Resistance (Replica) Read Online Free

who lived and worked there without really thinking about what their lives must be like. He’d never been cruel or unfair to any of them—at least, not that he knew of—but his well-meaning ignorance was a source of shame anyway. How could Kurt possibly have loved the privileged, self-centered bastard he had been before the rude awakening of his death?
    “So you weren’t a member of the resistance when we met?”
    Kurt looked away briefly before answering, and Nate braced himself for a lie. But Kurt was a master of not doing what was expected.
    “I was,” he admitted. “But I wasn’t active. What’s a teenage whore going to do to help bring down a government?”
    Nate flinched. “Don’t call yourself that!” He had no illusions as to what Kurt’s former profession had been, had known it from the moment he’d first laid eyes on him prowling the club, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.
    “What? A teenager?” Kurt grinned at him. “I suppose I could be as much as twenty, but I’m pretty sure it’s more like eighteen.”
    Just another indication of how different life in the Basement was from the life Nate had always known. He couldn’t imagine not knowing how old he was. “You know what I mean,” Nate said with a tired sigh.
    Kurt patted his thigh. “Yeah. But I’m not ashamed of it, like you are.”
    “Kurt—”
    Kurt silenced him with a brief kiss. “It’s all right, Nate. I get it. Really, I do. But I stopped being a whore the day you hired me. And I came to your bed because I wanted to, not because it was part of a job. I love you, you idiot.”
    Even in the midst of his turmoil, Nate couldn’t help laughing. “You’re such a charmer.”
    “You want charm, marry Nadia. Oh, wait. You will. My bad.”
    His words drained every drop of humor from Nate’s body. The fact that Kurt might have been using him all along had certainly bothered Nate, but it was a sin he was prepared to forgive, knowing that however things might have started, Kurt’s affection for him in the end had to be at least somewhat genuine. Other things he had done were far harder to forgive.
    “Dante put a tracker on Nadia, and you knew, ” Nate said, shaking his head in disbelief. “You set her up so your resistance buddies could kill her.” He wanted Kurt to deny having known, wanted it all to have been Dante’s idea, but he knew in his heart that wasn’t the case.
    Kurt reached for him, and Nate slapped his hand away. He might never be able to love Nadia the way she deserved, but she’d been his friend long before Kurt had come into his life, and the idea that Kurt had been willing to sacrifice her like that …
    Kurt didn’t even have the grace to look particularly guilty. “From what I understand, having that tracker on her probably saved her life.”
    “That doesn’t make it right! But then, you knew that, or you wouldn’t have gone behind my back.”
    Kurt’s gray eyes narrowed, and his voice took on a sharp edge. “Uh-huh, couldn’t possibly be ’cause you would have pitched a fit if you knew. You’d never do a thing like that, right?”
    Kurt’s words hurt more than the fading bruises. Both Kurt and Nadia had kept secrets from him. Big ones. And both for the same reason: they didn’t trust him. They thought of him as some impulsive, out-of-control child who’d fly off the handle and act without thinking. And the worst part about it, the part that hurt most, was that they’d been right.
    “We couldn’t let her be interrogated,” Kurt said a little more gently. “She knew enough to bring down the entire resistance if she talked, and Mosely has … had  … a way of making people talk. Besides, we thought that if she got caught, she was going to die anyway. We all thought that, even you.”
    Nate closed his eyes, as if that could block out the memory. He had tried everything he could think of to stop Nadia from putting herself in danger. Respecting her decision had been one of the hardest