by Bethany-Kris
Would the guy even be sober enough to talk?
Luca was about to find out.
Sliding onto a barstool beside the man—he had set himself all the way at the end of the bar in a shadow far away from anyone else—Luca waved at the bartender. “A beer—draft is fine.”
He really didn’t intend to drink. Driving, and all. The speed of his Ducati never mixed well with even the tiniest amount of liquor, and he wouldn’t put his mother through the hell of burying her adult son because he was foolish.
“Sit somewhere else,” the guy to his left muttered.
Luca eyed the reporter, his wrinkled shirt and stained, striped red tie. The stain had a yellow tinge, and the first thing that came out of his mouth was, “Did you puke on yourself? That looks like bile.”
William didn’t even glance down. “At some point. Go away.”
“No can do. Why did you delete your social media posts? Apparently, you were going to publish a story about the Smithenson murder last week but then your posts went away ... and no story came out.”
That had the drunk—and probably high, depending on how many of those pills he had taken from his med bottle—man glancing up. His head bobbed and swayed as he eyed Luca on the stool next to his. The hazy gleam in his gaze said there were probably two of Luca in the man’s vision. Maybe this wasn’t the best time for a conversation, all things considered, but what choice did he have in the matter?
He needed answers.
This man could possibly give them to him. Given the murder of Elijah Smithenson was the first thing Luca had been able to definitively tie back to Penny in a real way that wasn’t some bread crumb he found online in the dark web ... well, he wasn’t about to back down. Even if that meant having a conversation with a drunk.
“Who the fuck are you?” William asked.
Why was that always someone’s first question?
Luca shook his head, watching the bartender, and keeping quiet until the man had dropped his glass of beer off and headed back down the bar to tend to someone else. “Don’t ask about me. I’m not important here. Not to you or what I want to know, anyway.”
William sniffed, reaching for the pill bottle, his hand trembling so much that the pills rattled as he pulled them closer to his chest like it would give him some sense of comfort. That wasn’t a good sign. He also didn’t answer Luca’s question.
So, Luca talked instead.
“It’s interesting how much effort the media is going through to not talk about the fact it was a murder. Instead, Elijah is being painted as a hero for his family—a bright political career cut short since everyone knew he was going to follow in his father’s footsteps. Charitable. Honorable. Kind. Most stories this week have barely even mentioned the fact he was murdered. Except you, right? You were going to—”
“Boss made me pull down the posts.”
“Are they hiding something?” Luca asked. “The Smithenson family, I mean. I ask about them because if the police knew why he was murdered by now, I’m almost certain I would have been able to pull that information with a few hundred bucks in the right hand. I’ve got nothing.”
“And you won’t,” William slurred, reaching for his glass after he burped a putrid smell. He downed what remained of his whiskey before his hand went for the bottle to pour some more. “You won’t find anything because that’s the point. They don’t want you to.”
“They don’t know about me.”
“Anyone.” William waved a wild, trembling hand over his head. “The whole, wide world. Can’t stain the image—might cost a donor or two.”
“So, they are controlling the media.”
“Who are you?” the drunk reporter asked again. “Why do you care?”
Luca considered how he wanted to answer that, and if doing so might help his case here. He just needed ... something. Anything that could lead to another hole for him to dig into where Penny was concerned. A lot of the time, they were pointless rabbit holes. Considering how close he had come to her at the hotel, he wasn’t sure this would be the same.
“I’m just a guy looking for a girl,” Luca muttered under his breath.
William blinked, smacking his lips as he replied, “Yeah, I bet. Listen, I got nothing to say. Couldn’t confirm anything on Elijah ... just anonymous sources with information that got me in a lot of shit. The Smithensons, they’re everywhere. They watch everything. You start finding their secrets, and they start coming for you.”
He surveyed the man at his left again, the liquor and pills ... all of it.
“They came after you?”
William laughed dryly. “Can’t stain the image.”
And what exactly would do that?
The reporter proceeded to pop open the top of the pill bottle before dropping three little pills into his palm. He tossed them back before Luca could attempt to stop him and then reached for the glass he had just poured to wash them down. He wouldn’t get more from the man.
That much was clear.
Not having touched his beer, Luca stood from the stool and gestured at the bartender again to gain the man’s attention. He slapped down a five-dollar bill, knowing the drink couldn’t possibly be worth more than that in a place like this. He pointed at William, tipping his head in the guy’s direction as he said to the bartender, “Call an ambulance before he kills himself, huh? There’s a reason he’s drinking alone in the dark.”
He just didn’t care about those reasons. Why should he? He had secrets to search for now.
8.
Penny
THE only good thing Penny truly liked about the hotel on the Vegas strip where The League kept her a room, was the view. Add on the small balcony where she could sit and chain smoke while she became lost in her thoughts, and the Bellagio suite basically had it all.
Oh, there was a bed, bathroom, and whatever else she needed was just a phone call to the concierge away. The three-room suite had all the comforts and amenities that a furnished apartment might, too. The decor was modern, expensive, and gave a sense of good taste. Even the artwork on the walls was nice to look at, she supposed.
And she cared nothing for all of that. At all.
Penny wanted a place to sleep, clean, and eat. The only bonus she cared about was the balcony with the view. She had never been the type that enjoyed being closed into any particular space, after all. And despite calling the hotel a home of sorts for the past couple of years once she had earned her right to live outside of The League’s complex whenever she was back in the country, well ... the hotel suite was as good as anything.
A brown-filtered Marlboro burned between Penny’s fingertips, but she wasn’t losing herself in memories for the moment. Instead, the laptop on her bare legs kept her pale skin warm despite the bit of wind whipping around the loose strands of her white hair that had fallen from the braid she made earlier. With her free hand, her fingertips danced over the keys, pulling up the dark web browser after turning on the security measures installed by the computer geeks at the complex that could make anything happen with a piece of electronic.
People didn’t realize how easy it was to hack something. All someone needed was a Wi-Fi connection—public, especially, but private wasn’t safe, either—and they had their easy way in. The rest was child’s play to a hacker.
Unless ...
Well, it didn’t matter.
Penny’s devices couldn’t be hacked now. Part of the job and she was always careful to keep her Bluetooth turned off and never connected to any Wi-Fi that wasn’t her own. She also rarely took a device out in public where someone else might see.
Was it all a little much?
Maybe.
It was also the advice given to Penny after she joined The League, and she followed it because she needed to. She didn’t have a choice when the dark web had been a part of her life since before she could even remember. Now at least, she was the one capable of searching forums and chats and classifieds for whatever she was looking for. She didn’t need to
bring someone else into it unless the situation called for it.
Sometimes, that was because someone in her business had left a message in the classifieds about seeing her—usually, that was done as a warning to The League or other assassins. Rogues, mostly. Those were more common than not, but their little notes, when not caught, were a possible problem when Penny couldn’t afford to leave even the slightest breadcrumb about her existence behind.
If she found something in the usual places of the dark web, then she could get ahead of a situation. Typically, she found nothing. Mostly because the people kept employed by her handlers to watch over this sort of thing were half decent at their job.
They did miss shit.
Occasionally.
Which was why Penny also liked to check. Certainly not because she spent hours searching the classifieds with all the right buzzwords.
TU11. F. Papers. Compliant.
Touched. Unclean. Eleven years old. Female. The girl comes with papers to look legit. Compliant. Once someone knew the language, those confusing black and white characters on the screen suddenly became a hell of a lot more horrifying spelled out. Penny really shouldn’t be putting herself through the punishment of the personal classifieds, but it was a good check and balance for her. The reason why she was here, or part of it.
Placing the cigarette between her lips for a drag, she pulled hard to fill her lungs with smoke. Holding it just far enough from her face to eye the red lipstick stain that matched the color she had painted on her almond-shaped fingernails. Against the ghostly tone of her skin—so pale one could see the blue veins running beneath the surface—the color was quite a contrast.
She liked that.
The white of innocence—which she was not. Red like blood; something she knew all too well.
Flicking the ash from the cigarette, Penny went back to the dark web classifieds. She punished herself a little longer, finding more and more reminders to answer all the whys of her current situation, and the reasons for all that she did.
It was only once she had satisfied her masochistic nature that she switched to a common—popular—forum for known rogue assassins in the underground criminal world. People who took bounties or worked unmanaged by a larger organization that often took jobs from what they found online in the same places Penny was currently scouring.
Then, something caught her eye.
The white ghost is back—got word she had a job in New York a couple of weeks ago. Did anybody hear anything about it?
That message in the forum had been posted by MG546. It almost made Penny smirk at how everyone knew to stay far away from her when she was in town on a job. To not get in her way. That’s what she wanted.
The one and only reply to the original post, only a few seconds earlier before Penny logged onto the forum, came from a username Penny recognized as a guy that watched the forums for any useable—sellable—info he could find. The League’s hackers who scrubbed the net of her presence on a regular basis, even if it was just the mention of a white ghost, said they were pretty sure he was one of the people who fed information to Luca on occasion.
The reply was short and sweet: The white ghost is already gone—typical job. The hotel in Manhattan. No problems.
Penny blinked, surprised at how brazen the asshole was in the information he gave about her work in New York. Placing the laptop to the table next to her chair, she grabbed the cell phone she had shoved in the pocket of her cut-off jean shorts and dialed a familiar number.
The League’s number one hacker picked up.
“Did you see the latest on the forum?” Penny asked before the girl could even greet her.
“I did not,” Jewel replied, “but you know the program we have constantly running will flag it and scrub it. Like it always does.”
“Recently posted. Probably too early for the program to catch it. I did. They called me out by the moniker.”
“Mmm, the white ghost. You would think they might get a little more ... original.”
Penny rolled her eyes. “That’s not the point. Wipe it, would you? Don’t let it stay up until the program finds and flags it. That could take until the morning. I found it; it’s there. Scrub it clean.”
Jewel sighed heavily, the noise cracking on the phone. “Should I just expect you to call me every time you go on one of your dark web binges? This is the third time this week, Penny. I liked it better when they had you overseas, and the time zones fucked up your ability to contact me on a regular basis. Cree told me to stop enabling you, by the way. I think he’s right.”
Well, this was nice and all, but ...
“Are you going to scrub it or not?”
Jewel muttered something unintelligible under her breath before the clack of computer keys echoed in the background. “Already working on it ...” A few seconds later, the hacker said, “Ah, your buddy’s little friend again, I see. You know, I looked him up.”
“Looked who—”
“Luca Puzza—the one who chases you all the damn time. Figured if he could look for you, then we could look for him. Better to know your common enemy, as the saying goes.”
Penny’s brow dipped. “And?”
“As someone keeping your existence on the down-low ... he’s an ornery fucker that I doubt is going to give it up any time soon. But.”
“But what?”
“As a woman with two eyes, a vagina, and working ovaries that make me do stupid things when I see a good looking man, I mean, listen ... it might not be such a bad thing to let the guy catch you. Even once.”
Penny didn’t even reply to that.
She couldn’t because her throat had suddenly grown tight. Like her stomach, too, and the way she squeezed her thighs together at the very idea. And this was exactly why she didn’t want to respond to Jewel’s comment about Luca. That stupid little crush of hers from back when she was a teenager seemed to follow her straight into adulthood; being a different person with a whole new life did nothing for her hormones, apparently.
She was not that weak. A gorgeous man and a few memories from her younger years shouldn’t be enough to make her stupid. Yet, it did. So, Penny wouldn’t indulge it at all.
Simple.
“I am going to follow Cree’s advice and stop enabling you, though,” Jewel said. “Nothing good comes from you getting on those classifieds and forums, and you know it. Shit, the last time you found old photos of yourself up for sa—”
“Thanks, Jewel. Later.”
Penny hung up the phone and tossed it aside before Jewel could say something that might unintentionally send her spiraling into a dark place. God knew she visited that hell more often than she should.
Besides, Jewel wasn’t wrong. Neither was Cree. That didn’t mean Penny intended on telling either of them they were right.
She considered doing another scan of the forums or classifieds, but it probably wasn’t going to do much for her except leave her in a shitty headspace for the rest of the night. Gathering her things, she left the balcony for something better.
Ten minutes later, she sank beneath the hot water that she used to fill the clawfoot tub in the bathroom. So hot, in fact, that steam curled up around the edges of the tub. Setting her arms along the edge for her fingers to hang over the edge, she listened to the droplets of water fall from her digits to the floor.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Her gaze traveled over the length of her legs under the water, to the swell of her hips and the way her breasts lifted and fell with each of her breaths. It wasn’t the ghostly shade of her skin that people saw first if they were unlucky enough to see her without her arms and legs covered, but rather the many scars that covered her limbs and stomach.
Crisscrossed marks.
Some red.
Others a faded white.
Penny hadn’t cut in years, but she could still vividly and viscerally remember how it felt and what it did for her.
She had been perfect, once. Her skin
unblemished and untouched by a razor or whatever other sharp objects she could use to slice into her flesh. Eventually, cutting had been the one thing that numbed her. Before that, it had been the one thing that freed her.
Because she wasn’t perfect, then.
Nobody wanted a girl that looked like her. The monsters wouldn’t pay for the privilege of ruining something so ... broken.
Where was the fun in that?
But now, the monsters didn’t want her at all, and she was still left with a body full of scars, of imperfections. Funny how the thing that had once been the weapon used against her was now her best weapon against everything—and everyone—else.
To hurt others.
To keep from being hurt.
Penny would have continued to spiral in those hellish thoughts, but the ringing of her phone somewhere outside the bathroom kept her from delving any deeper. The special ringtone told her all she needed to know.
The League was calling.
Work needed to be done.
9.
Penny
PENNY was right.
She usually was.
The call had come directly from Dare, and without information as to why, Penny found herself walking the familiar halls of The League’s complex again. She suspected her handler called her in for a job, or something related to their plan for the group known only as The Elite.
What else would it be?
Rounding the corner at the end of a long hallway that led to the stairwell where she would head up to Dare’s office, Penny was entirely unsurprised to find Cree waiting on the bottom step. Legs stretched out and ankles hooked one over the other, the man almost appeared to be sleeping with the way his eyes were closed.
Penny knew better.
“Since when do you lie in wait?” Penny asked, approaching the steps.
She stopped in front of Cree.
He cracked one eye open. “You called Jewel tonight.”