by Bethany-Kris
She hoped they never saw the light of day.
Naz sighed, and then chuckled. “Maybe you’re not wrong, then, but that doesn’t mean it’s any of your business about what I was doing, either.”
“Fair enough.” Penny crossed around the couch and dropped into the recliner across from where Naz was sitting. “So, what are you hiding?”
“You think I would tell you?”
“Why not?”
“You know, I think this is the longest conversation we’ve had since you moved in with us months ago, Penny.”
She had to think about it, but it didn’t take her very long at all to realize that he wasn’t exaggerating. She blinked, trying to pull something out of her zipped lips to say that would be appropriate. All she managed to settle on was, “I didn’t know there was a me for a long time—I didn’t have a voice to use.”
Naz nodded. “I know, I didn’t take it personally.”
“You know I like you, right?”
He raised his brows. “Oh?”
Penny shrugged. “I haven’t tried to ruin your life yet—that’s good sign number one.”
“That’s not funny.”
“And that doesn’t make it less true, either.”
Naz made a noise under his breath. “All right.”
“Now that all the deflections are past us,” Penny said with a smile and a wave of her hand between them, “what are you hiding?”
Because he was, she knew.
Penny just had that sense—she looked at people, and she could tell when they were lying, or if they were someone who might hurt her. Naz didn’t fall into the hurt category. Like Roz, all he ever did was try to help her, but in his own way. Sometimes, that meant giving her space, and letting her figure out whatever she needed on her own time. She appreciated that more than he could possibly know.
Rarely did people leave her alone.
Naz sighed loudly. “You tell me.”
Flipping open the laptop, he turned it around on the table so Penny could see what was on the screen ... which wasn’t anything that made sense to her. A bunch of letters and numbers and symbols on a white screen, filling it from side to side.
It looked like ... HTML?
But more.
“Is that code?” Penny asked.
“Good call,” Naz returned.
“You write code?”
Naz lifted one shoulder like it wasn’t a big thing. “I do a little bit of everything, it’s how my brain focuses.”
Right.
Over the last few months, Penny had heard more than one person refer to Naz as a literal genius. She had seen enough of his whiteboards filled with formulas that she didn’t understand around their house to know he was smart.
He was also more.
He left early in the morning—drove a black car and wore a suit. Words like family business and made man were thrown around in low tones like Penny wouldn’t be able to hear if they spoke quietly. Which was crap, because she did hear. And because she had access to the internet, she looked that shit up.
Apparently, Naz’s family, and Roz’s ... well, they were criminals. Not the kind of criminals that hurt Penny, but criminals under the law, anyway. And they had been that way for a long time. Penny never asked about it, she didn’t think the details of what the internet told her where mafia families had reigned in New York for years was something she really needed to understand, but here she was.
“What’s the code for?” Penny asked.
Naz sucked air through his teeth. “That’s ... a harder answer.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“That’s a non-answer.”
Naz gave her a look. “I just don’t think I should talk—”
“Is it about the mafia?”
He kept staring at her, expression unmovable. “And what do you know about that?”
“What I found on the internet.”
“That shit lies.”
“But does it really?”
Naz’s cheek twitched. “Are we talking about this code or the fucking mafia?”
“You’re not a very good liar, are you?”
“Not to people I care about, no.”
Huh.
He cared about her.
Penny peeked at the screen. “Is it going to run something?”
“Yes, a program.”
“That does what?”
“Crawls the dark web, the public internet, and government servers, so long as they don’t detect it. It’ll cross countries, it’ll even break through the secure internet protections countries like China has that they use to monitor and control their citizens.”
Penny’s brow dipped. “But why?”
“That’s the hard part.”
“Why?”
Naz straightened and folded his hands over his knees as he stared at her. “You told Roz there was a network of people involved in the ... thing your father was doing. Right?”
Penny swallowed hard. “So what?”
“When the police asked you for more information about that, you went quiet.”
“Because look what they did with my father.”
“Right,” Naz said, “but there are still people out there, Penny ... hurting kids.”
“And?”
“This program is going to catch them—or at the very least, identify them, and then gather evidence of their business on the dark web, which will then be compiled into zipped, protected files before being delivered to whichever law enforcement is closest to their areas.”
She blinked.
That sounded ... “That’s impossible.”
“No, it isn’t. I had a base program to work off—one that was made decades ago called Thorn. It crawled the dark web looking for child porn, which it would then try to match using facial recognition and other landmarks, should the photos include those, to real children. The problem was, that was a white hat system. It only worked legally. It didn’t go over the line into the gray, or outright black, sides of hacking on the dark web. So, it had limitations. Mine does not, and since it will run constantly without me needing to touch it, and as I have it going through so many servers that it’ll never be traced back to me. Or rather, it would take them a very long time to figure out it was me.
“This program will hack into government databases, into school databases. It will pull pictures of children from online yearbooks, and teachers from school websites. It will pull criminal records, and it will look into workers whose photos are on the internet. I have a friend who is also working with a guy that runs a program which hacks into every single security camera that runs on Wi-Fi, which means at some point, it will also be able to just—”
“Run through faces from the general public,” Penny said faintly.
Naz nodded and pointed at the laptop. “That was the last bit of code needed. All I have to do now is hit that black button where it says RUN in the left-hand corner, and the system will be live in the dark web.”
“Can’t other people detect it, or—”
“Highly unlikely, given the way it was designed.”
“Don’t the people using the dark web have things to protect—”
“It’s going to hack into those systems, too. It’ll create small wormholes that will be virtually undetectable, which will suck in their coded information, before running through it to decode as much of it as it possibly can. That will leave the program with information of the people behind the forums.”
Holy shit.
“I know it doesn’t change what’s already happened,” Naz murmured, “and it’s not going to make your life better or easier to get through what’s been done to you, Penny, but it’s going to help someone else. It’s going to save someone else. Nobody gets to change the past—we can only change the future.”
“Yeah ...”
“The code is finished. You can press the black button, if you’d like.”
She stared at the screen for a while.
Naz waited her
out.
Then, without warning, Penny leaned forward, and hit the RUN button. The screen blinked, the white background turning black as the words turned white and began to scroll. It was almost beautiful, really.
“I still wish he was dead,” Penny muttered.
“I can make that happen, too.”
Naz said it so flippantly.
That’s how she knew he wasn’t lying.
“But would you?” she asked quietly.
“You should watch the news more often,” Naz said instead, “I hear you learn a lot from it.”
What did that even mean?
He didn’t give her the chance to ask.
“How many names of people do you know that can be tied to this ring your father was involved in?”
“Not many. I rarely got their names.”
“But some,” he pressed.
“A few,” she whispered.
“Would you write them down for me?”
Penny glanced over at him. “Why?”
“Sometimes, we just don’t get what we want from the law, Penny.”
Well ...
He wasn’t wrong.
“MISS DUNSWORTH, WHAT is the square root of—”
“Pass,” Penny muttered.
“You can’t just pass a question because you don’t want to answer it, Penny.”
She sighed. “Pass.”
Light laughter filtered through the classroom, but Penny was more interested in staring out the window. She would much rather do her studies online, or even with a tutor at home, but the chick who came around every once in a while to check in on Penny, and her living situation being fostered with Roz and Naz said it would be better for her to be in school.
With people.
Yuck.
The only good thing about this hell was the fact that Roz had allowed Penny to pick what school she wanted to attend, and then Naz came in to drop a whole bunch of money to make sure Penny had just enough freedom to breathe here.
Like now.
Sticking her hand up, the teacher’s gaze drifted to her. “Yes?”
“I want to go see Mrs. Canns.”
The school counselor.
The teacher’s lips pursed like she was considering refusing Penny’s request, but the woman eventually nodded with a jerk of her thumb toward the door. It took Penny no time at all to pack up her shit, and head out of the classroom, leaving the rest of the teenaged idiots behind her. She was only here because she needed to be—she needed a fucking diploma.
That was it.
She didn’t have friends.
Didn’t want them.
No one here would ever understand Penny, or her life. She was the weird one—the freak. In gym, they noticed she only wore long sleeve shirts, and black leggings. And so, the rumors about what she was hiding under her clothes started. Not that they were wrong, she just didn’t care to indulge them. The group of High Bitches in Charge and their Merry Band of Fucktoys for boys made it their mission to piss Penny off at least once a day, and that was a feat.
You know, considering Penny felt nothing.
Most of the time.
She didn’t go to the counselor. Instead, she headed outside through an exit door, and pulled a small metal case from her bag. Flipping it open, she found a handful of cigarettes, and two joints. She’d save the weed for later ... maybe.
Roz didn’t like it.
Naz didn’t have an opinion.
It soothed her mind.
It was the only time she didn’t have to think.
Lighting up a cigarette, Penny let the smoke soak into her lungs as she stared out over the west side of the parking lot. No doubt, the school already had her on camera coming out to smoke, and someone was on their way to drag her back inside. Security, likely.
She didn’t want to go back in there.
She didn’t want to be here at all.
And not just here ... but here.
Alive.
Breathing.
On earth.
That was when Penny realized her depression was back, and better than ever. It wasn’t like it had gone away, really, but it became far more manageable over the last year. She didn’t know what it was like to live without depression. At three years old, she had her first moment of suicidal ideation. Here she was at seventeen, and she was still looking out at the road thinking ... how easy would it be to just run out in front of traffic?
Fucking bitch.
Yeah, that’s exactly what depression was.
A goddamn bitch.
“Penny Dunsworth, get back inside the school right now!”
Penny sighed.
Figures.
She didn’t do as the security guard told her. Instead, she stood, slinging her messenger bag and purse over her shoulder before she darted into the parking lot without a look over her shoulder. She didn’t have a car here—still didn’t know how to drive.
Not that it mattered.
She didn’t mind a walk.
Penny just didn’t know what she was walking toward anymore.
“DO YOU EVER WORK?”
Naz didn’t look the least bit surprised to see Penny standing in the doorway of their living room. “Do you ever stay at school like you’re supposed to?”
“Bad day.”
“Idiots again, or ...?”
Penny shrugged. “Bad thoughts.”
That was her way of letting them know without saying something about her depression. She kind of felt like it was a check on herself, in a way. If other people knew she was having dark thoughts, she was less likely to act on them with self-harm, or something of a similar nature. It didn’t always work, but it helped.
Especially with Naz and Roz.
They didn’t judge.
Naz folded his arms behind his head and eyed her from the side. “I do work, actually. And do you know what else I do?”
“Not particularly.”
“Get phone calls from the school when you skip out. I figured you would be coming home, so I said I would be there to meet you. I should be on the other side of the city, though.”
Huh.
“Where’s Roz?”
“You have to stop skipping school.”
“I would if I could do it online.”
Naz lifted a brow. “You’re supposed to socialize. It’s a good thing to learn.”
“I do. With you, Roz, and people around here. That school is annoying.”
“Is it, or is it—”
“I hate that school, and the people in it.”
“You chose that school.”
Penny rolled her eyes so hard it hurt. “Because I had to.”
Naz pursed his lips. “Two days at the school, three days at home online.”
“Oh, we’re bartering now?”
“Everybody gets something they want.”
“What will the social worker say?”
“Fuck her,” Naz said, “her shit doesn’t work, anyway.”
Well ...
He had a point.
“Two days there, three here,” she agreed.
Naz nodded, clearly pleased. “You only have a few months left to go before you graduate. At least try to make it until then.”
“Yeah, but then what happens?”
He was silent.
Penny, too.
“Well,” he finally said quietly, “that’s the beauty of it. You can do whatever you want.”
But could she?
Could she really?
“I don’t ... know what I want,” she admitted.
Naz gave her another look from the side. “Yeah, I imagine that’s a big part of the problem, huh?”
More than he knew.
Penny didn’t understand her purpose.
Why was she even alive?
“And you didn’t answer me—where is Roz?”
“Getting a massage right about now. She worries all the time. About the baby, me ... you. She rarely even takes time to play the piano lately. So,
I set up a day for her to relax, and nothing more. Which is why I am here right now, and she is not.”
“Are we going to tell her I skipped again?”
Naz scowled. “Probably not.”
“I’ll try to do better.”
She expected a but will you?
Instead, he smiled. “The best you can do is all we ask for, Penny.”
Yeah, she knew.
It’s why she was still here.
That, and ... “Did you guys pick a name yet?”
“We were thinking Cross, for my father.”
“I like it.”
“Roz is going to ask you to be a godmother.”
Well, then.
Penny just blinked.
Naz said nothing as he pushed up from the couch until he came to stand in front of her. “And I thought you would like to know, before someone calls and tells you.”
“Know what?”
“Yesterday, your father was found murdered in the prison kitchen. Apparently, he washed dishes to earn privileges. They’re not really sure what happened ... but dental records confirmed the identity this morning.”
Penny stilled.
Naz let her have the moment.
She almost wanted to ask if he did it. But how? He’d said he could make it happen, after all.
A part of her wanted to have a breakdown right then and there. Her fragile mental state could never be trusted to handle something like this. Another part of her felt a sick sort of glee to know one of her monsters—one of her biggest demons—was dead. The rest of her felt nothing at all, but that wasn’t unusual.
An old friend, really.
Penny decided to ask, “Do you think God forgave him for what he did to me?”
Naz considered that. “I don’t know.”
“Well, I never will.”
“I’m sure he died knowing that.”
Good.
It’s what he deserved.
5.
Luca
ARRIVING late to a family dinner wasn’t anything unusual for Luca, lately. Running like a crazy man for Naz made it hard to be on time, not that anyone complained when he slid into his usual chair at his mother’s dining room table long after the food had been served.
Katya didn’t seem to mind when she beamed at him from her end of the table. Shit, there was a first time for everything. “I’ll grab you a plate, Luca.”
