One Step After Another (The After Another Trilogy Book 1)

by Bethany-Kris

  Except for tonight.

  Because tonight, Marise—or Delilah—wasn’t supposed to look her age at all.

  “Get off on the sixth floor,” Penny said. “No one will be waiting up there with him. They never have anyone. The entire point of what they do is the less who know, the better.”

  Marise didn’t argue. She also got off the elevator on the sixth floor.

  The rest, Penny could do alone.

  Besides, she liked it that way.

  ELIJAH EDWARD SMITHENSON the III.

  Yes, his lineage was as arrogant as his name suggested. He came from a long line of politicians. His great-grandfather, grandfather, and so on. The son of a current prominent democratic senator who was planning a run for president in the coming election. Or that was the rumor amongst the political crowd.

  People who knew what they were talking about.

  Apparently.

  Elijah himself was being looked at to follow in his father’s footsteps seeing as how the last state election won him the mayor’s seat. A position his father, the second, first won that started his overall career in the political sphere.

  On the outside, the man seemed like he had everything he wanted. Wealth. Prestige. Power.

  And none of that meant anything to Penny except for the fact that he ran in the same circles as people she had been hunting for years. One member of the elusive Elite. One more for her to kill.

  Or that was the plan.

  Currently.

  Room 801 faced a long hallway with no guards keeping watch as Penny stepped out of the elevator. The hallways to the right and left of the bank of elevators where she stepped out were also empty. One led to what looked like two more suites. The other ended at an exit stairwell.

  Penny headed for suite 801.

  She didn’t bother to knock but instead simply opened the door and entered the hotel room as was previously agreed upon. No locked doors—nothing and no one would see Elijah come and willingly greet and invite in a visually young girl and her older handler inside his room.

  The filthy rich could get whatever they wanted; whenever they wanted it. And sometimes, on nights when everyone was distracted around them—like Elijah’s father’s fundraiser dinner downstairs—and they had time to celebrate, they were known and prone to indulging their desires.

  Illegal, immoral, or otherwise.

  And sloppy about it, too.

  Which was why Penny showed up with a girl who wasn’t the age Elijah wanted but also wasn’t going anywhere near his hotel room despite the high price he paid to make sure she did exactly that. Maybe his people—or him—hadn’t been able to get a hold of one of his regular trafficked girls through the normal methods but either way ...

  His vice was her weakness to exploit.

  Penny didn’t mind at all.

  “Mr. Smithenson?” Penny called when the hotel door clicked shut behind her. “Your delivery is here and ready for your attention.”

  “Just a sec,” came the reply.

  From a room across the large space; probably the master bedroom in the space. A quiet, dimly lit hotel room stared back at her as she pulled the nine-millimeter from the bag that the men in suits downstairs hadn’t even bothered to check.

  So fucking sloppy.

  It was kind of sad, really.

  “A million dollars earned to smile and eat dinner. Two hundred guests at five thousand dollars a plate. I can do the math ... not a bad night for a politician raising funds for his next run,” Penny said, screwing in the silencer she had taken from the bag.

  “Oh, that’s before the donations are added into the—”

  Penny glanced up when Elijah’s words cut off. She took in many things at once. The suite was about as fancy, large, and expensive as she expected. Luxurious rugs. Rich tapestries. Ornate lighting overhead and furniture that was appropriately stuffy but also old. Nothing that interested her.

  Except for the man who had come to stand in the doorway across the room. He was already prepped to party. Dress shirt unbuttoned; slacks undone and showcasing the band of his briefs. A glass of something amber colored in his left hand.

  Maybe it was the shock of seeing only one woman—and no little girl—standing there or it could have been the gun in her hand that stunned him into silence.

  “What the fuck are—”

  “Nighty night,” Penny said, not wasting time.

  She couldn’t. Not when she had to be in and out of the hotel in fifteen minutes or less.

  Before Elijah could react—run, scream or otherwise—Penny did what she was there to do. Fifty hours of target practice with weapons meant she didn’t miss a shot. Shit, she didn’t unholster a weapon unless she intended to fire it, and she didn’t shoot unless she meant for it to hit the target in front of her.

  That was her training. She couldn’t forget it.

  It was a single shot. Hit Elijah between the eyes.

  Penny had already tucked the weapon back away into her bag and stepped further away from the door before the dead man’s body hit the carpeted floor with a dull thud. Such a morbid, but indifferent, sound for the end of a life.

  Not that this particular life mattered.

  If given the choice, Penny would have taken a lot more time with the kill. Really made it worth her time to be there in the first place while Elijah suffered as she was sure he’d made many others suffer. People like her ... even if he hadn’t hurt her.

  Monsters just like him did before. Could she be blamed for wanting to play with her kills in that case?

  She didn’t bother to give the corpse a second glance before stepping over it to finish the rest of her job. Killing Elijah was certainly on the list but gathering anything that would lead to anyone else—higher, more powerful people—doing even worse things than him ... well, that was a better deal.

  Two birds, one stone.

  Penny liked that. The people she worked for preferred efficiency, too.

  She found his laptop and phone in the bedroom. And a USB drive in the pocket of a pair of pants hanging in the back of the closet. All in all, the kill and collection took less than five minutes.

  That was a new record.

  3.

  Luca

  “EIGHTH floor.”

  “You’re sure?” Luca asked.

  “How much are you paying me again?”

  Luca came up the stairs two at a time. “What does that have to do with—”

  “Two grand,” Keys muttered on the phone. “You’re paying me two grand for—at most—an hour’s worth of work here. I’m doing said work while having a drink down the street. Easy work. You pay well, on time, the money’s good, and you don’t cause me problems otherwise. I tend to like clients who work with me the way you do. It makes for a good business relationship, you know what I mean? I’m not about to fuck that up, Luca. Your chick in the big black hat came off the elevator on the eighth floor. Anything else?”

  “No cameras on the hallway on that floor?”

  “Only outside the elevators. Not with a very wide view, either.”

  “And she hasn’t come back—”

  “Not to get on the elevators or to go in a different direction. She’s still there and from the floorplans I checked out ahead of time of the hotel, the direction she went only leads to a technical dead-end. A room. Eight-oh-one on that floor, to be precise. You want a text if she does get back in my line of sight on the cameras?”

  “As soon as she does.”

  “Got it.”

  “Thanks, Keys.”

  “Just doing my job, man,” the hacker replied.

  Right.

  A job that Luca would still have to pay for whether he managed to get the woman cornered this evening, or not. More money flushed down the toilet if the night didn’t end to his benefit. Not that he was ever clear on what he should do when—or if—he managed to catch Penny.

  Bring her home, Naz had once told him.

  I just want to know what happened, Roz said to L
uca once when he asked his sister. I want to know if we did something ... or didn’t.

  Penny Dunsworth wasn’t like every other search and find job Luca had taken on over the years. Even if it was her very disappearance from their lives a half of a decade earlier that had been the catalyst to bring him into his current profession. For one, because he didn’t usually work for friends and in this case, Naz was exactly that while calling all the shots regarding Penny ... and Luca’s work in finding her. But more importantly, because there was always a clear motive and objective once he found whatever it was that was missing.

  Naz’s desire to bring Penny home to his wife and the rest of their people for the reasons why she just up and disappeared after her eighteenth birthday ... as if she would stay. Like five years hadn’t passed and who knew what happened in between?

  If this was Penny he was chasing, Luca seriously doubted she was the person she had been before she left their lives. And at twenty-three now, it wasn’t like they could force her to remain with them or even get the answers some of them were so desperately seeking. That was before they factored in whatever else she was doing. Her work ... the connections she apparently had to a very dangerous organization.

  None of it spelled good things.

  But his friend asked.

  His best friend.

  So, what did it matter if Luca didn’t have a clear motive or objective once he got his hands on Penny? Who cared if he didn’t have the first clue what the plan was once he had her back? All Naz would care was that Penny was home—it would satisfy whatever compulsion he had to find her, and his wife’s sadness that hadn’t left the woman since she woke up to find the girl she loved and cared for was gone.

  Right?

  As for Luca ... well, shit.

  He just wanted to make things right. Like he didn’t blame himself for missing something years ago when he thought he had started to make friends with a young woman who had clearly been planning to leave long before she ever came into his friends’ custody.

  This was why Luca didn’t take jobs from friends or family. Emotions got in the way and clouded his judgment and rationale. Love made them all do stupid things because if in five years Penny hadn’t returned, not even bothered with a phone call, then clearly, she didn’t love them the way they had loved her.

  There wasn’t a single mark in his history that fucked him up the way Penny did. He wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing only because his desire to catch her had become an obsession of sorts. One that wouldn’t be satisfied until he had finally done his job.

  Maybe it was the fact that in all his years tracking the ghost of Penny Dunsworth, never once had he been close enough to breathe the same air as her. He’d never been just seconds behind her. It was all he could focus on.

  All he knew.

  It was the only thing racing through his mind when he passed a young girl dressed in a white, flowy gown. Not unusual considering the formal event downstairs even if she did look too young to be wandering a very large hotel on her own. It was a little strange to him that she didn’t just take the elevator but instead the emergency stairwell. He also didn’t have time to stop and question her.

  Her gaze met his as they side-stepped one another one in the stairwell, and their stares lingered for the length of time it took to pass by. Something about her was familiar. He didn’t know what.

  He only cared about catching Penny.

  That was the problem.

  LUCA HADN’T EXPECTED to find a guard wearing a black suit with a wire comm hanging from his ear waiting outside the exit door inside the stairwell on the eighth floor. Only because Keys hadn’t mentioned seeing one on the cameras. That would have been an important detail to know.

  Helpful, and all.

  He wondered if the guy had seen Penny head to room 801 earlier or if she had noticed him. Either way ... it didn’t matter because now he was in Luca’s way.

  Luca plastered on a fake smile, hoping to distract and get past the guy without a problem. The suit eyed him when he leaned sideways to glance beyond the glass window of the exit door and pointed at the bank of elevators he could see. “Got lost—place is crazy tonight. Wouldn’t have booked the whole week had I known there was going to be a political event. Don’t mix pleasure with politics, you know? Will that elevator take me—”

  “Only Smithenson family on this floor,” the guy said, offering nothing else.

  In fact, he altogether turned his gaze away from Luca. That was fine. It allowed him to size up the guard while he considered what the man said.

  What was Penny doing—or who was she visiting—on the floor where the Smithenson family was staying in the hotel? The same political family currently raising funds downstairs from wealthy donors.

  The guard was two inches shorter than Luca’s six-foot-two. But the guy also had probably forty pounds of muscle on Luca’s fit one-ninety-nine. So, he had a bit of height on his side, and the occasional kickboxing training that had become more and more infrequent over the years as he focused on his job might help but ...

  “Really,” Luca said, taking a step forward and reaching for the door. “I’ll only take the elevator back down to my fl—”

  Luca didn’t even reach the doorknob or finish his sentence before the guy grabbed his wrist and squeezed hard enough to make him flinch. Not that he did so, or showed his irritation.

  “I said no entrance to this floor, asshole. And how the fuck are you getting lost when you’ve had a room booked for the week, anyway?”

  He smirked.

  Good catch.

  Maybe the guy wasn’t just meat shoved into a suit. Not that it was going to do him any good at the moment. Luca had been willing to forgo violence thirty seconds ago had he been able to get past the man but now ...

  Too bad.

  “I lied,” Luca said frankly.

  And with a shrug.

  Just because.

  Honesty was the best policy, wasn’t it? Especially in cases where it gave Luca the leverage of shock.

  The guard’s head snapped to the side, his gaze nailing into Luca, but it was already too late. He used his free arm to lift fast and hard, and his elbow hit the intended target. The nose of the guard which broke on impact. And stunned the guy just long enough for Luca to get his forearm against the man’s throat as he pinned him to the wall.

  Forty unfortunate seconds later, because the man bled all over Luca’s arm, and he let the asshole fall to the floor before stepping over the unconscious body. Chances were, by the time he woke up, Luca would already be gone from the hotel.

  Hopefully with Penny. Even if he hadn’t figured out how to make that happen yet. Shit, if all else failed, he would just go the same route for Penny that he’d gone for the guard. Why not?

  Luca reached for the doorknob at the same time something down the hall beyond the door caught his attention and froze him to the spot. A black hat, that was. And the long, white-blonde hair now peeking out from beneath the rim, falling over the delicate line of her shoulders in soft waves. Shoulders that were covered by the sleeves of a gown that went all the way down to her wrists.

  Scars, he knew.

  She must still cover those.

  Had she been wearing a wig earlier?

  It was the change in hair color that shocked him the most. Just for a second. Long enough to make Luca pause and wonder what the fuck he was supposed to do now. He’d never even been this close to her in all these years.

  Penny.

  She stopped in front of the elevator, reaching out to push the button to open the doors. The black gown she had worn for the evening—or job, whatever the fuck she was there for—was a tight number that hugged her curves and showed off how well she could pull them off.

  The last time he saw her ... she was eighteen.

  Barely a woman.

  Barely fucking legal.

  Practically a mouse in the way she had trouble talking to men, or women ... anyone. Back then, the Penny he met that
his sister and best friend took in couldn’t gain the courage to lift her head to meet someone’s stare. She’d worn clothes that drowned any suggestion she was a female and regularly ran from the pain that chased her day and night.

  He shouldn’t know any of those things. It was part of the reason that made this job so goddamn complicated for Luca. And yet, he did.

  It’s why he paused.

  Why he stared.

  And why he couldn’t stop staring.

  He hadn’t gotten a good glimpse of Penny when she came into the hotel downstairs. Hadn’t gotten a peek at her in years beyond the occasional grainy security photo. He couldn’t even guarantee the woman who came in downstairs had been Penny until this moment. With her profile in full view through the glass of the door, there was no question in his mind.

  It was absolutely her. The mark he couldn’t catch. The one he couldn’t find.

  Until now.

  Penny.

  Her heart-shaped face had thinned from the roundness of her youth, making her cheekbones sharper and her chin more angular. Those painted-red, full lips were not something he expected—he couldn’t remember the younger her ever wearing make-up even if the rest of her pale skin still looked like porcelain glass. The ice-blue, wide doe-eyes were the exact same, though.

  It was that second when Luca realized he’d been chasing an idea of Penny. The image he had imprinted into his memories of her—of the girl that his sister and best friend desperately wanted to find. Certainly not this grown woman who he had to do a double take of because he was a man who had never learned how to look away from a beautiful woman.

  He’d been right.

  That Penny was a ghost.

  This woman was real and every part of Luca knew it. That was the problem, though. He shouldn’t notice those things at all.

  The black purse hanging off the corner off her elbow swung a bit when she stepped back and glanced upward. Maybe at the lights overtop the elevators. The groan from the man on the floor took Luca’s attention away from the glass for only a second before it was right back on Penny down the hall.