“Of course you don’t want to fight it,” he said. “It’s a sweet deal for you, isn’t it? You’ll go from being a little nobody from a little nothing state to the Chairman Spouse of the richest, most powerful state there is. You don’t give a shit how many lives you have to ruin to get what you want.”
Nate had the satisfaction of seeing Agnes flinch at his language. He had the brief thought that if Nadia could see him now, she’d tear into him for being such a bastard to a girl he didn’t even know. He certainly wasn’t playing his preferred public role of the charming rake. But if being a bastard was what it took to get rid of Agnes and save Nadia’s reputation, then he had zero qualms about it.
“I’m doing what’s best for my family and my state,” Agnes said, with all the spirit and fight of a lump of clay. “I’m sorry if it means someone will get hurt, but—”
“What if I tell you I can make your life far more miserable than your fifty-two-year-old marketing director would?” He fixed her with the coldest look he could manage, letting every bit of his fury show in his eyes.
She quickly averted her eyes, but instead of fleeing in terror she merely shrugged again. “People are mean to me all the time.” She made a sweeping head-to-toe gesture. “Look at me and ask yourself how much joy I’m expecting from a marriage.”
For the first time, Nate felt the tiniest twinge of genuine sympathy. He’d seen the way other Executive girls treated Nadia, who was beautiful and poised and strong. They were jealous of her status, eager to stab her in the back whenever they had a chance. Even if Agnes wasn’t prime marriage material outside of Synchrony, she was the daughter of the Chairman, in the top echelon of the Synchrony elite. She’d have been the object of the same kind of jealousy, and so far he’d seen no hint that she had the tools or the confidence with which to defend herself.
But just because Nate felt a little sorry for her didn’t mean he had the least interest in marrying her, even if the marriage arrangement wouldn’t have destroyed Nadia. She was a sacrificial lamb, being offered up for the slaughter by her power-hungry father. And the worst part about it was that she didn’t even seem to mind.
Threatening Agnes with the prospect of a miserable marriage wasn’t going to work, if that was what she’d expected all along. Nate was going to have to find some other way to sabotage the arrangement—preferably in such a way that his father wouldn’t see his hand in it—before Agnes turned eighteen and signed the papers to make it legally binding.
If only he had the faintest idea how he was going to pull it off …
* * *
Nadia had pulled out the phone Dante had snuck to her three times while she waited in her room for midnight to come. The lack of visitors had filled her with a sense of foreboding, and the temptation to call Nate and ask him why he hadn’t come was almost overwhelming. But there was always the remote chance that someone might hear her talking, that the staff would find out she was in possession of a contraband phone and take it away from her. It was a chance she wasn’t willing to take, and so each time the temptation hit, she managed to fight it off.
Nadia bundled up in a sweater before slipping outside for her midnight walk. Her nerves were even more fraught this time, and she found herself jumping at every sound, startled by every shadow.
What if Dante didn’t show up? No one else she’d been expecting had come for her today. What if everyone she knew had now abandoned her, leaving her to rot here in this gilded prison?
Nadia battled against the worries as she made her way through the lawns and flowerbeds toward the wall of trees. She was probably making something out of nothing. There was probably a benign explanation for why she hadn’t received any visitors today, and she was going to drive herself insane if she didn’t stop speculating. She should ignore the squirmy, uncomfortable feeling inside her that told her something was horribly wrong.
Her attempts to calm herself met with little success, and by the time she emerged from the trees into the clearing before the fence, her pulse was racing and her hands were clammy. If Dante didn’t show up, she didn’t think she could possibly resist making a phone call. There was no one to hear her out in the woods, and she needed that sense of connection as much as she needed to breathe.
“Dante?” she called out softly, already half-convinced that he wouldn’t be there. She peered into the trees beyond the fence, crossing her fingers and holding her breath. There was no sign of movement, no man-shaped shadows hidden among the tree trunks. “Dante?” she called again, a little louder, though her voice was shaky with nerves. He had promised to be here, and even if unforeseen circumstances had somehow prevented her family and Nate from visiting her, surely those circumstances wouldn’t affect Dante.
“I’m here,” Dante’s voice answered, and Nadia feared for a moment she was going to burst into tears of relief. She now saw the man-shaped shadow she’d been looking for—inside the fence.
“How did you get in here?” she asked, then wanted to slap herself for the silly question. It wasn’t like the fence was electrified or topped with barbed wire or anything. The spiky fleurs-de-lis at the top looked intimidating, but they wouldn’t stop a determined intruder.
“I climbed the fence,” he answered simply, as if her question hadn’t made her sound like an idiot. “It’s more for show than to actually keep people out. People stay away because they don’t want to be sent to prison for trespassing on an Executive retreat, not because they can’t get in.”
Nadia bit her lip as Dante came closer, close enough that the moonlight illuminated his face. “You should go back to the other side,” she said, looking nervously up and down the strip of grass. “If someone saw you…” The wheels of Paxco justice had never turned fairly, and a low-level Employee like Dante, caught trespassing on an Executive retreat with an underage Executive girl, would be ground into dust.
Dante dismissed the threat with a careless wave of his hand. “I’m a spy for Paxco security, remember? If I get caught, I can talk my way out of it.”
Nadia wasn’t as confident of his safety, and standing out on the grass where anyone could spot them—if anyone actually wandered around this part of the grounds at this time of night—struck her as tempting fate. She glanced over her shoulder at the trees behind her.
“Come on,” she said, putting a hand on Dante’s shoulder to urge him forward. “Let’s at least get you into some cover.” Touching him like that was an overly familiar gesture from an Executive to a servant, but it felt right and comfortable, and Dante seemed to have no objection.
Together, they entered the protection of the trees. Nadia led Dante to a fallen tree she had noticed on her way to the fence. It would give them something to sit on, and the gap in the canopy allowed moonlight to filter through. She wasn’t sure what she was going to say to him, or what they were going to talk about. Whining about her lack of visitors seemed petty, and Dante was unlikely to know what any of them had been thinking when they’d failed to show up. In fact, she wasn’t sure what she was hoping to get out of this encounter, except that she’d longed for contact when she felt abandoned.
As they sat together on the fallen tree, Nadia felt suddenly and surprisingly awkward. None of her highly polished Executive social skills had prepared her for a situation like this, for having a clandestine conversation with someone who was of such a different social class that it was almost as if they were from different worlds. He probably thought living in a retreat where you had no responsibilities and were waited on hand and foot was the pinnacle of luxury and Executive excess. No doubt he thought it was whiny and childish of her to complain about a life so many others would envy.
But when she looked Dante full in the face, with moonlight chasing away the shadows that had hidden his expression, she realized with a sinking feeling that he wasn’t here for social reasons of any kind.
“What’s happened?” she asked, dreading the answer. If something bad had happened to one of her family members, that would explain why they h
adn’t shown up for visiting hours. Though it wouldn’t explain why Nate hadn’t come. Unless something had happened to Nate again.
Dante didn’t answer immediately, and the look on his face was far from comforting.
“Dante, please! Tell me what’s wrong. You’re scaring me.”
He cleared his throat nervously. “I’m not supposed to know about this, and I’m not sure I should be the one to tell you.”
Nadia would have reached out and shaken him if she had any reason to suspect that would make him cough up the news sooner.
“Is someone hurt?” she asked, her voice going rough and tight. She remembered all too clearly the threats Dirk Mosely had made against Gerri’s children, and she couldn’t help worrying that he’d somehow reached out from beyond the grave to get his revenge.
“No, no. Nothing like that,” Dante hastened to assure her, and Nadia let out a breath of relief. As long as Nate and her family weren’t hurt, she could survive anything else he had to tell her.
“Then what?”
“I, um, overheard your parents arguing.”
Even under the circumstances, Nadia couldn’t help a small smile. “I’m sure it was entirely accidental on your part.” She doubted a professional spy and double agent would be able to resist investigating the sounds of an argument in the household where he was employed.
Dante ducked his head and looked uncomfortable, but he didn’t deny her assumption. “It’s not public knowledge yet, but apparently the Chairman notified your family in advance as some kind of supposed courtesy.”
“Notified them of what?” Nadia asked, losing patience with the slow buildup. “Just spit it out already!”
“All right,” he agreed softly. He raised his head and met her eyes, and the sympathy in his scared her even more. “Sometime next week—I didn’t catch exactly when—the Chairman is going to announce the official engagement between Nate and Agnes Belinski.”
The floor dropped out from beneath Nadia’s world. She’d been unofficially engaged to Nate for literally as long as she could remember. Her entire life, she had striven to be the perfect Executive, her behavior always exemplary, her every decision colored by the knowledge that a misstep could ruin her and her family. Her family’s entire future had rested on her shoulders, and she’d lived in constant fear of letting them down. She’d done everything she possibly could to protect her reputation—a sometimes difficult task with someone like Nate in her life—and to fulfill her every duty.
Until the original Nate Hayes had been murdered, and Nadia had allowed herself to become embroiled in the quest to clear Bishop’s name. She had defied Dirk Mosely, and defied the Chairman himself. And now she was paying the price.
Tears burned in her eyes, and there was a tremor in her hands she tried to hide by tucking them under her arms and hugging herself as if she were cold.
It came as no surprise that the Chairman was a vindictive son of a bitch, and she probably should have foreseen this the moment she’d made an enemy of him. Maybe she should have extended her blackmail to protecting the marriage agreement. Maybe she still could, although locked up here in the retreat, it wasn’t like she had access to the Chairman to threaten him, or to the recordings to release them. She’d need Gerri’s help for that. And Gerri hadn’t shown up.
“They were arguing about sending me away for good, weren’t they?” she asked, holding herself together through sheer force of will. No wonder no one had come to visit her today. She had destroyed the ambitions of her entire family. Her father would never be promoted to the board of directors, and the stink of scandal would cling to the Lake family name for years to come. Her mother would host no more dinners or parties in the foreseeable future, nor would she be invited to social events other Executives hosted. The same was true of Gerri. Even their closest friends would shun them, afraid the taint of scandal would rub off on them. And, fair or not, the blame would rest squarely on Nadia’s shoulders.
Dante nodded. “Your father is against it. Adamantly.”
Nadia stifled a half-laugh, half-sob. “Like that’ll do me any good.”
Dante hadn’t been with their household long, but he surely already knew that Esmeralda always got her way. If she thought sending Nadia away to some upstate retreat where she would never be seen again was necessary to salvage the shreds of the Lake family’s reputation, then that was where Nadia would end up. Regardless of what her father thought about it.
“Maybe it will,” Dante said, reaching out and squeezing her hand. “He fought for you. I’ve never heard him get so worked up about anything before. I’ve never heard your mother back down from anyone before either, but she did this afternoon.”
But they both knew that her father had only won the first battle of the war. There would be more to come, and long experience led Nadia to believe she and her father would end up on the losing side. Her life as she knew it was now over.
A tear trickled down her cheek. Ordinarily, she would have tried to hide any sign of weakness, especially in the presence of a social inferior, but she supposed there was no reason to keep up appearances right now. Thinking about what her future might hold made her want to curl up in a hole somewhere and die. Dante squeezed her hand a little tighter, but he didn’t have any more comforting words to offer.
“What happened when you were arrested, Nadia?” Dante asked. “There’s no way Chairman Hayes thought Agnes Belinski was a better match for Nate than you. The change in plans has spite written all over it. What I don’t get is, if he hates you so much, why did he let you out of Riker’s?”
Nadia shook her head at him even as tears continued to fall and she clung to his hand. “You never take off your spy hat, do you?”
It was hard to tell in the darkness, but she thought he might have blushed. “Sorry,” he mumbled, scuffing at the ground with one foot. “I can’t help noticing this stuff. And wondering about it.”
For a moment, Nadia was sorely tempted to tell Dante everything, to tell him about Thea, about her experiments, about Mosely’s mission to procure test subjects from among the lowest, most powerless citizens of Paxco. She wanted to thrust a dagger through the Chairman’s heart and laugh while he bled.
But it wouldn’t be the Chairman who bled if word of his crimes got out. Dante’s resistance movement claimed to want to change the government slowly and peaceably—or at least that was what Dante thought the eventual goal was—but despite the Chairman’s ruthless quelling of protests, there were plenty of malcontents out there who would gladly turn to violence if given sufficient cause. Triggering a rash of riots that could potentially escalate into full-out civil war was not the way to punish the Chairman for his sins. Which meant, she realized with a sinking feeling, that she wouldn’t be able to blackmail her way out of this even if she could reach the Chairman. Any threat she made to release the recordings would be a bluff, and he was too savvy not to know that.
“I can’t tell you what happened,” she said. “But you’re right that the Chairman hates me. He can’t kill me or put me in Riker’s.” As long as the recordings existed and were hidden. Nadia had arranged for them to be released to the public should something happen to her. “But he can—and obviously will—hurt me in other ways.”
Just as he would hurt Nate, in any way he could.
The thought of Nate made her chest ache, and the tears flowed more freely. Why hadn’t he come to tell her the dreadful news in person? How could he leave her here in ignorance?
How could he let the Chairman marry him off to someone else?
The tears burst from her in an uncontrolled gush, no longer demure and ladylike. Dante drew her into his arms, cradling her head against his shoulder, and she didn’t even think of resisting.
“I’ll spend the rest of my life locked up in a retreat somewhere up north,” she sobbed, not sure how she would bear it. Five nights at Tranquility had her wanting to scream. How could she live in a place more restrictive and more isolated than this for the rest of her li
fe?
“Maybe not,” Dante whispered soothingly, holding her tightly to him. “Your father may win in the end. And even if they do send you away, it might not be forever.”
She appreciated his attempts to comfort her, but it could never work. She could see her fate stretching out before her all too clearly. She would be sent to a distant retreat, where everyone was way older than her and female. She would never be seen in public again, might never see her family or Nate again. They could keep her at the retreat against her will until she was eighteen, and then they could keep her there by refusing her access to the family’s funds so that she had nowhere else to go. She would never marry, never have children. Hell, she would never even know love, because there would be no boys or men in her life.
“You don’t understand,” she hiccuped against Dante’s jacket. An Employee like Dante would never have had to face the specter of a retreat, couldn’t possibly comprehend what such a gilded cage was like.
Dante sighed and stroked her hair. “I do understand,” he said softly. “And I’ll do whatever I can to help you. I’m sure Nate will, too.”
Nadia shook her head and tried to pull away from Dante’s arms, but he wouldn’t let her. She went limp against him. Propriety didn’t matter anymore, and if she wanted to let a male servant hold her and comfort her, then she would. His arms felt solid and strong around her, and she liked hearing the steady thump of his heart when she pressed her head to his chest.
“Nate can’t help me,” she said, feeling the truth of her words down to her bones. She didn’t know how the Chairman had convinced Nate to agree to the match with Agnes Belinski, but she knew he hadn’t done so willingly. Somehow, his father had gotten a hold on him, and if he was determined to make both Nate and Nadia suffer, then he would be sure to keep them apart.
“Probably not directly,” Dante agreed. “I don’t know what’s going on under all this, but I do know the Chairman will be watching Nate’s every step. But he won’t be watching me.”