwelling on her worries, Nadia couldn’t help wondering about Athena’s motives in befriending her so quickly—and giving her the override code to the doors. When Nadia had asked her how she’d gotten the code, she’d blithely described how she’d seduced one of the retreat staff who worked the night shift in the dorm.
“She’s quite a sweet little thing,” Athena had said with a conspiratorial wink. “A little naive, perhaps, but she has an adventurer’s soul and loves taking risks. Fooling around with one of her Executive charges strikes her as something excitingly dangerous, and she never noticed how closely I watched when she used the override code to open the doors without leaving a record.”
“And your trysts aren’t caught on the security cameras?” Nadia had asked.
“They would be if she didn’t turn them off for the few seconds we need them to be off.”
Athena’s attitude had been careless to say the least, although her actions could have cost her lover her job—and possibly put the kind of black mark on her record that would make it impossible to find another. Nadia wondered if Athena would feel bad if her lover ended up in the Basement when their affair was over, and it didn’t exactly make her feel confident that Athena was the compassionate friend she pretended to be. But Gerri didn’t have time for her to indulge in second thoughts.
Time ticked away with exquisite slowness. The bed check happened precisely at eleven o’clock, and though she could stay up as late as she wanted as long as she was in her room, Nadia turned off the light to give any patrolling staff the impression that she was asleep.
And the staff did patrol the hall, whether they called it that or not. They wore soft-soled shoes, but as one by one the residents of the dormitory turned off their lights and went to sleep, the silence that descended made even soft footfalls noticeable. Nadia sat on her bed, fully clothed, listening carefully to those footfalls, getting a feel for how often the patrols occurred.