Nate reminded himself that he didn’t actually care how far half a klick was, that he’d run another five miles if that was what it took to get Nadia out of the Sanctuary. He took off after Dante.
It felt to Nate’s burning lungs and leg muscles that they had run at least a mile when Dante called a halt again. This time, he allowed Nate to get a little closer to the circle of light surrounding the Sanctuary’s fence, but he still made him stop before Nate could see much of anything.
“If you could see the guy in the tower,” Dante reminded him, “then he could see you. The last thing we need to do is put him on alert before Nadia gets there.”
Nate looked at his watch. It had been a good thirty minutes since they’d talked to Nadia. “She should be there already,” he said as his heart rate jacked up on a fresh surge of adrenaline. It felt like it had taken him forever to get here, and Nadia had had much less ground to cover. If the Sanctuary staff had caught her trying to escape …
“She’s cautious, Nate,” Dante said with a hint of impatience. “It takes a while to get from place to place when you’re cautious. Not that you’d know about that.”
Nate closed his eyes and ordered himself not to rise to the bait. And not to get testy that Dante insisted on calling him Nate when they were far from friends. “You really want to pick a fight now?” Talk about your bad timing.
“I’m not picking a fight. I’m just telling it like it is. I’m going to get closer, and you’re going to wait here. Might be a good time to get out the gun and turn the safety off. If things look like they’re about to go to hell, I’ll whistle. Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re sure you have something to shoot at. And try not to shoot Nadia or me if it comes to that.”
Nate’s self-control was definitely getting better. He refrained from making a smart-ass reply. He was never going to like Dante, but he had to grudgingly admire the guy. By being here, he was defying not only his official bosses in the security department, but his unofficial ones in the resistance. It took major guts to do that.
Nate withdrew the gun that he’d stuck in the back of his pants. He couldn’t see the safety in the oppressive darkness of the trees, but he found it by feel and flicked it off as Dante crept forward once again.
* * *
Nadia hit the ground with a thump that rattled her teeth. Her ankle buckled on impact, sending a stab of pain up her leg. She choked off a cry of pain as she fell to her hands and knees. The lights of the guard tower felt like a spotlight, picking her form out of the darkness and screaming “she’s trying to escape” to anyone nearby. Her ankle throbbed, but she felt too vulnerable in the light to wait for it to ease up.
Hobbling as fast as she could, she half-walked, half-limped toward the trees. She caught a flash of motion, nothing more than a patch of shadow darker than its surroundings, and she came to a sudden halt, panting with exertion and pain.
“Dante?” she called in a breathless whisper, her hand straying to the canister of knockout gas, in case it wasn’t him.
“Keep moving!” Dante said abruptly, stepping into the fringes of the light.
Nadia wanted to throw her arms around him and weep, but Dante was all business, grabbing her and dragging her toward the trees. She stumbled along behind him, her ankle screaming in protest. Once they left the circle of light, she could barely see anything. The cloudless night and Dante’s black clothes made him practically invisible.
As soon as they were safely under cover of the trees, Dante hauled her into his arms and hugged her so tight she could barely breathe. Not that she had the slightest inclination to complain.
“Are you all right?” he whispered in her ear, and the brush of his lips against her skin made her shiver.
Her sister was dead, her life was in ruins, someone had just tried to kill her, but other than that …
Nadia pulled back from the embrace so she could look up into Dante’s eyes and drink in the sight of him.
“I thought I would never see you again,” she whispered.
He gazed down at her, opening and closing his mouth a couple of times as if he couldn’t quite decide what to say. In the end, he settled for kissing her, his lips hot, hungry, and almost desperate against hers. He pulled away sooner than she wanted, his hands cupping her face.
“I wish we had time for a proper hello,” he said, “but we have to get moving.”
Nadia agreed on both counts. She had no idea how long she had before the alarm was raised, or even what the Sanctuary staff would do about it when it was—and she didn’t want to find out.
“Just give me your arm for a bit,” she said, slipping her hand into the crook of his elbow. “I’m a little gimpy.”
Dante swept her off her feet so fast she gasped in surprise. Her arms settled around his neck by instinct, and she held on tight as he made his way through the darkened trees. She couldn’t help cuddling against him, noticing the firmness of his chest and the breadth of his shoulders. He carried her with an effortless strength that was undeniably sexy, and she felt way safer in his arms than she had any right to feel under the circumstances.
“Where’s Nate?” she asked, though she was reluctant to let anyone else intrude on this moment. “And Agnes?”
“I left Nate a little ways back,” Dante answered, “and Agnes is with the car. We’ll have you out of here in no time.”
And then what, she wondered, but didn’t ask because she doubted Dante had any more answers than she.
* * *
Nate’s breath frosted in the air, and the cooling sweat on his skin made him shiver. He stared intently at the little slice of the fence and tower he could see from his position.
The shivering got worse and worse, and Nate regretted his moment of gallantry in giving Agnes his jacket. It felt like the sweat from the long run was freezing against his skin, and he held the gun with great care, afraid his shaking fingers might get him into trouble.
The wait seemed to last forever, and it took all of Nate’s willpower to keep himself planted in position. He would never forgive himself if he crept forward to see what was taking so long and someone spotted him and sounded the alarm. He hoped the lack of commotion meant nothing had gone wrong at least.
Eventually, he saw movement in the trees coming toward him. He gripped the gun with both hands, then let out a shuddering breath when he saw Dante approaching, carrying Nadia like she weighed about two pounds. She was cuddled intimately against his chest, one arm locked securely around his neck.
Nate turned the safety back on and stood up. Jealousy stirred in his gut, an instinctive reaction he couldn’t will away, no matter how much he wanted to.
Throughout his life, Nadia had always been there for him. She’d understood him like no one else and just generally been his rock. He genuinely wanted her to be happy, and he wanted her to find love, just as he had found it with Kurt. That didn’t make it any easier to accept the changes a burgeoning romance would make to their friendship. Somehow, he had to train himself to stop relying on her so heavily, to get used to the idea of her being someone else’s rock now.
“Why did it have to be him of all people?” Nate muttered to himself. Couldn’t she have fallen for someone who wasn’t such a dick?
A dick who could have pulled off this whole rescue without any help from Nate, thank you very much. It was Dante who’d gotten word of Gerri’s death and warned Nate. It was Dante who’d provided the transportation. And it was Dante Nadia had called for help. Nate was merely tagging along, proving himself to be exactly the kind of useless aristocrat Dante thought he was.
Nate shoved his self-pity to the side. He could bemoan his uselessness later. Nadia was out, but they were hardly out of the woods—har, har—yet.
As soon as Nate stood up, Nadia raised her head from Dante’s shoulder and stopped cuddling against him. Nate wondered if she was trying to spare his feelings. Then he wondered why he always seemed to think everything was about him.
Damn, he needed to get
out of his own head.
“Nate!” Nadia cried with a smile that would have lit up the night if it weren’t for the shadows in her eyes. She held out her hand to him. “I’d give you a hug, but this caveman refuses to put me down.”
Nate clasped the offered hand and squeezed it firmly. “Are you hurt?”
“Just a twisted ankle,” she assured him. “I just need to walk it off.”
“We need to hurry,” Dante said, not about to put her down. “We’ll move faster with me carrying you than with you limping.”
Nadia shot a pleading look Nate’s way, but he shook his head, reluctantly agreeing with Dante. “For the duration of Operation Rescue Nadia, he’s in charge. Let’s get the damn thing over with before I kill him.”
There was one and only one benefit to having Dante carry Nadia the whole way back to the car: even the superspy couldn’t run through darkened woods while carrying someone, at least not indefinitely. Which meant that not only could Nate keep up, he didn’t have to do all that panting and sweating in front of Nadia.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Despite Dante’s suspicions, Agnes was in the car, huddling in Nate’s jacket, when they burst through the woods and into the grocery store parking lot.
No one had spoken throughout the course of the hike, aside from a couple requests from Nadia to be put down, which Dante ignored. They were probably about as quiet and subtle as a herd of elephants crashing through the underbrush, but it didn’t seem like there was anyone around to hear.
Agnes leaned over and opened the car door before Nate could reach it, and Dante laid Nadia carefully on the seat as if she might break if he put her down too hard. He closed the door behind her, and he and Nate both climbed in the front. Nate didn’t know about the others, but he didn’t feel remotely safe, even though they seemed to have gotten away cleanly.
Dante pulled out of the driveway and hung a right, pushing the car up to the speed limit fast enough to look suspicious to anyone who was watching.
“So, where are we going?” Nadia asked from the backseat after having exchanged a brief greeting with Agnes.
Nate looked at Dante, hoping he had some suggestion of what to do and where to go now, but he looked as clueless as Nate felt.
“We’re still working on that part,” Nate said. “We figured we needed to concentrate on getting you out first.” Which was certainly true, but he wondered if any of them had really thought they were going to succeed. Until Nadia had called them, their rescue plans had been vague at best.
He doubted his answer was what you’d call satisfying, but Nadia took it in stride, as she seemed capable of doing in even the worst situations. “Why don’t you start by telling me the whole story,” she prompted. “Including why you and Agnes dressed up so much to break me out of the retreat.”
As Dante drove resolutely away from the Sanctuary but not toward anywhere in particular, Nate filled Nadia in on everything that had happened from the moment he’d received Dante’s call at the theater.
* * *
Nadia was still shaking with cold and residual nerves as she listened to Nate’s recounting of the night’s events. She raised her eyebrows at Agnes a couple of times, surprised and touched that the timid girl had put herself at risk as she had. Though it would have been better for all if Agnes weren’t with them. She knew too many of their secrets already, and the more time she spent with them, the more she would learn—and the deeper a hole she would dig for herself. Nadia wondered if the girl had any clue how catastrophic her decisions tonight were going to turn out to be. Had she figured out yet that she couldn’t go back?
“There’s something I don’t understand,” Agnes said after Nate had finished explaining everything.
Nadia was looking at Agnes, but out of the corner of her eye, she saw the face that Nate made. There was actually a lot Agnes didn’t understand, but she didn’t seem to know that.
“What’s that?” Nate asked.
“You said your father can afford to kill you now because he has Dorothy.”
“Yes.”
“What does Dorothy have to do with it? I thought once he found the recordings, your father was free to eliminate anyone who knew too much.”
Nate looked puzzled. “Well, yeah. But he couldn’t kill me because he needed an heir, and now he has Dorothy for that.”
Agnes looked just as puzzled as Nate did. “But he still has a backup of the original Nathaniel Hayes, and that backup scan was done before you learned any of his secrets. Why couldn’t he just create a new Replica and start from scratch? I mean, it would be really expensive and all, but…”
Nate squirmed a little in his seat. “I know you’ve heard that the hiatus in the Replica program is temporary, but that’s a lie. There won’t be any more backups or Replicas. Ever.”
Agnes’s eyes went wide, and her mouth dropped open in shock. Nadia could only imagine the girl’s dismay at discovering how she and her father had been played. With Paxco’s chief source of revenue gone, Nate as its Chairman Heir became a considerably less appealing marriage prospect. Would Chairman Belinski really have wanted his daughter tied to a state on the verge of economic collapse? Nadia was quite certain Chairman Hayes had never mentioned that little issue during the marriage negotiations.
Agnes opened and closed her mouth a few times with false starts before she took a deep breath and shook her head. “There’s obviously been a lot of lying going on. More than you know about, apparently. Remember I said there was something fishy going on?”
She was talking to Nate—she’d had no such conversation with Nadia—but a lump of dread was steadily rising in Nadia’s throat.
Nate nodded cautiously.
“Well, the first fishy thing that happened was the announcement about the Replica program.”
Nate grinned wryly. “You mean you don’t believe my father when he says the press was exaggerating and it’s just a temporary glitch?”
Agnes shook her head. “It’s not that. At least not exactly. My father and I were sworn to secrecy—for obvious reasons—but part of the appeal of the marriage agreement was that my father and I would both have backup scans. We freaked out when we heard the news, but your father assured us the Replica program is still up and running. It’s just that he’s running low on storage space for all the backups so he’s picking and choosing who he’ll use it for.”
Nate shook his head. “That’s not true. It can’t be true.”
Nadia found she was gripping the seat in front of her so hard her fingers were going numb. She hadn’t even realized she’d reached out to grab it. “He’s just stringing you along,” she said with more hope than conviction. “After you sign the agreement, he’ll regretfully tell you—”
“My father and I had our scans done on Friday.”
“No,” Nate said again, as if denying what he didn’t want to hear could make it not true.
“Maybe it’s all a scam,” Nadia said. “Maybe he just pretended to make backups.” But she didn’t believe her own theory.
“That has to be it!” Nate said.
Somehow, without meaning for it to happen, Nadia’s hand had found Nate’s, and their fingers twined together. Whatever else kept them apart, in this they were together.
“What is it?” Agnes asked. “Why is this … upsetting you so much?”
Still holding on to Nate’s hand, Nadia let herself think back to that dreadful day when she had been arrested. Thought back to the deal she’d made with the Chairman. She remembered Thea somehow messing with the electronic lock so that they couldn’t get into her vault. Remembered the Chairman going back to the other room to retrieve a key from Dirk Mosely’s dead body. Remembered him walking back to the vault with blood on his hands.
And remembered the moment before he’d finally gotten the vault door open, when all the lights had suddenly dimmed.
Just like they did when a Replica was created.
“Thea’s not dead,” Nadia murmured in horror. “She mad
e a Replica of herself before the Chairman destroyed her.”
And if Thea was still alive, that meant that everything Nate and Nadia had gone through had been for nothing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Nadia had been so shocked by the realization that Thea was still alive and kicking that she didn’t immediately realize she had spoken aloud. Not until Dante and Agnes asked, “Who’s Thea?” in concert.
Nadia blinked and shook her head as her mind continued to reel. Chairman Hayes had tricked her. All this time, she’d been comforting herself with the knowledge that no matter what bad things had happened to her, she had made a difference in the world by destroying the monstrous machine/creature that was Thea. She thought she had saved lives. She thought her own sacrifices were worth it. And all along, the Chairman had been laughing at her behind her back, biding his time until he located the blackmail recordings so he could do away with the pesky little threat she offered him and return to business as usual.
“Nadia?” Dante prompted. “Who’s Thea?”
“Someone who shouldn’t be alive,” Nate answered for her. “And that’s all we can say about the subject, so don’t ask any questions.”
“I’m the one with the car, asshole,” Dante retorted. “You in the mood for a walk?”
“Cut it out,” Agnes said to the boys before they could escalate hostilities. She turned to Nadia with both worry and sympathy in her eyes. “So this Thea person being alive is bad, isn’t it?”
Nadia nodded. “Very, very bad.”
“And you and Nate weren’t supposed to know about it, because Chairman Hayes thought you’d release your blackmail recordings if you did.”
This time, Nadia didn’t respond, as if by now going silent, she could stop Agnes’s agile mind from putting more puzzle pieces together and figuring out stuff she had no business knowing.
“And I tipped you off that she was alive by letting you know the Replica program is still active,” Agnes continued.