The first Agnes Belinski must have had an impressive backbone to have been Chairman of a corporate state, even a small one like Synchrony. Too bad her namesake seemed to have inherited none of it.
No, not too bad, Nate reminded himself. If Agnes were a girl like Nadia, the kind of girl who always stubbornly fought back, he’d have no hope of frightening her out of the marriage. After all, the status and money and power she would get out of being Chairman Spouse of Paxco were well worth fighting for. Nate knew any number of Paxco girls who would stab their grandmother in the back if that meant they got to marry him, and it wasn’t because they were so all-fired fond of him. Better for him that Agnes be a wimp.
Walking gingerly as if to keep her shoes from clacking against the hardwood floor, Agnes proved herself capable of movement and took a seat on the sofa. She sat straight and primly, with her knees locked together and her hands folded in her lap. Nate thought she was going to give him more details about her grandmother, to try to fill the silence with meaningless chatter, but she didn’t. He imagined Nadia, sitting alone at the retreat, waiting patiently for visitors who would never come. She wouldn’t know why, and she’d be both hurt and angry.
“You’re going to ruin an innocent girl’s life,” he blurted, glaring at Agnes. She just blinked at him stupidly, as if she had no idea what he could possibly be talking about. But unless she’d been living in a cave, she had to know Nate had already been informally engaged before she’d entered his life. If she hadn’t known it by the time she first set foot in Paxco, then someone had certainly told her by now. He kept glaring at her until she bowed her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said, proving she did know.
Nate waited for more, but obviously Agnes wasn’t much of a talker. “You’re sorry? That’s all you have to say for yourself?” He looked for some hint of spirit and defiance in her, but there was none. If he hadn’t despised her so much, he might have felt sorry for her.
“When your father’s a Chairman, you don’t get to pick whom you marry,” she said. It was a statement of fact, not a complaint. If her lack of choices bothered her, she certainly wasn’t letting it show.
“Tell your father you won’t do it.”
She looked shocked by the very suggestion, as if he’d told her to fly to the moon. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“Why would I do that?” she asked, sounding genuinely perplexed. “Solidifying the bond between Paxco and Synchrony will be advantageous to both our states, and—”
“Because if you don’t fight it, you’ll be stuck with me,” Nate said as ominously as he could. “You won’t like that.”
He thought he detected a hint of unease in Agnes’s eyes, but she shrugged as if it hardly mattered to her. “You’re the Chairman Heir of Paxco. Surely you know that what you and I would like is irrelevant. I didn’t much like it when it looked likely I’d marry a fifty-two-year-old marketing director with two children older than I am, but the match made political sense and I didn’t complain about it. I know my duty.”
Nate sneered at her. He didn’t care if she married a ninety-year-old geezer with no teeth or a nine-year-old boy who was years away from shaving. Anyone but him.
“Of course you don’t want to fight it,” he said. “It’s a sweet deal for you, isn’t it? You’ll go from being a little nobody from a little nothing state to the Chairman Spouse of the richest, most powerful state there is. You don’t give a shit how many lives you have to ruin to get what you want.”
Nate had the satisfaction of seeing Agnes flinch at his language. He had the brief thought that if Nadia could see him now, she’d tear into him for being such a bastard to a girl he didn’t even know. He certainly wasn’t playing his preferred public role of the charming rake. But if being a bastard was what it took to get rid of Agnes and save Nadia’s reputation, then he had zero qualms about it.
“I’m doing what’s best for my family and my state,” Agnes said, with all the spirit and fight of a lump of clay. “I’m sorry if it means someone will get hurt, but—”
“What if I tell you I can make your life far more miserable than your fifty-two-year-old marketing director would?” He fixed her with the coldest look he could manage, letting every bit of his fury show in his eyes.
She quickly averted her eyes, but instead of fleeing in terror she merely shrugged again. “People are mean to me all the time.” She made a sweeping head-to-toe gesture. “Look at me and ask yourself how much joy I’m expecting from a marriage.”
For the first time, Nate felt the tiniest twinge of genuine sympathy. He’d seen the way other Executive girls treated Nadia, who was beautiful and poised and strong. They were jealous of her status, eager to stab her in the back whenever they had a chance. Even if Agnes wasn’t prime marriage material outside of Synchrony, she was the daughter of the Chairman, in the top echelon of the Synchrony elite. She’d have been the object of the same kind of jealousy, and so far he’d seen no hint that she had the tools or the confidence with which to defend herself.
But just because Nate felt a little sorry for her didn’t mean he had the least interest in marrying her, even if the marriage arrangement wouldn’t have destroyed Nadia. She was a sacrificial lamb, being offered up for the slaughter by her power-hungry father. And the worst part about it was that she didn’t even seem to mind.
Threatening Agnes with the prospect of a miserable marriage wasn’t going to work, if that was what she’d expected all along. Nate was going to have to find some other way to sabotage the arrangement—preferably in such a way that his father wouldn’t see his hand in it—before Agnes turned eighteen and signed the papers to make it legally binding.
If only he had the faintest idea how he was going to pull it off …
Nadia had pulled out the phone Dante had snuck to her three times while she waited in her room for midnight to come. The lack of visitors had filled her with a sense of foreboding, and the temptation to call Nate and ask him why he hadn’t come was almost overwhelming. But there was always the remote chance that someone might hear her talking, that the staff would find out she was in possession of a contraband phone and take it away from her. It was a chance she wasn’t willing to take, and so each time the temptation hit, she managed to fight it off.
Nadia bundled up in a sweater before slipping outside for her midnight walk. Her nerves were even more fraught this time, and she found herself jumping at every sound, startled by every shadow.
What if Dante didn’t show up? No one else she’d been expecting had come for her today. What if everyone she knew had now abandoned her, leaving her to rot here in this gilded prison?
Nadia battled against the worries as she made her way through the lawns and flowerbeds toward the wall of trees. She was probably making something out of nothing. There was probably a benign explanation for why she hadn’t received any visitors today, and she was going to drive herself insane if she didn’t stop speculating. She should ignore the squirmy, uncomfortable feeling inside her that told her something was horribly wrong.
Her attempts to calm herself met with little success, and by the time she emerged from the trees into the clearing before the fence, her pulse was racing and her hands were clammy. If Dante didn’t show up, she didn’t think she could possibly resist making a phone call. There was no one to hear her out in the woods, and she needed that sense of connection as much as she needed to breathe.