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.”
Agnes looked just as puzzled as Nate did. “But he still has a backup of the original Nathaniel Hayes, and that backup scan was done before you learned any of his secrets. Why couldn’t he just create a new Replica and start from scratch? I mean, it would be really expensive and all, but…”
Nate squirmed a little in his seat. “I know you’ve heard that the hiatus in the Replica program is temporary, but that’s a lie. There won’t be any more backups or Replicas. Ever.”
Agnes’s eyes went wide, and her mouth dropped open in shock. Nadia could only imagine the girl’s dismay at discovering how she and her father had been played. With Paxco’s chief source of revenue gone, Nate as its Chairman Heir became a considerably less appealing marriage prospect. Would Chairman Belinski really have wanted his daughter tied to a state on the verge of economic collapse? Nadia was quite certain Chairman Hayes had never mentioned that little issue during the marriage negotiations.