by Bethany-Kris
Or if he even should.
Nonetheless, he gave Naz the bones and most of the meat of the story. From The League, to even The Elite. He didn’t stop there, even going as far as explaining how Allegra Dunsworth fit into it, her upcoming marriage to a respected senator, and what Luca had learned over the past couple of days. The longer he spoke, the more irritated his friend became.
With him, certainly.
But also with everything else.
It was expected.
Naz raged for a bit. Luca let him.
At the end of the day, only one thing really mattered to him now.
“I need to find her,” Luca said when Naz finished his rant about people keeping shit from him just because they could. His friend wasn’t wrong, he just didn’t have the time or concern to handle that when other things needed his attention. Things like Penny. “She’s already got whatever remains of The Elite—or whoever is working for them—looking for her. Now, she’s going to have an entire team of assassins from another organization hunting her down, too.”
Naz fell into the chair behind his oak desk. “It all comes back to her mother, doesn’t it?”
“Like one messy, vicious circle.”
“And The League—”
“I got the impression that because they don’t think they’ll be able to get the situation under control with Penny being AWOL that they’re going to handle it in a more ... permanent way.”
“Kill her, you mean. Just say it.”
Luca dragged in a shaky breath. “Yeah. It’s just her ... whatever she’s trying to do right now, she’s out there doing it alone.”
He didn’t like that.
He couldn’t have that.
“They can’t risk it otherwise,” Luca added.
“Risk what?”
“Her boss. The League, Naz. What they are—what they do, you know?”
“Not really.”
“Yeah, me either.”
But here he was.
Trying.
No one could ever say Luca didn’t try.
“Her boss,” Naz said, circling a finger in the air when he added, “go back to that. Who is her boss if not the organization she’s—”
The lie slipped from his mouth before he could stop it. Another to add to the growing pile that he would eventually have to deal with. Luca would, just not now.
“They didn’t say,” Luca said.
He swallowed that proverbial pill. It wasn’t easy.
“This is bad.” Naz leaned back in the chair, staring at the ceiling overhead like he was waiting for the heavens to open up above him. “Worse than I thought—she’s a dead woman walking. Think about it.”
“It’s not going to happen, though,” Luca said, wanting his friend to know that at the very least. “This isn’t over, Naz. She’s not dead. Not yet. And she won’t be if I have anything to say about it.”
That had his friend sitting straighter in the chair, and eyeing him.
He avoided Naz’s gaze when he said, “I know the Donatis can’t go up against an organization like The League and come out of it relatively unharmed, but she might not need that, either. And I’ve got a leg up—I know she’s going after her mother. I only need to be where that bitch is and work from there.”
“You’ve gone from tracking her to protecting her, then?”
Luca’s jaw clicked when he clenched it. “Who else is doing it?”
Naz kept watching him.
Considering.
“Anything else you wanna tell me about Penny—and you, maybe?” Naz asked.
He should.
He wanted to.
Luca had no reason not to tell Naz what had transpired between him and Penny since he found her again. And shit, he wanted to tell someone. Anyone, because then it might make that real. The new loneliness in his heart was a real fucking thing he couldn’t escape. The constant worry and emptiness that wouldn’t leave him alone were driving him insane. It wasn’t fair that he’d dedicated practically so many years to something—or someone, rather—that he wasn’t sure would ever be his.
It only recently dawned on him that Penny did feel like his, in a way. As if that shit wasn’t terrifying enough. He’d always felt something for Penny, but it wasn’t the same now.
Obsessive.
Clawing.
Constant.
“Not yet,” Luca settled on telling Naz, “but I will. Soon.”
“But there is something to tell?”
“There’s something.”
One less lie between them.
Didn’t that count for anything?
“I just need a place to start, and I can find her again—go from there,” Luca muttered more to himself than to Naz.
“You don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
Naz pushed his chair back just far enough that he could open a drawer in his desk. Yanking out a newspaper, he slapped it to the top of the desk and nodded at Luca to take a look. “That right there—published today in the Times.”
Luca’s confusion only lasted as long as it took him to get the newspaper in his hands. Naz already had the paper open and folded to the story on the third page—an entire article dedicated to exposing Allegra Hatheway as Allegra Dunsworth. Maybe exposing wasn’t the right word as the journalist simply connected the dots of the woman’s history, her former husband’s arrest for child pornography, and his subsequent death. There was a suggestion that the charges facing Preston Dunsworth had only scratched the surface, the journalist had written in black and white. Holding back only a bit.
But it was enough, he knew.
Enough to do damage. To ruin a reputation. To fuck shit up for certain people—like Allegra. Or even her current fiancé who certainly couldn’t afford a scandal of this kind with his high profile nature and politics in the way.
“What are the chances,” Naz asked, “that story dropped now just because?”
Luca glanced up from the page, meeting his friend’s stare. “I don’t believe in coincidences like that.”
“Me, either. And if this is coming out, chances are, it’s not going to be the last thing we see on the topic.”
Right.
“Penny is feeding information to the papers.”
Or to someone.
It would have to be her.
Who else would—
“Maybe she’s giving people a place to start looking because then she controls where everyone else is while she’s somewhere else,” Luca murmured.
Naz shrugged. “It’s smart.”
But messy.
And now Luca needed to figure out how to look through any distractions Penny put out to find what she didn’t want him to.
Luca could tell Naz was still pissed at him. Since they were kids, nothing had been off-limits between the two. He didn’t wonder why his friend felt the way he did. “I know you’ve still got shit to say to me about all of this,” he told Naz, “but we can get back to that at another time. Because right now, I’m running out of time to find Penny. If someone else finds her before I do ... listen, nothing good is going to come from that, man.”
Naz sighed harshly. “She’s not the same, is she?”
“It’s been five years, Naz.”
“I know, but ... she’s not the same, is she?”
Luca thought about that.
And what he could say.
Penny was ...
Better.
Amazing.
Dangerous.
To him, she was enthralling.
He settled on telling his friend, “No, she’s different than she used to be, but it’s not a bad thing.”
6.
Penny
THERE was something to be said for returning to a place where it all began ... at least, in Penny’s world. One might think the start of her life—good or bad—had been at the New Jersey home tucked deep within a gated community where her parents kept a permanent residence until her father found himself locked behind ba
rs for his misdeeds.
All the horrors of the three-level Victorian home were hidden by tall, green edges and a manicured lawn. The luxury vehicles that used to sit in the driveway, and the picture-perfect image her parents presented to the world kept suspicion at bay from anyone who dared to look beyond the pretty surface to find the cracked layers underneath.
And even so, that had been where her life began.
Right?
Wrong.
Penny’s life started somewhere else. Or what she considered to be the start of it, anyway. Was life really a life worth living if someone didn’t know what love was, or how to love? Was life at all important when one wasn’t really living it, only existing?
That came later for her.
Learning how to live, that was.
It was also every reason why instead of returning to New Jersey ... she found herself back in New York. Or specifically, walking the bumpy, dirt path—one of many—that connected the forested area behind Rozalynn and Nazio Donati’s home and their rear property.
Was it too close for comfort?
Yes.
Was she being foolish?
Absolutely.
It was ... more days than she cared to count since she went AWOL from The League. She didn’t doubt for a second that her former handlers already had a small army looking for her. She was a situation they needed to get under control, and they would certainly try to do just that by whatever means necessary.
It also changed nothing.
Penny was done following orders that would not serve her best interests or the interests of the people who she had done this for in the first place. She wasn’t going to make it easy on The League—or anyone else that dared to get in her way—while she finished her business with Allegra Dunsworth.
She shouldn’t have come back to Naz and Roz when they would undoubtedly be the first place The League came to look for Penny. Very few others knew her past like her handlers did, though, so she was willing to take the risk. It wasn’t like she planned to stay for long.
And yet, despite it all, Penny couldn’t help but come back one more time before everything changed again. Before she changed everything.
She didn’t plan to show herself or even walk up and knock on the backdoor. Her adoptive family would never even know she had been there after she left. They deserved better than a random appearance and another disappearance. She threw their world into upheaval once just by being there and then again when she left without an explanation. There was no good reason to do it to them again. Even she knew that.
No, she just wanted to ... see them.
Or their home, rather.
Remind herself why she was here in the first place and what brought her to the point that she was willing to ... give it all up.
Her protection from being who she was. The family she desperately missed. A career that had allowed her both healing and retribution for the wrongs done to her. The chance to start over, or to be someone else, even.
To learn what came after ...
All of it and more.
Penny was giving it up—or any chance of it by doing what she had done, really.
Still, as she lingered at the edge of the forest, ten feet beyond where the treeline ended on Naz and Roz’s property, she couldn’t help but think it was still worth it. For them, and their life, even if it was one without her.
And for her, too.
For her peace of mind. Something she never had—not while her mother still walked and breathed.
Soon, Allegra wouldn’t.
Penny needed to start over first. Go back to the beginning and remember. To know that for a time, before all of this happened, she was happy. Or ... she was starting to learn how to be happy in her own way. Until her mother ruined that, too.
Some things never changed ...
Lost in her thoughts and still staring at the only home she had ever known, Penny was too distracted to hear the crack of twigs from her left. That was, until a little voice said, “Hey, Penny.”
Whether it was the shock of someone saying her name, or just the fact that they had managed to sneak up on her in the forest behind Naz and Roz’s property, it still earned a reaction from Penny. She hadn’t heard the approach from her left until the new voice joined a silent conversation she’d been having inside her head while the memories raced for attention in her mind.
Despite her years of training to stand calm and steady no matter the situation, she let out a yelp and fell backward when she stumbled over an exposed root of a tree. The white strands of her hair made a curtain over her eyes as her palms hit the ground to catch her fall from turning into something much worse.
A quiet, child-like laugh rang out in the forest. The sound was almost musical and a total contrast to the way her heart thumped loudly in her chest.
“Sorry,” her new companion said, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Penny didn’t bother to get up, or even fix her hair. Instead, she pushed sideways and came to sit right on her ass, so she could stare directly at the guest who had joined her in the forest. He was maybe three and half feet tall, not quite four, if that. Dark hair. Soul-deep eyes. She found familiarity in the softness of his boyish features. Even the way his grin tilted a little more on the right side in a smirk she had seen time and time again.
She didn’t need to ask his name.
She already knew.
“Cross,” she said.
The boy shrugged. “Well, everybody calls me little Cross when they think I can’t hear. I don’t like that very much. But since Grandpapa doesn’t like being called Senior, I have to deal with it. Or that’s what he said.”
His words were clear. His sentences, smart. For his age, anyway.
“And you are, right—Penny, I mean?”
She stared at the boy, blinking as if he might disappear in the next minute. She was still trying to figure out why in the hell he was even in the woods. Where were his parents? Was this something he did on the regular?
Hell ...
Penny hadn’t seen his face since he was six months old. Not once in all the years since she left had she even been graced with a picture of the boy as he grew. She always wondered, of course ... did he keep his father’s features, or change to look more like his mom?
She missed a lot.
About him.
His first steps.
Those first words.
Even his first day at school.
“You don’t talk?” Cross asked. “Ma says you were always quiet.”
She swallowed hard, knowing what she needed to tell the boy because she wasn’t even supposed to be here in the first place. “I don’t know who you think I am, but I’m not—”
“Yeah, you’re Penny. I have pictures.”
So sure.
And true.
God.
Penny dragged in a quick breath. “You didn’t scare m—”
“Yeah, I did,” he interjected again, seemingly unbothered that he kept interrupting her. “Sorry. It was kind of funny, though.”
She couldn’t help the smile fighting to get out. He was quite the kid. It only killed her more.
“You know they’re looking for you, right?” Cross asked.
Penny wet her lips. “How do you know that?”
“Uncle Luca came back. I heard Papa say he was lying. There was a lot of yelling.”
“You call him your uncle?”
Cross lifted one shoulder covered by a leather jacket that looked strikingly like one his father would have worn years ago. The children’s Doc Martens on his feet matched the whole vibe. The one thing he didn’t have was the slicked-back hair, but the wild strands of his black hair looked better all crazy anyway.
“He’s my godfather, too,” Luca added. “So ...”
Penny knew.
“And you’re supposed to be my godmother.”
“Yeah, I am,” she admitted quietly.
“Supposed to be,” the boy said again, “because
you’re not here. You never were. And even though everybody else knows you, I don’t.”
“You knew me. Just for a short time.”
That didn’t satisfy the boy at all.
“Yeah, well. Not the same.” He sighed hard, glancing through the trees at his house when he said, “I like it out here. I’m not supposed to go past the trees, but ... well, I do what I want.”
Penny laughed under her breath. “We all do.”
“Not like me.”
What did that mean?
“You’re smart, aren’t you?” she asked.
Cross pressed his lips together as he considered that before saying, “Yeah, but not like my papa. Different.”
“How?”
“He’s ... smart-smart, you know? Numbers, and books, and things. All the things. Universe stuff. I see people and just know.”
Penny’s brow dipped. “Know what?”
Cross looked back her way, those soul-deep brown eyes of his piercing and apprehensive and knowing when he replied, “Well, everything, Penny.”
She thought ... no way.
“Really?”
The boy smiled half-heartedly, saying, “It’s a lot sometimes. People lie, I know. When people hurt, I see it. Ma says it makes me special. Papa says ... it is what it is.”
“And what do you think?”
“I think you ask about me because you don’t want me to ask about you.”
And just like that, Penny knew he was telling her the truth.
“I should go,” Penny said, pushing up from the ground and brushing the dirt from her backside at the same time.
Cross glanced her way, frowning openly. “Remember when I said I didn’t know you?”
“Yeah.”
“I did know enough about you. I know you must have loved me before you left and made my ma and papa sad, right? Because you made me something to keep—something I would always have.” Cross shuffled his feet against the dry ground, kicking up some dirt and dead leaves in the process when he muttered, “I mean, nobody makes a song for someone else just because.”
Some did.
Not Penny.
“Of course, I loved you.”
