Resistance (Replica) (33 page)

Nate cursed as he looked down at himself and the crisp white tux shirt. He supposed he could take it off, but aside from the fact that it was freezing out, he didn’t think his pale skin would be that great an improvement. Dante, of course, was wearing all black, and his complexion was naturally darker, even though he’d lost the unfashionable tan he’d had when they’d first met. It only made sense to let him scout things out by himself, no matter how much it galled Nate to be left behind.

“Fine,” he said. “Just hurry.”

Dante gave him a look that managed to convey
no shit
without words. Then he began creeping forward, keeping low and darting from tree to tree. Even knowing where he was, Nate had trouble picking his form out of the darkness, and that had to be a good sign.

Dante was gone long enough that Nate wasn’t out of breath anymore when he returned. Nate knew that caution was absolutely necessary under the circumstances, but curbing his impatience was damn hard when urgency kept beating at him. It was possible his father had figured out Nate was going to show up here in an attempt to get to Nadia. Unlikely, given how impossible it seemed that he could get her out of there, but if his father
did
guess, pursuit wouldn’t be far behind.

“Looks like Nadia’s tower is about half a klick that way,” Dante said, waving to his right. “Let’s go.”

Nate didn’t know how far a
klick
was—a kilometer, maybe?—but he wasn’t about to admit his ignorance by asking. He wondered if Dante had used the term just to be annoying, or if he’d had military training before becoming a spy for Paxco security.

Nate reminded himself that he didn’t actually care how far half a klick was, that he’d run another five miles if that was what it took to get Nadia out of the Sanctuary. He took off after Dante.

It felt to Nate’s burning lungs and leg muscles that they had run at least a mile when Dante called a halt again. This time, he allowed Nate to get a little closer to the circle of light surrounding the Sanctuary’s fence, but he still made him stop before Nate could see much of anything.

“If you could see the guy in the tower,” Dante reminded him, “then he could see you. The last thing we need to do is put him on alert before Nadia gets there.”

Nate looked at his watch. It had been a good thirty minutes since they’d talked to Nadia. “She should be there already,” he said as his heart rate jacked up on a fresh surge of adrenaline. It felt like it had taken him
forever
to get here, and Nadia had had much less ground to cover. If the Sanctuary staff had caught her trying to escape …

“She’s cautious, Nate,” Dante said with a hint of impatience. “It takes a while to get from place to place when you’re cautious. Not that
you’d
know about that.”

Nate closed his eyes and ordered himself not to rise to the bait. And not to get testy that Dante insisted on calling him
Nate
when they were far from friends. “You really want to pick a fight
now
?” Talk about your bad timing.

“I’m not picking a fight. I’m just telling it like it is. I’m going to get closer, and you’re going to wait here. Might be a good time to get out the gun and turn the safety off. If things look like they’re about to go to hell, I’ll whistle. Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re sure you have something to shoot at. And try not to shoot Nadia or me if it comes to that.”

Nate’s self-control was definitely getting better. He refrained from making a smart-ass reply. He was never going to like Dante, but he had to grudgingly admire the guy. By being here, he was defying not only his official bosses in the security department, but his unofficial ones in the resistance. It took major guts to do that.

Nate withdrew the gun that he’d stuck in the back of his pants. He couldn’t see the safety in the oppressive darkness of the trees, but he found it by feel and flicked it off as Dante crept forward once again.

*   *   *

Nadia
hit the ground with a thump that rattled her teeth. Her ankle buckled on impact, sending a stab of pain up her leg. She choked off a cry of pain as she fell to her hands and knees. The lights of the guard tower felt like a spotlight, picking her form out of the darkness and screaming “she’s trying to escape” to anyone nearby. Her ankle throbbed, but she felt too vulnerable in the light to wait for it to ease up.

Hobbling as fast as she could, she half-walked, half-limped toward the trees. She caught a flash of motion, nothing more than a patch of shadow darker than its surroundings, and she came to a sudden halt, panting with exertion and pain.

“Dante?” she called in a breathless whisper, her hand straying to the canister of knockout gas, in case it wasn’t him.

“Keep moving!” Dante said abruptly, stepping into the fringes of the light.

Nadia wanted to throw her arms around him and weep, but Dante was all business, grabbing her and dragging her toward the trees. She stumbled along behind him, her ankle screaming in protest. Once they left the circle of light, she could barely see anything. The cloudless night and Dante’s black clothes made him practically invisible.

As soon as they were safely under cover of the trees, Dante hauled her into his arms and hugged her so tight she could barely breathe. Not that she had the slightest inclination to complain.

“Are you all right?” he whispered in her ear, and the brush of his lips against her skin made her shiver.

Her sister was dead, her life was in ruins, someone had just tried to kill her, but other than that …

Nadia pulled back from the embrace so she could look up into Dante’s eyes and drink in the sight of him.

“I thought I would never see you again,” she whispered.

He gazed down at her, opening and closing his mouth a couple of times as if he couldn’t quite decide what to say. In the end, he settled for kissing her, his lips hot, hungry, and almost desperate against hers. He pulled away sooner than she wanted, his hands cupping her face.

“I wish we had time for a proper hello,” he said, “but we have to get moving.”

Nadia agreed on both counts. She had no idea how long she had before the alarm was raised, or even what the Sanctuary staff would do about it when it was—and she didn’t want to find out.

“Just give me your arm for a bit,” she said, slipping her hand into the crook of his elbow. “I’m a little gimpy.”

Dante swept her off her feet so fast she gasped in surprise. Her arms settled around his neck by instinct, and she held on tight as he made his way through the darkened trees. She couldn’t help cuddling against him, noticing the firmness of his chest and the breadth of his shoulders. He carried her with an effortless strength that was undeniably sexy, and she felt way safer in his arms than she had any right to feel under the circumstances.

“Where’s Nate?” she asked, though she was reluctant to let anyone else intrude on this moment. “And Agnes?”

“I left Nate a little ways back,” Dante answered, “and Agnes is with the car. We’ll have you out of here in no time.”

And then what,
she wondered, but didn’t ask because she doubted Dante had any more answers than she.

*   *   *

Nate’s
breath frosted in the air, and the cooling sweat on his skin made him shiver. He stared intently at the little slice of the fence and tower he could see from his position.

The shivering got worse and worse, and Nate regretted his moment of gallantry in giving Agnes his jacket. It felt like the sweat from the long run was freezing against his skin, and he held the gun with great care, afraid his shaking fingers might get him into trouble.

The wait seemed to last forever, and it took all of Nate’s willpower to keep himself planted in position. He would never forgive himself if he crept forward to see what was taking so long and someone spotted him and sounded the alarm. He hoped the lack of commotion meant nothing had gone wrong at least.

Eventually, he saw movement in the trees coming toward him. He gripped the gun with both hands, then let out a shuddering breath when he saw Dante approaching, carrying Nadia like she weighed about two pounds. She was cuddled intimately against his chest, one arm locked securely around his neck.

Nate turned the safety back on and stood up. Jealousy stirred in his gut, an instinctive reaction he couldn’t will away, no matter how much he wanted to.

Throughout his life, Nadia had always been there for him. She’d understood him like no one else and just generally been his rock. He genuinely wanted her to be happy, and he wanted her to find love, just as he had found it with Kurt. That didn’t make it any easier to accept the changes a burgeoning romance would make to their friendship. Somehow, he had to train himself to stop relying on her so heavily, to get used to the idea of her being someone else’s rock now.

“Why did it have to be
him
of all people?” Nate muttered to himself. Couldn’t she have fallen for someone who wasn’t such a dick?

A dick who could have pulled off this whole rescue without any help from Nate, thank you very much. It was Dante who’d gotten word of Gerri’s death and warned Nate. It was Dante who’d provided the transportation. And it was Dante Nadia had called for help. Nate was merely tagging along, proving himself to be exactly the kind of useless aristocrat Dante thought he was.

Nate shoved his self-pity to the side. He could bemoan his uselessness later. Nadia was out, but they were hardly out of the woods—har, har—yet.

As soon as Nate stood up, Nadia raised her head from Dante’s shoulder and stopped cuddling against him. Nate wondered if she was trying to spare his feelings. Then he wondered why he always seemed to think everything was about him.

Damn, he needed to get out of his own head.

“Nate!” Nadia cried with a smile that would have lit up the night if it weren’t for the shadows in her eyes. She held out her hand to him. “I’d give you a hug, but this caveman refuses to put me down.”

Nate clasped the offered hand and squeezed it firmly. “Are you hurt?”

“Just a twisted ankle,” she assured him. “I just need to walk it off.”

“We need to hurry,” Dante said, not about to put her down. “We’ll move faster with me carrying you than with you limping.”

Nadia shot a pleading look Nate’s way, but he shook his head, reluctantly agreeing with Dante. “For the duration of Operation Rescue Nadia, he’s in charge. Let’s get the damn thing over with before I kill him.”

There was one and only one benefit to having Dante carry Nadia the whole way back to the car: even the superspy couldn’t run through darkened woods while carrying someone, at least not indefinitely. Which meant that not only could Nate keep up, he didn’t have to do all that panting and sweating in front of Nadia.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Despite
Dante’s suspicions, Agnes was in the car, huddling in Nate’s jacket, when they burst through the woods and into the grocery store parking lot.

No one had spoken throughout the course of the hike, aside from a couple requests from Nadia to be put down, which Dante ignored. They were probably about as quiet and subtle as a herd of elephants crashing through the underbrush, but it didn’t seem like there was anyone around to hear.

Agnes leaned over and opened the car door before Nate could reach it, and Dante laid Nadia carefully on the seat as if she might break if he put her down too hard. He closed the door behind her, and he and Nate both climbed in the front. Nate didn’t know about the others, but he didn’t feel remotely safe, even though they seemed to have gotten away cleanly.

Dante pulled out of the driveway and hung a right, pushing the car up to the speed limit fast enough to look suspicious to anyone who was watching.

“So, where are we going?” Nadia asked from the backseat after having exchanged a brief greeting with Agnes.

Nate looked at Dante, hoping he had some suggestion of what to do and where to go now, but he looked as clueless as Nate felt.

“We’re still working on that part,” Nate said. “We figured we needed to concentrate on getting you out first.” Which was certainly true, but he wondered if any of them had
really
thought they were going to succeed. Until Nadia had called them, their rescue plans had been vague at best.

He doubted his answer was what you’d call satisfying, but Nadia took it in stride, as she seemed capable of doing in even the worst situations. “Why don’t you start by telling me the whole story,” she prompted. “Including why you and Agnes dressed up so much to break me out of the retreat.”

As Dante drove resolutely
away
from the Sanctuary but not
toward
anywhere in particular, Nate filled Nadia in on everything that had happened from the moment he’d received Dante’s call at the theater.

*   *   *

Nadia
was still shaking with cold and residual nerves as she listened to Nate’s recounting of the night’s events. She raised her eyebrows at Agnes a couple of times, surprised and touched that the timid girl had put herself at risk as she had. Though it would have been better for all if Agnes weren’t with them. She knew too many of their secrets already, and the more time she spent with them, the more she would learn—and the deeper a hole she would dig for herself. Nadia wondered if the girl had any clue how catastrophic her decisions tonight were going to turn out to be. Had she figured out yet that she couldn’t go back?

“There’s something I don’t understand,” Agnes said after Nate had finished explaining everything.

Nadia was looking at Agnes, but out of the corner of her eye, she saw the face that Nate made. There was actually
a lot
Agnes didn’t understand, but she didn’t seem to know that.

“What’s that?” Nate asked.

“You said your father can afford to kill you now because he has Dorothy.”

“Yes.”

“What does Dorothy have to do with it? I thought once he found the recordings, your father was free to eliminate anyone who knew too much.”

Nate looked puzzled. “Well, yeah. But he couldn’t kill me because he needed an heir, and now he has Dorothy for that.”