“I’m not lying,” Nate said. “I’m just leaving a whole lot out. Dante does work for me, but for reasons I can’t explain, he knows I won’t fire him, so he feels free to treat me like an equal.”
“Uh-huh,” Agnes said, clearly unconvinced.
Nate expected Dante to get out of the city as fast as possible, so when the car made a sudden turn into a parking garage, he turned his attention away from Agnes.
“What are you doing?” he asked Dante.
“We have to change cars,” Dante explained. “Too many people saw the two of you getting into this one. We don’t need anyone tracking us. And both of you, take the batteries out of your phones.”
Nate uttered a curse. He should have thought of that himself. The secure phone wasn’t a problem, because no one who’d be looking for him knew he had it, but his personal phone was. He fished it out of his pocket, keeping an eye on Agnes to make sure she followed suit. Her phone was in one of those silly little clutch purses ladies carried, and when she took the battery out, she handed it to him. He raised his eyebrows.
“I don’t want you thinking I’m going to put it back in the minute your back is turned,” she explained.
He accepted the battery, though if Agnes were going to betray them, it seemed like she’d have done it by now. Then he pulled out the secure phone. This was just the kind of emergency he’d had in mind when he’d asked Dante to smuggle a phone to Nadia, so he punched in the number and held his breath.
“Who are you calling?” Agnes asked.
“Nadia, I hope,” he said. He had no way of knowing if she still had the phone, but he had to try. He cursed when he reached voice mail.
“Try again later,” Dante suggested. “She may not be free to answer right now.”
Nate resisted the urge to bite the asshole’s head off for stating the obvious.
The garage was deserted, and though most of the spaces on the lower floors were filled, as they climbed, there were fewer and fewer parked cars. When they were near the top, Dante pulled up beside another bland-looking sedan, this one blue.
“You must pay your servants awfully well,” Agnes commented. “Not just one car, but two. I’m impressed.”
Apparently, when she wasn’t in some kind of fraught social situation, Agnes wasn’t quite so shy about speaking up. He didn’t know how to explain the cars. Dante certainly wouldn’t be able to afford a car on a servant’s wages, and the cars were both too cheap for Nate to claim them as his.
“Please stay in the car, Miss Belinski,” Dante said as he turned off the ignition and opened the door. “I need a private word with Mr. Hayes.”
Amazing how much contempt Dante managed to get into his voice while technically addressing Nate in a proper fashion. Nate thought Dante was as surprised as he was when Agnes said, “No, I think not.”
She opened her door, but remained in the car, clearly planning to get out if they did and stay put if they didn’t.
“It’ll just be for a minute,” Nate said, figuring Dante wanted a chance to let him know how displeased he was at Nate’s decision to bring Agnes along.
“No, it won’t,” Agnes countered. “He’s going to suggest sticking me in the trunk while you two ride off to the rescue.”
The mingled surprise and guilt on Dante’s face proved she had guessed right. And Nate supposed it made good sense. She would be nothing but a liability on this mission, but they couldn’t just let her go because of what she might tell people. It would be a really shitty way to treat her after she’d helped him, but it was logical. Of course, since she had guessed what Dante had planned, there was no way they were getting her into the trunk quietly.
Agnes sniffled and lowered her eyes, and Nate felt like a bastard. She opened that little purse of hers, and he assumed she was looking for a tissue to blot her eyes. He practically swallowed his tongue when she pulled out a gun instead.
“You are not putting me in that trunk,” she said, pointing the gun at Dante, who glared at Nate as if this were all his fault. Which, come to think of it, it was.
“Where did you get that?” Nate asked, shaking his head. There was no way Agnes habitually went to the opera with a gun in her purse.
“It was in your bodyguard’s ankle holster. I was holding his ankles, remember?”
She sounded calm enough, but there was a slight tremor in her hands. Obviously, she’d had an inkling she’d be coming along from the moment she’d helped him with Fischer, but she probably hadn’t given herself enough time to think it through.
“You’re not really going to shoot anyone, are you?” Nate asked. Five minutes ago, he’d have been saying that, not asking, but he had obviously underestimated Agnes.
“Not unless someone tries to lock me in the trunk.”
Nate and Dante looked at each other.
“I thought she was supposed to be shy and quiet,” Dante said. There was a thread of anger in his voice, and the look he was giving Nate was anything but friendly, but it didn’t seem like he was particularly bothered by having a gun pointed at him.
“I did, too,” Nate said, then turned to Agnes again. “You don’t even know what’s going on or why we think Nadia is in danger, nor do you know what we plan to do.” Actually, Nate didn’t know what the plan was, either, and it would be rather hard to discuss it if they couldn’t ditch Agnes.
Agnes let out a shaky breath. “I know something extremely fishy is going on in Paxco, and I’m damn well going to find out what it is before I find myself locked into a marriage agreement. I agreed to the match because I thought it was for the good of my state, but now I’m not so sure. No one’s going to tell me the truth, so I’m going to have to learn whatever it is firsthand.”
Nate couldn’t blame her for not wanting to be locked in the trunk, and he supposed the whole situation had alarm bells clanging in her head. The haste with which the marriage agreement was reached, the “hiatus” in the Replica program, the introduction of Dorothy, and now this. She was more than prepared to take one for the team, but the match probably wasn’t looking so ideal right about now.
“You have no idea what you’d be getting yourself into,” he told her. “The less you know about it, the safer you’ll be.”
“Perhaps you should have thought about that before you dragged me out of the theater,” she said quite sensibly. “I’m now thoroughly involved anyway.”
Dante scowled at her in a way that probably would have been intimidating if she weren’t holding him at gunpoint. “You don’t get it. You come with us, you could get killed. This isn’t some stupid game, and we don’t need you coming along for the thrill.”
It was hard to tell in the darkened car, but Nate thought Agnes’s face lost some of its color, and he was sure Dante had made his point. Her hand wavered, but she regained her resolve before the muzzle lowered enough for anyone to try to take the gun away.
“I’m coming,” she said firmly. “And we’re wasting time here. Stop trying to figure out how to get around me and let’s go.”
“She has a point,” Nate admitted reluctantly. “We don’t have time for a long standoff. Unless you’re willing to gamble that she won’t shoot.”
He felt about 90 percent certain she wouldn’t, but she’d surprised him so many times tonight he wasn’t about to rely on his instincts.
Dante shook his head in disgust. “Fine. We’ll take her along. And when she gets us caught before we get to Nadia, it’ll be all your fault.” He got out of the car and slammed the door behind him, then stalked over to the blue sedan and unlocked it.