events, including Nate’s true sexual preferences. Whatever she did, she would damn Bishop, and Nate would hate her for it.
Mosely stood up, still staring at her with baleful eyes. “If I walk out that door without your agreement, you will be transferred to the detention center within the hour.”
Mosely turned on his heel, striding purposefully toward the door.
Mosely grabbed the knob and pulled the door open.
“Wait!” she cried, just before he stepped out of the room. “I’ll do it.” She felt like a pathetic coward for giving in, but she just couldn’t face the consequences of refusing.
Mosely turned back to her with a vicious smile. “You’ve made the right decision,” he said, then took his seat across from her again.
Nadia wished she could believe him.
CHAPTER THREE
After the unpleasant meeting with his father and Mosely, Nate hoped to go home and get his thoughts lined up, but of course things were never so easy when you were the Chairman Heir of a powerful corporate state. So instead of having time to rest and recuperate, he found himself running a gauntlet of press conferences, interviews, and debriefings.
The press asked the most intrusive and obnoxious questions, of course, focusing on the lurid details and constantly asking him how he felt about everything. He’d been Chairman Heir all his life, so Nate was used to the media circus. That didn’t mean he liked it, and as the day wore on, his responses grew rather more abrupt than was politically wise. When he got asked for what felt like the thousandth time how he felt about having been murdered and brought back to life as a Replica, he snapped.
“How the fuck do you
Nate’s press secretary gave him a dark look as his security detail tried to confiscate all the cameras that had caught his little indiscretion for posterity. Nate put the odds at fifty-fifty that the film would wind up on the net anyway.
Screw it. He might be a Replica, but he wasn’t a machine, and there was only so much shit he was prepared to swallow.
He left the press conference only to find a cluster of demonstrators waiting for him at the Fortress’s front entrance. The entrance was sealed off with a double set of gates, and the security forces were keeping the protesters well away from the gates and the street, but that didn’t stop Nate from seeing the signs being waved as his limo pulled out.
REPLICAS AREN’T PEOPLE.
ABOMINATION!
THE DEAD SHOULD STAY DEAD!
YOU WILL BURN IN HELL!
He suspected some of the stuff they were screaming and chanting was even worse, though he couldn’t make out the words. The protest was peaceful enough, and there was no sign that the crowd wanted to fight past the barricade and rush the limo, but their anger was a palpable force. Nate tried to look straight ahead and ignore it all, but it was still a shock to the senses.
Nate was used to being well liked. Even his scandalous behavior was usually treated as roguish charm by the press and the public. The vehemence of the crowd’s anger was more than a little unsettling, though perhaps he should have expected it. Even he had to admit that Replicas were a bit disturbing. The idea that anything he remembered in his entire life actually happened to someone else was going to drive him insane.
It was well past dark by the time he finally escaped and was able to drop the forced smile he’d been wearing all day. He still struggled with the idea that someone had actually stabbed him to death the night before. He could be an asshole sometimes, he knew that, but generally that wasn’t a crime punishable by death.
His bodyguards performed a thorough examination of his penthouse suite before allowing Nate to enter, but once he was inside, they retreated to the vestibule and he was finally able to close the door on the outside world. He had moved into the penthouse on his eighteenth birthday, a little more than six months ago. His father thought his eagerness to move out from under the same roof had been an act of rebellion, and it had. But more importantly, it had granted Nate the only modicum of privacy he was ever likely to have.
His knees feeling suddenly weak, his chest tight, Nate helped himself to a tumbler of expensive whiskey, closing his eyes and savoring the smooth burn as the alcohol slid down his throat. Technically, he was under the legal drinking age, but no one was going to refuse to sell to the Chairman Heir. His hands were shaking, his heart pounding. The pain and the panic he’d been fighting all day tried to swamp him as he finally had a chance to face them without an audience.
Nate gulped the rest of his whiskey, not caring that it was supposed to be sipped. He’d never developed a connoisseur’s palate, despite the expensive tastes he was expected to cultivate, and he didn’t make much of a distinction between the finest aged single malt and rotgut. They both contained alcohol, and that was all that mattered. He smiled tightly, thinking how his father sneered at his lowbrow tastes. The Chairman considered him to be about as cultured as a Basement-dweller, and Nate took pride in it.
The whiskey helped soothe away the panic attack, and Nate paced in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that fronted his living room, looking out at the twinkling lights of the city. He had a breathtaking view of what everyone still called the Empire State Building, despite the fact that it had been officially renamed the Paxco Headquarters Building. Usually, he appreciated the view, but tonight he was struck by how vast and dangerous the city was.
Kurt was out there somewhere, alone, hunted. Nate put his hand on the glass and closed his eyes, wishing he could sense Kurt’s presence, wishing some magic would flow into his body and show him where to find him. Surely, Kurt would contact him eventually, would reach out for the help only someone of Nate’s station could offer. All Nate had to do was wait and be ready when the time came.
He’d feel a lot more ready if he had some concrete plan for how he was going to help Kurt when he found him. Obviously, he would have to find some way to smuggle him out of Paxco. Even if Nate could find the real killer, Kurt would never be safe in Paxco again. He was supposed to be presumed innocent, but that wasn’t how things worked in the real world, and the stain would never wash off.
“Hurry up and contact me,” Nate whispered, as if willing Kurt to do it would actually make it happen.
Kurt had friends in the Basement, Nate reminded himself. Well, maybe calling them “friends” was a bit on the generous side, but he had connections. People who’d be willing to hide him and protect him from Mosely’s security forces, as long as he had money.
As soon as the thought hit him, hope surged in Nate’s chest. To survive in the Basement when he was being hunted, Kurt needed money. And Nate knew exactly where he could have gotten his hands on what he needed if he’d been daring enough to try for it.
Setting his empty glass down, he closed the drapes to protect from any unwanted watchers, then crossed to the bar with its impressive array of bottles and decanters. The floor of the bar was rich green marble, but the bar itself was of carved mahogany. Mahogany doors hid a minifridge from view, and beside the fridge was a decorative carved panel that looked like solid wood.
Nate felt along the sides of the panel until he found the little metal protuberance, then pushed. Something clicked, and the panel came loose in his hands. He laid the panel on the floor behind the bar, then peered into the thin vertical compartment the panel had hidden.
Ordinarily, the compartment held stacks of neatly banded hundred dollar bills. Real dollars, not company scrip. Scrip was the currency of choice for all legal transactions, and your ordinary Employee never laid eyes on a real dollar bill. But if you were going to spend any time in Debasement, you wanted the real thing. Oh, the black
