Jenna Black - Replica

“Why wouldn’t you tell me any of this before now?” he asked.

“Because Mosely doesn’t know I didn’t hear the whole conversation. I made some noise when I ran for it, so they knew belatedly that I was there, but they don’t know what I heard. If Mosely has any reason to think you and I have been in touch, then he’ll think I’ve told you whatever this big goddamn secret is. He killed you once to keep it hidden. I have no doubt he’d do it again. It would hurt the Chairman’s pocketbook to animate another Replica, but he’d rather do that than have you know the big secret.”

“So you … you did it to protect me?” Nate put a hand on his sore stomach, trying not to remember Angel’s goons hitting and kicking him there. As physically painful as it had been, the emotional pain of thinking Kurt had meant to hurt him was far, far worse.

“Well, me too. You did end up leading Mosely’s men straight to Angel’s place. Angel knew the Red Death had taken me in, and if he’d questioned her, that would have sucked.” He gave Nadia a cold, angry look. “I don’t care why you did it. I don’t forgive you.”

Nate had always thought of Nadia as somewhat … timid. He understood that a girl of her station had to exercise a good deal of caution—especially one who was expected to marry the Chairman Heir—but he had often found that caution rather tiresome. But either recent events had changed her, or Nate hadn’t known her as well as he thought.

Nadia didn’t wilt under Kurt’s accusatory gaze. Her lip curled in something that looked almost like a sneer as she put an arm around Nate’s shoulders. “Well I don’t forgive you for hurting Nate like you did. And I really don’t give a damn what you think of me. If Nate didn’t care about you so much, I’d hand you over to Mosely in a heartbeat.”

Nate didn’t believe that, and he suspected Kurt didn’t, either. But Kurt held up his hands in a conciliatory gesture.

“Fine. We understand each other.”

“No, we don’t,” Nadia said firmly. “After all the fuss you made to keep Nate from finding you, why all of a sudden did you arrange this meeting? And why did you insist I come?”

Kurt grimaced and looked away. “Because I really fucked up when I sent that note.” He turned back to them. “But we should get Dante back in here for the rest of this discussion.”

“Is that really necessary?”

“’Fraid so,” Kurt responded, then looked Nate up and down. “Let’s get you straightened up a bit.” He picked up the wig, gave it a close look, then dropped it back on the floor of the van. “Fuck that.” He then reached out and started pulling out the pins that held Nate’s real hair back.

Nadia rose up on her knees and helped, and Nate felt like a monkey being groomed.

“I can do it myself,” he said, trying to reach up to his head, but Kurt batted his hand aside.

“Not as fast as we can do it for you,” he said.

Moments later, Kurt was ruffling his hair. Then he sat back on his heels. “Better,” he declared, then started smoothing out the powder on Nate’s face as best he could.

Nate took a deep breath, trying to calm what remained of his inner turmoil. The touch of Kurt’s hands helped. There were still a lot of unanswered questions left between them, questions that couldn’t be settled in the presence of another person, even Nadia. But Nate was sure he wasn’t imagining the affection in Kurt’s touch or the regret in his eyes. Maybe Kurt had first infiltrated his household as part of a mission, but Nate had to believe it had become more than that to him. And if Kurt distrusted Nate for being a Replica, he certainly was showing no sign of it.

“We good for now?” Kurt asked quietly.

Nate nodded and hauled himself off the floor of the van and back onto one of the milk crates. Nadia sat next to him once more, and Kurt opened the back doors of the van to let Dante in. Nate stiffened as Dante took in the scene—Nate’s dead wig, his real hair, his messed-up makeup, his busted hand—and swore he’d throw his attempts at self-control right out the window if the bastard said one wrong word. But the guy was smarter than he looked, keeping his mouth shut as he and Kurt sat on the crates across from Nate and Nadia.

“You asked why I changed my mind since last night,” Kurt said. “Like I said, I really fucked up by sending that note.”

“No,” Dante interrupted. “I did, by getting caught.”

“Whatever.” He turned another glare at Nadia. “I let our little spy here know I hadn’t left Paxco.”

Nate opened his mouth to defend Nadia, but she beat him to the punch.

“You really want to go there with the finger pointing?” she asked. “Because you’ve been spying on him a lot longer than I have.”

“I didn’t—”

“Stop it,” Dante interrupted, making a chopping motion with his hand. “Let’s try to get through this with a minimum of bickering. We’ve all had our moments in this mess.”

“Who died and made you boss?” Kurt grumbled, but at least he didn’t light into Nadia anymore.

“The problem,” Dante said to Nadia, “is that Mosely thinks you might have been dishonest with him when he spoke to you this afternoon. He isn’t sure, because he says you were drunk when he talked to you.”

Nate turned and gave Nadia a startled look. She’d accept a drink now and then, but she never seemed to particularly enjoy them, and he’d never seen her so much as tipsy, much less drunk.

Nadia gave a half smile. “I knew I couldn’t act normal around him while I was lying, so I figured I’d give him an alternative explanation as to why.”

Both Kurt and Dante looked impressed by the tactic, and Nate felt an absurd surge of pride in her. This morning, he’d been ready to write her out of his life entirely, but somehow between then and now, he’d stopped blaming her. She’d had no choice but to do what she’d done, and if she’d tried to confide in him, he probably would have confronted Mosely. Or his father.

Nate’s mind skittered away from that thought, not willing to deal with what his own father had done to him. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

“It was a good idea,” Dante told her. “But he still suspects, and you can’t be drunk every time he talks to you.”

Nadia was sitting close enough that Nate could feel the shiver that ran through her. If Mosely thought she was lying to him, then he’d go to extreme measures to force her to talk. Once upon a time, Nate would have trusted Nadia’s station to protect her from the likes of Dirk Mosely, but now he knew better.

“The problem is worse than you think,” Dante continued, sharing an unhappy look with Kurt. “We, er, haven’t told the leader of our cell about our indiscretion with the note, but if he ever gets wind of it and thinks that Nadia might be taken in for more rigorous questioning…” He looked uncomfortable and let his voice trail off.

Nate was a little slow on the uptake. He blamed it on lack of sleep and emotional exhaustion, but he honestly didn’t know what Dante was getting at. Until Nadia finished Dante’s sentence for him.

“You think he’ll have me killed.”

Strangely,the threat to her life didn’t frighten Nadia as much as it should have. Maybe she’d been on the receiving end of too many threats lately and they had lost their power to shock. Or maybe it was just easier to face a threat to her own person than to think something she said or did might cause Mosely to hurt Rory and Corinne.

The same was not true of Nate.

“That’s not going to happen,” he said, as if just saying the words could make it true. “None of this is Nadia’s fault, and it’s just wrong that she should be in danger because of it.”