Jenna Black - Resistance

To her surprise, Athena grinned at her. “A no-nonsense kind of girl, hmm? I like that. Reminds me a bit of what Ellie was like before that rat bastard husband of hers destroyed her.”

Nadia choked on her mouthful of water, practically dropping the glass on her lap as she coughed. No one talked about the Chairman like that. Especially not to complete strangers. Nadia hastily put her glass down and held her napkin to her lips, trying to stop coughing.

Athena clucked her tongue. “You’re not the only one who can be blunt. You’ll find a lot of the fine manners you’ve been taught aren’t terribly useful here.”

Nadia nodded to indicate she understood. Her throat still itched, and the coughing fit had brought tears to the corners of her eyes. She was incapable of saying anything out loud.

“You’re right that your relationship with Nathaniel is none of my business. I was asking because I wondered if there was a chance you would speak to him in the future. I certainly won’t have that chance, but I promised Ellie I would do everything in my power to get a message to him.”

A shiver traveled down Nadia’s spine. Athena’s face had gone grim and serious, no hint of her bright smile remaining. “But why would she have needed you to get a message to him? In ten years, she made no effort to contact him, not even once. If she had something she wanted to tell him—”

“Rat bastard husband, remember?”

Nadia wondered if lack of sleep had stolen her ability to think. She had no idea what Athena was getting at. She shook her head, unable to come up with a coherent question.

“It was the price she paid to avoid being arrested for treason,” Athena explained, which only served to make Nadia more confused.

“Wait, what?” she asked, shaking her head again in case that would make her brain start working properly. “Treason?”

Athena frowned. “Why do you think Ellie spent the last decade of her life here? What does society think happened?”

“Umm. The rumor is that the Chairman cheated on her and she was so angry she locked herself away and refused to ever talk to him or Nate again.” A rumor the Chairman himself had confirmed only the day before. Although it suddenly occurred to Nadia that if she agreed with Nate that Dorothy was an impostor, that made the rest of the Chairman’s story equally suspect.

“Hmpf!” Athena snorted. “Leave it to him to cast himself as the cheater and still make himself come out looking better than Ellie.”

“So that’s not what happened?”

Athena shook her head. “Not hardly. It was Ellie who cheated. She and Rat Bastard had a polite arranged marriage, and they didn’t hate each other. They got along well enough to produce the required heir, and after that they were married in name only. But Ellie wanted more out of life, and she fell in love. Rat Bastard was hardly celibate himself, but when he found out about the affair…” Athena’s lips twisted in something between a sneer and a snarl. “Just sending her off to a retreat for the rest of her life wasn’t punishment enough, not for him. He wanted her to suffer. So he told her that she was never going to see her son again. He said he would argue that cheating on him was an act of treason, and he would have her arrested if she ever made any attempt to see or even contact Nathaniel. She thought that maybe when they declared her terminal, he might relent. But no.”

Nadia could hardly believe what she was hearing.

Treason.

Could the Chairman possibly have made a charge like that stick? If Nadia recalled her history correctly, Henry VIII had used similar charges as excuses to kill off inconvenient wives, but that was rather a long time ago. Surely such a charge wouldn’t stick in modern times.

But if Nadia had been in Ellie Hayes’s shoes, she very much doubted she’d have been willing to take the risk. Any reasonable person would agree that adultery was not treason, but the Chairman had ways of making reasonable people act unreasonably. After all, he’d been planning to torture and execute Nadia on a specious treason charge, and she saw no evidence that he wouldn’t have gotten away with it if she hadn’t managed to blackmail him.

“All these years…” Nadia said wonderingly under her breath. “All these years, Nate was convinced his mother was a selfish bitch who abandoned him. He thought she didn’t love him enough to stay around and face her difficulties with his father.”

Athena nodded. “That’s what Rat Bastard wanted him to think. He wanted to build up the barrier high enough that Nathaniel would never bother trying to see through it. He’s not a man you want as your enemy.”

And yet that’s exactly what he was to Nadia. It might have been her parents who had officially banished her to the Sanctuary, but it was the Chairman who had put them in the position where banishment seemed like their best option. Would he be satisfied with his revenge? Or would he want more?

Nadia shook off her worries about any future escalation of the Chairman’s revenge. Her chief worry now was what would happen to Gerri if she went looking for the recordings. She regarded Athena Lawrence’s open, friendly face, wondering if it would be foolishly naive of her to take anything the woman said at face value. For all she knew, the woman was clinically insane and was making up the whole story. Or was just someone who had an ax to grind with the Chairman and wanted to cause strife in his family.

But if anything she said was true, then she could potentially be Nadia’s ally. An ally who’d lived at the Sanctuary for years and knew all its ins and outs. Who might be able to help Nadia formulate a plan to slip through the Sanctuary’s security and get to a phone. She didn’t quite dare imagine an escape attempt, not when she had nowhere safe to go and no access to money, but if she could at least talk to Gerri and warn her not to touch the recordings, maybe her imprisonment wouldn’t seem quite so terrible.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Nadia said, “how did you end up living here?”

Athena’s smile turned crooked, and even bitter. “The man Ellie loved was my brother. I helped cover for the affair. My brother died in Riker’s Island after the Chairman had him arrested on a trumped-up embezzlement charge. My family knew the true story and knew that I’d helped Ellie and my brother meet. They decided the whole disaster was my fault, and they sent me here. It didn’t all shake out until more than a year after Ellie was sent away. I don’t think the Chairman ever realized I was sent to the same retreat, or he would have looked for some way to have me moved elsewhere so Ellie wouldn’t have a friend.”

Nadia didn’t know what to say. Even before the murder of the original Nate Hayes, she’d known the Chairman was a ruthless man and that he was not afraid of using and abusing his power. But though she’d thought herself a realist, she’d had no idea the depth of the corruption in his soul.

“Don’t feel too sorry for me,” Athena said. “At least I ended up here instead of in Riker’s Island, like my brother. And it’s not so bad, really, once you get used to it.”

Nadia doubted she would ever get used to it. The living conditions were beyond reproach, and she remembered Dante’s barbed comment about how luxurious life in a retreat would seem to a powerless Basement-dweller, living in squalor and deprivation and danger. But no amount of creature comforts could change the fact that she was a prisoner here, even if no one would ever admit it in those words. As an Executive, and as the presumed future bride of the Chairman Heir, her life had never truly been her own; but at least before, she’d had the illusion of freedom. Now, even that was gone.