Jenna Black - Resistance

No one did.

Visiting hours were over, and everyone was saying their good-byes. Most of the guests were gone already, and those who remained were outnumbered by the staff. When Nadia noticed Mari of the manic smile heading her way, she quickly vacated her seat and practically ran for the exit. No doubt the woman was coming to offer consolation of some sort, but Nadia couldn’t have stomached it even if she’d believed it sincere. She fled back to her room and locked the door behind her, sitting on the edge of her bed and urging herself not to cry.

She’d only been away five nights, though it felt like forever to her. She had certainly gone longer than that without seeing Gerri before, as her sister had her hands full with work and two young children. Her mother had never been warm and nurturing, and she might have taken the retreat’s suggestion that visitors stay away for the first two weeks to heart. Or maybe she was planning to bring Nadia home in the next couple of days, making a visit unnecessary.

But Nate … How could Nate not have come? He had to know she was climbing the walls, had to know she was desperate for company. Obviously, he did know, or he wouldn’t have sent Dante to deliver the phone.

Nadia swallowed the lump in her throat. There was a logical explanation for his failure to appear. He certainly hadn’t done it to hurt her, or even out of carelessness. Nate might not be the most considerate and responsible of people, but he had always been her best friend. If he hadn’t come tonight, it was because, for some reason, he couldn’t.

Nadia reached into her tunic and withdrew the phone she had tucked in her bra. The temptation to dial Nate’s number, to find out if he was all right, to hear his explanation for why he hadn’t come, was almost overwhelming. But as hurt and as abandoned as she was feeling, the phone was only for use in emergencies, and this was not an emergency. Using the phone involved risk, and wouldn’t she feel like the world’s biggest idiot if she lost her lifeline just because she felt lonely?

Reminding herself that Dante would come tonight, that she wasn’t completely isolated no matter how she felt, she tucked the phone back into its hiding place.

Themedia had been overly generous when they labeled Agnes Belinski “plain,” Nate decided the moment he set eyes on the girl his father meant to shackle him to for the rest of his life. Her body was pear-shaped, and the clingy blouse and flowing skirt she wore made that shape more obvious, rather than camouflaging it as she probably hoped. Puffy cheeks and a receding chin made her face look round as a soccer ball, and her thin, fine brown hair was cut in an unflattering bob. Even if he liked girls, he wouldn’t want her in his bed.

Nate made little effort to hide his distaste when his father introduced him to Chairman Belinski and his homely daughter. He made his handshake as brief and limp as possible, and after looking Agnes up and down once, refused to meet her eyes. He wondered idly why Mrs. Belinski hadn’t come to dinner—he knew she had come to Paxco with her husband and daughter—but he wasn’t interested enough to bother asking.

“Chairman Belinski and I have some important matters to discuss,” Nate’s father said. “We’ll leave you young people to get to know each other, then we’ll rejoin you when dinner is served.”

Though he wasn’t looking straight at her, Nate could see the look of near-panic Agnes shot her father; he could also see the reassuring smile Chairman Belinski gave her.

Nate grimaced. So not only was Agnes homely, but she didn’t have the grace and self-assurance to fulfill her social obligations without her daddy holding her hand. She was probably the kind of girl who burst into tears if anyone said anything even remotely unkind to her.

In short, she was nothing like Nadia, who would have been as close to the perfect wife as it was possible to get.

The two Chairmen left the room, both looking pompous and self-satisfied—Nate’s father because he knew just how poorly Agnes stacked up against Nadia, and Chairman Belinski because his daughter would be marrying well above her station. Synchrony was one of the smaller states, and not a particularly wealthy one. They produced great tech, but they kept too much of it to themselves to realize anything close to their earnings potential. Their elite and exceptionally well-equipped military was envied worldwide, but in the hierarchy of states, rich outranked well-defended by a mile. Paxco could have gotten a bigger financial boost by creating an alliance with a much wealthier state, and Nate was convinced his father had picked Synchrony because he knew just how Nate would feel about Agnes.

Nate had never thought of himself as a mean or cruel person. He was careless of people’s feelings sometimes, but it was rarely out of malice. But the anger and resentment burning inside him were almost too much to bear, and he just couldn’t bring himself to make friendly with Agnes in even the most superficial way. She was the enemy, and he would give her exactly the kind of consideration an enemy deserved. When their fathers left the room, Nate stood rooted to the floor in stony silence, daring Agnes to break it.

Agnes licked her lips nervously. A couple of times, it looked like she was going to say something, but she either thought better of it or just plain didn’t have the nerve. Nadia would have handed Nate his ass on a silver platter if he’d treated her like this, but Agnes just stood there. He might have hoped that if he was being forced to marry a homely stranger, she might at least have a decent personality to make up for her shortcomings, but it seemed she had the personality of a frightened mouse. Maybe Nate would get lucky and she’d start begging her father to cancel the engagement plans the moment Nate was out of her sight.

Giving Agnes one more disdainful look, Nate walked past her and plopped himself down in an armchair near the fireplace. If there had been a fire he could stare broodingly into, he would have done it. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Agnes still standing in the same spot, shifting from foot to foot. If she couldn’t even make a show of standing up for herself with him, how the hell was she going to handle people like the Terrible Trio, who so loved to publicly embarrass other girls to make themselves feel more important? This was the girl his father wanted to be Chairman Spouse of Paxco someday?

The awkward silence eventually became so uncomfortable that Nate was forced to break it himself. If he were being extremely generous, he might think that had been Agnes’s plan all along and she’d actually won a battle of wills against him. But he was hardly in the mood to be generous to anyone, much less the girl his father would force him to marry.

“What kind of a name is Agnes, anyway?” he asked out of nowhere. Agnes jumped at the sound of his voice, her eyes going wide. No, she definitely had not been engaged in a battle of wills. She’d just been incapable of speech. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone named Agnes who wasn’t at least eighty years old.”

Splotchy color rose in Agnes’s chipmunk cheeks, and she looked at the floor instead of at him when she answered. “I was named after my grandmother.” Her voice was high and thin, almost like a little girl’s. It was a voice Nate knew would grate on his nerves in no time flat. Not that everything about Agnes didn’t grate on his nerves already. “She was the first Chairman of Synchrony.”

The first Agnes Belinski must have had an impressive backbone to have been Chairman of a corporate state, even a small one like Synchrony. Too bad her namesake seemed to have inherited none of it.