“Sweetie, you can’t wear panties with that,” she said with as much patience as she could muster.
Agnes looked down at herself, startled, and saw that the edges of her panties were showing all around the high legs of the bodysuit. Nate had described her as acting brave and calm the night before, but whatever courage had seized her during the rescue had clearly been used up.
Agnes shuddered, but started to take the bodysuit off again. Nadia didn’t tap her foot, but she was sure her impatience was showing no matter how hard she was trying to hide it.
When next she turned around, Nadia found that Agnes had put the costume on properly and was now sticking her feet into the thigh-high platform boots that came with the outfit. The last item in her bag was a tube of blue gel, which neither of them knew what to do with. With Agnes as decent as she was going to get for the night, Nadia called Bishop in, and he explained the gel was for Agnes’s hair. He made Agnes sit down—which was clearly hard to do in the stiff bodysuit—and squirted the entire tube of gel into her hair, using it to plaster her hair to her head in a hard blue cap.
“Don’t worry,” he assured Agnes, holding up his bright blue hands, “it washes off.” He ducked into the bathroom to wash his hands, then displayed them for Agnes’s benefit.
She was still teary-eyed and uncertain-looking, but she nodded.
The blue-haired Amazon looked nothing like the Agnes Belinski Nadia had known. Agnes would never be beautiful, but right now she was strikingly exotic. Sexy even, though Nadia doubted Agnes would think of herself that way. “You could walk by your own father and he’d never recognize you,” Nadia told her.
“If you say so,” Agnes mumbled, rubbing her hands up and down the thin mesh sleeves of her bodysuit. “I’m just glad there’s no press to see me like this.”
Nadia smiled. “Ditto.”
“You both look great,” Bishop said, “now let’s get the fuck out of here before it’s too late.”
“Always such a gentleman,” Nadia said, but she had long ago developed an immunity to his foul mouth. And she was more than ready to get going.
The trip from Dante’s apartment to the Basement could only be described as harrowing. While the five of them were all dressed in their best imitation of Basement regalia, they didn’t fit in nearly as much as Nate would have liked. He—and presumably Dante, though Nate didn’t know for sure—had spent enough time in the Basement not to be struck by culture shock the moment they crossed its border, but the same could not be said of the girls. Nadia had only set foot in the Basement once in her life, and that had been in a secluded, disused underpass where there were no Basement-dwellers except Kurt in sight. And Agnes … Well, Agnes couldn’t have looked more screamingly uncomfortable and out of place if she were stark naked.
Agnes’s vulnerability was so great—and so obvious—that Kurt and Dante flanked her as they made their way through the Basement fringes. Whether because they feared she would bolt, or because they were afraid she would attract predators, Nate didn’t know.
The buildings in Debasement were all identical, bland concrete high-rises with cookie-cutter apartments that were available rent free. At least in theory. There was approximately zero security presence in Debasement, which left the gangs and other predators free to claim whatever territory they wanted and charge people whatever they wanted—whether in the form of money, goods, or services—for the privilege of living there.
The first few blocks of the Basement were a kind of borderland between polite society and the heart of Debasement. During the day, this was where respectable Executives and Employees went when they wanted to dabble in the black market. During the night, it was where respectable Executives and Employees who were too dumb to know better came as tourists to enjoy the bars, the clubs, the drugs, and the prostitutes. A chance to take a walk on the wild side and see how the “other half” lived. Nate knew because he’d been one of those dumb Executives himself, treating trips to the Basement as joyrides, completely blind to how he and others like him were exploiting the misery of their fellow human beings.
The apartment Kurt had claimed for his own was right at the edge of the neighborhood, perilously close to Debasement’s gang-controlled heart, where even the bravest of tourists knew better than to set foot. He led them all inside, where they had to climb five flights of fire stairs to reach his floor because the elevator was broken. Nate didn’t want to think about how people on the highest floors coped.
Nate had never been inside one of the buildings that was used as an actual residence before. He’d always stuck to the clubs, whose owners had gutted the interiors for their own purposes. Considering everything he knew about the Basement, Nate shouldn’t have been shocked that the building was such a pathetic dump, but knowing something and seeing it with your own eyes were two different things.
The enclosed stairway reeked of urine, old smoke, and sweaty bodies. There were several places where the walls were pockmarked with what Nate figured had to be bullet holes, and only one out of every three fluorescent light fixtures was working.
Kurt’s actual apartment wasn’t much better, though at least it looked relatively clean and didn’t stink. There was no furniture in the living room, only a scattering of sofa cushions that looked like they had been pillaged from the trash. The floor was covered in stained gray linoleum, which was peeling up in numerous places, and when Kurt switched on the lights, only a couple of the fluorescent bulbs overhead came on.
“You live here?” Nadia asked in amazement.
“You were expecting a palace?” Kurt countered as he closed the front door behind him. The array of shiny locks on the door, as well as the grid of metal reinforcements that crisscrossed it, were by far the newest and most sophisticated things in sight. Kurt saw Nate looking at them and gave him a crooked smile. “Security is priority number one around here,” he said, patting the door like it was a favored pet. “I’ll get shit like furniture and whatever eventually, but this had to come first.”
Nate would have felt ridiculous bugging Kurt about his language here, so he didn’t. He also tried really hard not to think about what Kurt was going to do if Nate’s grand plan failed. The dollars Nate had given him obviously didn’t stretch as far as Nate would have hoped if he was still at the point of considering furniture optional. And if Nate didn’t manage to have himself named the new Chairman of Paxco, he would most likely end up dead and unable to funnel any more money to Kurt. Which meant Kurt would have no choice but to take up his prior occupation.
The thought made Nate shudder.
“We need to record the video and get this over with as soon as possible,” he said.
“Agreed,” Dante said. “You and Nadia need to get washed up and back into normal clothes.”
“Those are normal clothes,” Kurt said in mock offense.
“Back into your normal clothes,” Dante corrected smoothly. “You need to look as respectable as possible for the video.”
Nate wasn’t sure how respectable either of them was going to look. He’d be wearing a stained, wrinkled, and generally worse-for-wear tux, and Nadia would be stuck wearing her retreat uniform. But if he wanted his father to take the threat seriously, they couldn’t record the video in their Basement disguises, so their rumpled, slept-in clothes were the next best thing.
“Bathroom’s down the hall to the right,” Kurt said. “You’re lucky to get five minutes’ worth of lukewarm water, so wash up quick if you don’t want to freeze your nuts off.”
Nate gave him his best dirty look, sure Kurt was actively trying to offend the girls with his language. Either that, or keeping his potty mouth tamed had been more of an effort than Kurt had ever let on when he’d been working as Nate’s valet.