Jenna Black - Replica

“I won’t let him hurt you,” Nate said, his voice softer and gentler than it had been from the moment she’d blurted out her confession.

He meant the words to be comforting, but she wanted to scream at him. When was he going to accept that he couldn’t make promises like that? He’d probably told Bishop the same thing when he’d made him his valet, and look what had happened!

“Please don’t tell him what I just told you,” Nate continued. “He’s probably already watching Angel, but he has no way to know for sure that Kurt’s been in contact unless you tell him. And if you tell him that Kurt stole my dollars, he’ll make the same assumption I did, that Kurt’s not in Paxco anymore.”

Nadia shook her head, not sure how she was going to keep Mosely from prying this information out of her. She swallowed hard. “Do you have any idea what would happen to me, what would happen to my family if Mosely catches me lying to him?”

“I won’t let him hurt you or your family, Nadia. I mean it.”

She glanced up at him in exasperation. “Wake up, Nate! You can’t stop him from hurting me. You can’t stop him from getting pissed off at me and taking it out on my niece or my nephew. You think he can’t get some scumbag to hurt them for him? Without ever dirtying his own hands? All he needs is a little plausible deniability, and he can get away with just about anything. You think throwing a temper tantrum is going to stop him?”

“He’s not invincible!” he snapped back. “And I’m not some whiny, powerless kid. Can I officially order him to leave you alone and expect him to listen to me? No. But I can sure as hell make a lot of noise he would find inconvenient, to say the least. He can threaten you all he wants, but if it comes down to actually acting on the threats, that’s a whole other story.”

He’s already hit me once, she thought, but refrained from saying, afraid the words would have the absolute opposite effect from what she wanted.

Nate might be right. Mosely might be making empty threats. Not because he didn’t have the power to carry them out, or even because he would fear the consequences of doing so, but because if the situation escalated to that point, she wouldn’t be useful to him anymore. Once Mosely followed through on the ugliest of his threats, if he actually had Gerri arrested and sent to Riker’s Island or had someone hurt Corinne or Rory, the threat lost its power to control her.

But even if Nate was right, even if Mosely didn’t plan to follow through on his threats, how could she possibly risk her family’s safety on that assumption?

“Please, Nadia,” Nate said again. “You can tell him I told you I got beat up by Angel’s bouncers because I was asking stupid questions at her club. I was half expecting to end up in some kind of mess like that anyway. Walking around a Basement club asking questions isn’t a very good survival strategy, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that it backfired on me. So tell him they beat me up and robbed me. It’s true, after all. The only part you have to leave out is the link between Angel and Kurt. And whatever you do, don’t tell him Kurt contacted you.”

Nate let out a heavy sigh and sat back in his chair, like he was trying to look relaxed. He didn’t have much success. “I understand why you did what you did,” he said, but that was a lie and they both knew it. “I’m not sure I can forgive you for it, but I’ll try. But only if you don’t tell Mosely about Kurt.”

She swallowed hard. “You want me to risk everything on the hope that you’ll try to forgive me?”

The coldness in his eyes chilled her. “How about if I try to forgive you and I don’t interfere with our engagement plans?”

She let out a humorless laugh. Of all the things she’d expected from Nate, this wasn’t one of them. “Taking a page from Mosely’s book?”

“You want to protect your family. I want to protect Kurt. Our marriage was always going to be a business arrangement anyway, so let’s make it official.”

Nadia’s throat ached, and there was a lump in it the size of a tennis ball. She’d confessed all under the understanding that it would destroy the engagement, that she would doom herself to a future marriage of convenience with a stranger she could never love. Nate was offering her hope where none had existed. So why did the offer hurt so much?

When the smoke cleared, it would look to all the world as if her life had returned to normal. She would marry the Chairman Heir, her father would be promoted to the board of directors, and all her immediate family members would become eligible to have periodic backups and even Replicas. She would have all the material trappings and powers she would have had if none of this had ever happened. The only thing she wouldn’t have was Nate’s friendship. The pain of that loss threatened to rise up and swallow her whole.

“Do we have a deal?” Nate prompted as she struggled with the pain.

Her chest and throat too tight to speak, Nadia could only nod.

WhenNadia got home from Nate’s, she found that a courier had delivered a package to her from Gerri. She hurried to her bedroom, where she could open it unobserved. Inside was a pair of dangly earrings of gold filigree with a smattering of faceted pink stones. There was a handwritten note from Gerri informing her that there was a tiny toggle switch on the backing of one earring. When activated, the hidden transmitter would send whatever it picked up to a secret location.

“I’ve shared that location with someone I trust implicitly,” Gerri wrote. “Someone who knows what to do should anything happen to the two of us. It’s better you not know who, and that you don’t know where the data is being sent.” A postscript warned Nadia to destroy the note, but the warning wasn’t necessary.

Nadia put on the earrings, but even knowing she had a potential secret weapon didn’t give her the courage to contact Mosely yet, so she decided to investigate the mystery of how Bishop’s note had gotten onto her breakfast tray instead. Someone in this household must have put it there, and Nadia was determined to find out who.

Of course, Nadia couldn’t tell anyone she’d received a note from a known fugitive and suspected traitor and murderer. For all she knew, whoever had planted the note in her napkin had no idea what was in it, and, if so, it was best it stay that way. She decided the best way to play it was to pretend the envelope had contained a nasty note she suspected came from one of her Executive rivals, like Jewel. Certainly Jewel wouldn’t be above sending a nastygram just for the fun of it, and getting one of Nadia’s own servants to deliver it would add spice.

Since the tray had originated from the kitchen, Nadia started there, questioning the head cook, Mrs. Reeves. Mrs. Reeves was a grandmotherly little woman who’d been working for the Lake family since well before Nadia was born. As Nadia suspected, it was Mrs. Reeves herself who had put together the breakfast tray, but of course she hadn’t put the note in the napkin. She was outraged by the very idea that someone did such a thing, her cheeks turning a mottled red with indignation. Grandmotherly she might be, but she had a fiery temper.

“I don’t think whoever did it meant any harm,” Nadia said soothingly, and it was the truth. “They probably thought it was nothing more than some secret note passing between a couple of teenage girls acting like kids.”

Mrs. Reeves put her fists on her hips and scowled. “If anyone in my kitchen had anything to do with it, they’re going to rue the day they were born.”

So much for Nadia’s careful attempt to make sure no one got in trouble. “Please, Mrs. Reeves,” she said a little plaintively. “I really want to know who sent me that note, but no one’s going to talk to me if they’re afraid you’re going to take your meat tenderizer to them.”