One Breath After Another (The After Another Trilogy Book 2)

by Bethany-Kris

  ONE BREATH AFTER ANOTHER

  The After Another Trilogy, Book 2

  BETHANY-KRIS

  National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800.656.HOPE (4673)

  Chat Online: online.rainn.org

  CONTENTS

  ONE BREATH AFTER ANOTHER

  PROLOGUE.

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  INTERLUDE: 1.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  INTERLUDE: 2.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  CODA.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  OTHER BOOKS

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE.

  Penny

  Present Day ...

  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 bars for his misdeeds.

  All the horrors of the three-level Victorian home were hidden by tall, green hedges 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 Rosalynn 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.”

  1.

  Luca

  Six and a half years earlier ...

  SOMETIMES, the present was the last place Luca wanted to be, but especially when nothing he did seemed to please anyone around him. That was never more obvious than when he sat at his family’s dinner table. Even a simple question wasn’t just a question for him to answer regardless of which parent asked it of him.

  It was always an opening for a discussion. One of many, unfortunately. Discussions that made it very clear he wasn’t doing what someone thought he should be, but certainly when it came to his life choices.

  “How were your classes this week?” his mother asked.

  Luca stabbed the waffle on his plate with a fork, hoping that if he shoved the bite into his mouth and chewed for long enough, Katya would forget she even asked in the first place. Highly unlikely.

  “All right,” he muttered around chews when she continued staring at him from her spot at the end of the table. “Missed a lecture and my morning classes but—”

  “Education is important, Luca.”

  Yeah, here we go, he thought.

  “And you did want to go to college,” Katya added after a moment. “Why waste time and resources if you’re unwilling to commit to your choice?”

  “I’m not wasting anything, Ma.”

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

  Christ.

  Maybe he had looked at this all wrong. Instead of using bites of food to deflect his mother’s questions about his failing attempt at law school—every good criminal family needed a defense lawyer, right?—she was using his full mouth as a chance to get her opinion in when he couldn’t talk back.

  Sneaky.

  But smart.

  Also, not surprising.

  Wives of made men learned different ways over the years about just how they could get their voices heard when it wasn’t meant to be in the discussion in the first place. His mother might have been given a bit more freedom in her place as his father’s wife—not all made men cared to have compliant, silent, pretty dolls for wives, after all—but she also knew where the lines were drawn when it came to the family business.

  While his father watched them from his chair at the head of the table, he knew his mother was toeing the line by even bringing up the fact that his higher education was currently taking a hit a
s he stepped more and more into Zeke’s business.

  The family business.

  The mafia.

  “I just think—”

  “Katya,” his father spoke up, drawing all attention to Zeke when he picked up his coffee mug from the table. “Would you mind pouring me another cup? This one is cold.”

  Luca’s mother sighed.

  His father would never outright tell her to stop pushing the topic. Zeke wouldn’t shut his wife up just because she asked things that he didn’t like. He would, however, divert her on to something else which was a clear but silent that’s quite enough, darling.

  The chair legs squeaked against the tiled floor of the dining room as Katya stood from the table with pursed lips. A good sign of her displeasure, not that she would voice it with Luca there. He couldn’t remember—in all of his twenty-four, almost twenty-five years—a time when his parents fought in front of him or his younger sister, Roz. Hell, his mother never even raised her voice despite the little shit he had been as a kid.

  Zeke, on the other hand ...

  He didn’t mind being loud.

  “Grazie,” Zeke thanked his wife when she took the cup from his hand as she passed.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Am I?” his father asked under his breath after his wife had left the dining room entirely. “That’ll be a fun chat later, I’m sure.”

  Zeke went back to looking over the newspaper beside his breakfast plate like the entire thing hadn’t happened in the first place. Luca wasn’t quite as willing to pretend.

  “You don’t have to do that,” he told his father. “I can handle Ma’s questions. She’s just ... worried.”

  “Because you’re doing what you should be doing?”

  “Because she’s not sure it’s what I want to do.”

  The mafia wasn’t for the faint of heart, but especially not a man who was just beginning to dabble in the business. He was at the beck and call of any man in the Donati crime family who needed or wanted him for whatever they thought would serve their purposes. He barely had time to sleep and feed himself lately, let alone get any of the many papers done for college that had been due ... a long time ago.

  He should just quit.

  He rarely made it to class anymore. His grades were inconsequential because he wasn’t even doing the work to get a fucking grade. Katya had been right in stating he was wasting time and resources, but wrong that she assumed they were his to do so.

  Someone else could take his spot at college. The money his parents paid for him to attend was someone else’s dream. He was very aware of his privilege and the fact he abused it. Luca wasn’t that much of an asshole that he didn’t care.

  It wasn’t that at all.

  He just ...

  “Roz is a fucking pianist prodigy,” he muttered, referring to his little sister—by only a year—that would soon be returning from her stay in Australia where she had played for a massive company for several years. “My best friend is a literal genius.”

  Naz, that was.

  Who also dated his sister.

  Luca shrugged, pushing the food around on his plate because now it looked a little less appealing than before if only because he wasn’t in the mood to eat anymore. A sense of unworthiness could do that to a person. He hated feeling like he wasn’t up to par with the people around him. Not that anyone ever voiced as much.

  His parents didn’t compare him to his genius friend or musically inclined sister. Luca did that all on his own because he heard the things that were said and made of them what he wanted or needed to at any given time.

  Zeke eyed him over the edge of the newspaper, considering that before he replied, “And you’re ... what?”

  “Exactly. What am I, Papa?”

  “What you should be, Luca.”

  Was he?

  “I wanted to be a defense lawyer,” he said.

  Zeke sucked air through his teeth, saying, “I think you’re doing right by focusing on the family business. You balanced both for a while, but it’s hard to deny that one is now starting to suffer. Surprise, you need to make a hard choice. Comes with adulthood, son. We all reach those points eventually. You’ve hit yours.”

  “And if I didn’t want college to suffer—”

  “Luca.”

  Right.

  There it is ...

  That tone of his father’s—one he knew all too well. His mother didn’t want him to quit college, and his father didn’t care what Luca did as long as he worked to be a made man. Just like Zeke—or any other man in his life that really mattered.

  It was expected.

  Luca used to think he could do both. He even dared people to prove him differently, and they hadn’t been able to for a time.

  The pressure came from all sides.

  Constantly.

  He was really getting tired of trying to please everyone instead of just doing what he wanted. The problem was, he hadn’t found what he wanted to do yet. Which was exactly why he was trying to do everything.

  And failing.

  “I’ll tell your mother to lay off a bit on the college thing,” Zeke told him.

  Luca only thought, but what about you? What about the fact that his father made it clear he believed his only son should have his life all figured out by now and nothing else would do?

  Not that he said it out loud.

  It wouldn’t matter.

  The beep of his phone distracted Luca momentarily. Just long enough for him to pull the device from the pocket of his jeans and check the message that lit up the screen.

  Be at the club in Brooklyn in two hours. I’ve got a problem, it read.

  What was more surprising was the fact that it came from Naz who was supposed to be overseas visiting with Roz before accompanying her home. She was finally coming back from Australia. For good.

  But if Naz was already back and hadn’t even told Luca as much, then—

  “Where are you going?” Katya asked, returning from the kitchen with a steaming mug of coffee in hand for her husband only to find Luca standing from the table. “You didn’t even finish breakfast. This is the only time all week I’ve even been able to see you, Luca.”

  “Sorry, Ma,” he muttered, giving his father a pleading look to excuse him while he pulled his leather jacket from the back of the chair. “An emergency came up with Naz. I gotta go.”

  “But—”

  “Let him go, Katya,” Zeke said. “Family business first.”

  His mother sighed.

  Loudly.

  She at least gave him a smile when he dropped a kiss to her cheek on the way by. Not that it reached her eyes or felt particularly true.

  He also didn’t mind running out early despite the tinge of guilt that pulled at his gut. He didn’t want to keep disappointing his mother—or even his father.

  But shit ...

  Whatever got him out of that house.

  NAZ SAID TWO HOURS.

  Luca made it forty-five minutes early because he got lucky and traffic wasn’t completely fucking horrible on the way over.

  His good fortune meant he wasn’t surprised that he arrived before Naz at the Brooklyn club affectionally known around the family as Dizzy’s because of the manager. A female that barely touched five feet in height but was known for her ability to gut a grown man without a blink. Despite being told by many men in la famiglia that Nazio should hire someone more appropriate—like a guy—to run the place for him while he only used the club mainly to work out of for more illegal business, his best friend refused. Deserie—or Dizzy, to the people who mattered—knew how to do her job and that’s what mattered the most.

  It spoke to the changes in Cosa Nostra’s culture over the years, even since his own father’s days. Especially when those first few men who voiced their displeasure at a woman so close to the business were also quick to accept a younger man’s perspective on how certain aspects of said business should be done.

  Because Naz wasn’t wrong.


  It probably helped too that the boss of the family enjoyed challenging the opinions and views of those around him simply because he could. Oh, and because the boss was Naz’s own father. If anything, it afforded Luca’s friend a stronger position in the decisions he made regarding the mafia.

  Luca wished he could say the same. Having a father that held one of the highest seats in the Donati crime family only aided in the expectations that followed him around nonstop. While his friend managed to handle that same pressure with a grace that said Naz was meant to be the son of a boss, he was left feeling like he wasn’t good enough.

  Which was some kind of shit, that.

  No one ever said as much.

  Luca was just ... fucked that way, maybe. In his head or because he read too much into the way his parents voiced their love and worries. Who knew?

  Not him.

  “You’re looking ... in a mood,” came a dark, familiar voice from Luca’s left as he stepped beyond the entrance of the club.

  He did his best not to show his surprise at hearing Naz’s father greet him. He found Cross sitting in the first booth in a line of many, a lit cigar dancing between his lips as he muttered to the man sitting across from him to say, “Give me fifteen, Marty, yeah?”

  “Sure, boss.”

  The man stood from the booth and didn’t look back at the stacks of cash he left behind on the table.

  Cross offered Luca a smile as he pulled the cigar from his mouth and said, “What—cat got your tongue?”

  “Nah, I just—”

  “Lighten up, Luca. I was kidding. Sit for a minute. Indulge my arrogant company, hmm?”

  Cross waved at the seat across from his, but Luca took in the bar around them, still wondering why the Donati crime boss was there in the first place. He did business in a lot of places—not here. The place didn’t look the same in the daylight. One could actually see how large the stained, glossy wood floor was and the sixty feet it spanned from one side to the wall-to-wall bar on the other side.

  It wasn’t the best club. A bit shoddy in appearance, it certainly wasn’t the usual, upscale place where one would find made men doing business.