Jenna Black - Resistance

“I really need to talk to you alone.”

“Tough,” was Nadia’s tart reply. “We’re not sending Agnes out to the service by herself, and we’re not leaving her holding the bag if someone comes looking for us. So she’s coming with us. Now come on, Agnes.”

She waved to Agnes again, and the girl reluctantly came closer. Nate didn’t want this virtual stranger intruding on his time with Nadia, nor did he want her to see him falling apart at the seams as he feared he might. But he didn’t have the energy to fight a battle he knew he wouldn’t win, so he sighed and started off toward the parlor again.

“Make sure you bring the whiskey,” he called to Agnes over his shoulder.

Agnes, of course, didn’t answer, but he heard the soft tap of her shoes on the wooden floor of the hall, so he knew she was following. Once upon a time, he’d been fairly good at getting Nadia to agree with him, even when he knew she didn’t really agree. She hadn’t been a pushover, exactly, but he’d always known which buttons to push. Those buttons didn’t work anymore, and if she was dead set on Agnes coming along, then Agnes was coming along.

Outside, the drizzle had picked up and become a steady rain, drumming on the windows. The parlor Nate led the girls into would have been dismal on a bright and cheery day, the furniture dark, fussy, and old-fashioned. On this gray and gloomy day, the place was positively depressing. Or maybe that was just Nate’s mood. They certainly went together nicely. He closed the parlor door. Anyone who came looking for him would have no trouble finding him, but he doubted his father would hesitate to start the service without him there, and once it started, no one was going to come looking.

Nadia and Agnes sat together on a floral-upholstered sofa with spindly legs, but Nate was too agitated to sit. Agnes was still holding the whiskey bottle, probably unsure what to do with it. He wanted to take it from her, more because he wanted something to do with his hands than because he wanted to drink, but Nadia’s forbidding stare made him think twice.

“So, what’s happened now?” Nadia prompted.

He hated that he had to talk about this with Agnes in the room. Even when she’d disapproved of him, Nadia had always been easy to talk to. They’d known each other so long, been each other’s friends for so long … He was trying not to think of Agnes as the enemy anymore, but she certainly wasn’t a friend.

Soon, everyone, friend and foe, is going to know about this, he reasoned with himself. No doubt the Chairman had already been making discreet introductions from the moment he had arrived.

His voice halting as though every word were being dragged out of him by force, he told the girls everything he knew—which, granted, was very little—about his alleged half-sister. Neither Nadia nor Agnes interrupted him, even when his pauses became uncomfortably long. They sat side by side, quietly listening, and Nate was struck for the millionth time by the contrast between them. Nadia, beautiful and tastefully dressed, sat up straight and proud, her eyes soft with sympathy as she looked him straight in the face. Agnes, plain and with no fashion sense whatsoever, sat slumped with her shoulders slightly hunched, her gaze focused either on the floor or at something across the room, never at his face. He doubted she was much more comfortable sitting in on this conversation than he was having it in front of her.

There was a long silence after he’d finished telling them about Dorothy. He’d seen Agnes start when he mentioned his worry that Dorothy would one day be named heir, and he wondered if by some miracle she was now reconsidering the engagement. It wasn’t like he’d made a great impression on her as potential husband material if he didn’t come with guaranteed rank, status, and money. She chewed her lip and frowned, looking lost in thought.

“I don’t know what to say,” Nadia said in a small voice, shaking her head.

Nate shrugged. “There’s nothing to say. If my dad wants to pretend this girl is his daughter, who’s going to stop him?”

He gave Nadia his most challenging stare, daring her to argue that Dorothy really was the Chairman’s daughter. But, to his utter shock, it wasn’t Nadia who spoke, it was Agnes.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Agnes said, her voice even softer than Nadia’s had been.

Nadia turned to her, obviously as surprised as Nate that she’d spoken up. Nate couldn’t remember a time when Agnes had spoken without being spoken to first. She surprised him yet again by raising the whiskey bottle she still held to her lips and taking a swift swig.

“What doesn’t make sense?” Nadia asked.

Agnes grimaced at the taste of the whiskey, setting the bottle down on the coffee table. She looked back and forth between Nadia and Nate as if uncertain it was all right for her to speak.

“Go on,” Nate urged, trying to keep his voice gentle.

Agnes swallowed hard and looked at him, though her gaze kept darting sideways, as if she couldn’t quite stand to meet his eyes for more than a second at a time.

“Even though you’re still the legal heir,” she said, “your stock goes down when people discover another potential heir is out there.”

Nate frowned in confusion, but Nadia understood right away what Agnes meant. “Your stock in the marriage market,” she said, and Agnes nodded. Agnes looked at her as if hoping Nadia would continue the thought, but Nadia smiled softly and waited.

Agnes licked her lips and did that not-quite-meeting-his-eyes thing again. “Your prime value right now is that you’re the undisputed Chairman Heir. That’s why my father wants this engagement so badly, even though he’s … uneasy about marrying me to a Replica. He expects his grandchild to be the Chairman of Paxco someday.”

Nate tried very hard not to shudder or make a face at the idea of providing Chairman Belinski with a grandchild. The idea of trying to perform his conjugal duties with Nadia was bad enough, but he’d never be able to overcome his distaste enough to do it with Agnes.

“There’s already a comfortable alliance between our states,” Agnes continued. “We have good trade agreements with each other, and there are very few strings attached. But if you and I marry, the balance of power between our states will change. We won’t be quite so independent anymore, and we’ll lose some of our more lucrative trade agreements with states that are your rivals. If the next heir to Paxco is going to be a Belinski, then the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, but if not…” Agnes shrugged. “The arrangement heavily favors Paxco under those circumstances, and my father might decide he can make better use of me.”

“By marrying you to that marketing director you told me about?” Nate asked incredulously. The idea that a man like that would make for a more favorable marriage prospect than Nate seemed almost insulting.

“It would be a financially advantageous match,” Agnes said, “and would come with none of the same strings. So why would your father announce the existence of another potential heir now, of all times? If he’d waited just one more week, I’d have signed the papers to make our engagement legally binding and it would have been nearly impossible for Synchrony to back out.”

Nate stared at Agnes in mute astonishment. He didn’t think he’d ever heard her string so many words together before. And somehow, it had never quite occurred to him that Paxco might be getting the better out of their marriage arrangement. He’d focused on the relative size and wealth of their two states—and on Agnes’s lack of personal charms—and decided Agnes was marrying above herself. He had never considered that in marrying above herself, Agnes might have been making her state into a vassal of Paxco, and that that might not be so advantageous for Synchrony. Never considered that Chairman Belinski might have been anything other than ecstatic about the match.