Replica (21 page)

Usually, he was happy to see her. She might not be the love of his life as he pretended to the outside world, but she
was
his friend, and would have been even if their parents hadn’t chosen them for one another. But there had very obviously been something wrong when she called this morning, and a nasty, suspicious side of him felt sure he’d heard guilt in her voice. He was still reeling from the shock and pain of what sure as hell looked like Kurt’s betrayal. If Nadia was guilty of something, he’d almost rather not know.

Nate groaned and collapsed into a chair, closing his eyes and laying the back of his head against the cushions. It felt like there were ten-ton weights sitting on each of his shoulders, pressing him down into the chair, making it hard to move. Or breathe. Or think.

Kurt would
not
have done this to him, his mind kept insisting. And yet …

No one but Kurt would have known the significance of that room at Angel’s club. No one but Kurt would have known about the locket. No one but Kurt would have known his true identity—and revealed it to Angel.

“But
why
?” he asked the empty air, unable to come up with a single explanation.

His brooding was interrupted by Nadia’s arrival. Nate asked his butler to show her into his sitting room, then tried to brace himself for whatever was to come. Hard to do, when he was already so miserable.

Nadia looked pale and wan when she stepped into the room. She’d tried to cover the dark circles under her eyes with makeup, but it hadn’t worked, and she’d chewed all the lipstick off her lower lip. Nate’s sense of foreboding grew stronger as he forced himself to his feet. His entire torso groaned in protest, and he winced.

“What’s the matter?” Nadia asked, quickly crossing the distance between them. “Are you hurt?”

She knew. He didn’t know how, but there was no other way to explain her panic on the phone this morning or her instant assumption that he was hurt.

“You know what happened last night, don’t you?” he asked, taking a step back from her. A little voice in his head told him he was being ridiculous, suspecting Nadia of … Well, he wasn’t quite sure
what
he suspected her of, but it was something bad. Nadia was his best friend, and one of the nicest people he’d ever met.

Yeah, and Kurt was his boyfriend, but that hadn’t stopped him from having Nate savagely beaten. And maybe worse.

Nate expected—or at least hoped for—a hasty denial, but that wasn’t what he got. Nadia looked away from him, her eyes squinched in misery, her teeth working away at her lip again. She shook her head, and her voice was small and tentative.

“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “Only that
something
did, and it was bad.” She squared her shoulders and raised her chin, meeting his eyes with what looked like a Herculean effort. “I want you to hear me out,” she said. “Listen to the whole thing before you react.”

Nate’s hands curled into fists at his sides. “What the hell have you done?” he asked from between his clenched teeth. Adrenaline pumped through his veins, speeding his heart, making his breath come short. His body still ached from the beating, and somewhere beneath the fury lurked a mother lode of hurt. The fury was infinitely easier to manage, so he focused on it, fueling it and glaring at Nadia with a kind of ferocity he’d never have guessed himself capable of.

For some reason, he’d expected Nadia to quail in the face of his fury, maybe because he felt so overwhelmed by it himself. Nadia was nice enough that some people mistook her niceness for weakness, but Nate had never been one of those people before. It showed something about his own mental state that he made the error now.

Instead of being intimidated by his fury, she seemed to draw strength from it. She stopped chewing on her lip, and her body went rigid as a hint of fire flickered in her eyes.

“I ask you to hear me out before you react, and you’re reacting before I say word one? Don’t you think you owe me a little more than that?”

“Depends what you’ve done,” he growled. “And it sounds like you’ve done something pretty shitty.”

A fine tremor made her hands shake, but the look in her eyes told him the tremor was of anger, not of fear. “You selfish, spoiled, entitled bastard!” she snarled at him, and she looked like she wanted to slap him. “After everything I’ve gone through because of you and your stupid little games, you’re going to condemn me without even listening to me? How
dare
you? I’m not one of your servants, living to fulfill your every desire. I have my own life, my own needs, my own issues, but you never have given a damn about that, have you?”

She whirled away from him, heading for the door. Without thinking about it, he reached out and grabbed her arm, hauling her back around to face him. She raised her hand as if to slap him, but even in her fury, she was still too damnably nice to do it, and she soon let that hand drop to her side.

“Let go of me, Nate,” she said, and some of the anger had drained from her voice, replaced with resignation and something he might almost have labeled despair. “You never bothered to listen to anyone before, so there’s no reason I should expect you to now. Bishop and I were both right to keep you in the dark.”

Bishop and I?
Did that mean Kurt and Nadia were in this together somehow? Whatever
this
was? But that seemed impossible. They had never done more than tolerate each other, and that tolerance was colored with dislike and sometimes even contempt. No way they were working together in some crazy plot against him.

Then again, it seemed that everything that had happened to him since the night of the reception had been impossible.

“You know where Kurt is,” he said, squeezing her arm a little harder, making sure there was no way she could pull free from his grip.

Nadia’s shoulders sagged, the starch seeping out of her spine. “You didn’t really hear a word I just said. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“I heard you,” Nate snapped. “You’ve done something you’re ashamed of, and you’re telling me it’s all my fault. Forgive me for knowing bullshit when I hear it.”

“You don’t know a goddamn thing, Nate,” she said, but she sounded more tired than angry. “As far as you’re concerned, the whole world revolves around you and what you want. Hell, if you thought about other people half as much as you think about yourself, you might even have been able to figure out what was going on, or at least have a good guess.”

“What are you talking about?”

She met his eyes. “Have you forgotten I was taken to the security station and held for fifteen hours after your murder? Have you forgotten that I was the last known person to have seen you alive, and that Dirk Mosely
personally
interrogated me? Did you ever take even half a minute to think about what I might have been through, what he might have done to me, what he might have threatened?”

Nate opened his mouth and drew in a breath to protest, but no words would form in his brain. He’d known Nadia had gone through hell the day after his death, and he’d felt a kind of formless pity for her. Mosely was a sadistic bastard, and he wouldn’t have gone easy on Nadia just because she was a teenage girl. But she was the daughter of a president, for God’s sake. She was Nate’s fiancée, at least to all intents and purposes. Surely Mosely wouldn’t have dared do anything … awful.

Nadia shook her head again, and this time when she tried to pull her arm free, his grip loosened. But she didn’t head for the door.

“No, you never did think about it,” she said, each word biting into his conscience.

Nate’s fists clenched at his sides. “If that bastard hurt you—”

Nadia threw her head back and laughed, but there was no humor in the sound, and the look in her eyes was wild. She turned away from him, and he thought she was going to storm out. But she didn’t. She turned back to him, folding her arms across her chest and staring up at him with fierce intensity.

“What will you do if he hurt me?” she asked. “Burst into his office and punch him out?”

Nate wasn’t sure he could see himself being quite that aggressive, but … “I would demand his resignation. Maybe even press criminal charges. If he’s hurt you, he’ll pay.”

Nadia pinched the bridge of her nose as if his responses were giving her a headache. “And this is why I kept my mouth shut as long as I did.” She dropped her hand away from her face and looked at him earnestly. “Nate, he’s the chief of security, and he’s investigating the assassination of the Chairman Heir. He wouldn’t be doing … what he’s doing if your father hadn’t given him free rein. If you go in there playing the white knight, all you’ll do is piss him off. And it’s me and my family who will pay the price.”

Nate couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It was true that the Chairman was capable of being a monumental hard-ass. He had hired Mosely, after all, and never showed any signs that he was bothered by Mosely’s reputation. But he wouldn’t let his favorite hatchet man prey on the daughter of a top Executive. Not when that daughter was also Nate’s bride-to-be.

“What you’re saying is you think I can’t protect you,” he said through clenched teeth, a little surprised by how much the realization stung. “I’m good enough to marry, but not good enough to actually
depend
on, to
trust
.”

Nadia seemed to sense his hurt, and she reached out and gave his shoulder a quick squeeze, even though she was obviously still angry with him.

“I’m sorry, Nate, but no. I don’t think you can protect me. Being Chairman Heir isn’t the same thing as being Chairman. Maybe if your father actually respected you, you’d be able to do something, but if you go to him complaining about Mosely, he’s just going to think you’re being naive, not understanding what needs to be done.”

Nate was pretty sure Nadia was underestimating him, but it was hard to feel confident in his convictions after what had happened last night. Hard not to doubt everyone and everything in his life—including himself. Especially when he didn’t have the full story on anything. He ran a hand through his hair, wishing his fingers could somehow reach down into his brain and scrape all the pieces into order so that things would make sense again.

“Tell me what’s going on,” he said, deciding to ignore the whole question of what to do about Mosely for now. “Tell me how you knew something bad happened to me last night.”

She’d obviously come to see him with the express purpose of telling him just that, but Nadia had a core of stubbornness to her Nate had never noticed before.

“Tell me what happened to
you
first.”

Ordinarily, Nate would have bet on himself any day in a battle of wills with Nadia, but today he hurt too much, both physically and emotionally, to keep fighting. Instead, he collapsed back into his chair, wincing at the myriad pains in his back and abdomen, and told Nadia an abbreviated version of what had happened at Angel’s club last night.

*   *   *

Nadia
listened to Nate’s story of last night’s trip to the Basement in horrified silence. She was here to tell Nate about her deception, sure he would never forgive her for it. And yet she had almost stormed out of the room without confessing a thing, so angry at Nate’s obliviousness to everyone around him that she could hardly stand to face him. But Nate had always been like that, and, somehow, they’d been friends anyway. She’d understood that he had a good heart underneath it all. He might not always be looking out for everyone, but if he actually
saw
an injustice, he wouldn’t hesitate to try to set it right. In fact, that was one of the very reasons she’d been so reluctant to confide in him.

She’d never realized how angry some of Nate’s more thoughtless moments made her until today, when her emotions seethed out of control and spilled out of her mouth.

But as Nate told her about his trip to a Basement club known as Angel’s and his encounter with the club’s owner, she was reminded once more of all the reasons Nate meant so much to her, despite all his faults. Yes, he wanted his real killer brought to justice, but that wasn’t the reason he’d put himself in the danger he had. He’d done it because he loved Bishop and wanted to clear his name and thereby keep him safe. What other privileged Paxco Executive would have ventured alone into the Basement asking questions just to clear the name of someone he couldn’t even be sure was innocent?

When Nate told her about the message Angel had given him from Bishop, his hand strayed to his chest, and he rubbed his sternum absently. The pain in his voice and on his face was enough to make Nadia’s eyes mist over again, but she was through with crying.

“I refuse to believe Kurt was really behind it,” Nate concluded, but he sounded a lot less sure than the words suggested. Not to mention that he’d just finished listing a string of arguments for why it
had
to be Bishop’s doing.

Nadia sat back in her chair and regarded Nate closely as she thought about what he’d just told her. If Bishop had gotten hold of the tracker, then that meant he and Angel really were in contact, no matter how badly Nate didn’t want to believe it.

“Would you recognize Bishop’s handwriting if you saw it?” she asked, a lump forming in her throat as she tried to put herself in Nate’s shoes, tried to imagine the level of betrayal he must be feeling.

Nate’s eyes were wide and alarmed when he looked at her. “I was teaching him to read and write. So yeah, I’d recognize it. Why?” The last word came out sounding strangled, and Nadia wished she didn’t have to do this.

Nadia reached into her pocket and pulled out the note she’d found in her napkin this morning, handing it across to Nate. His face went a little paler, and she didn’t have to wait for his response to know he recognized the handwriting.

“It’s him,” Nate confirmed, his face now almost bloodless. “What is it he’s threatening to tell?”

Nadia clasped her sweaty hands in her lap and stared at them. “I told you Mosely made threats,” she said softly as her throat tried to close up in panic. “He threatened to torture me, and he threatened to hurt my sister’s kids. And they weren’t empty threats, Nate. I
know
they weren’t.”