by Bethany-Kris
But the place would do.
For now.
“Toilet and shower down the hall,” Freddie said from the doorway.
Penny passed Luca a look that he didn’t return. Instead, he told the man, “Thanks.”
“We’ve got the cook downstairs from six until six. The bar, too. And the window won’t open. Don’t bother trying.”
“Got it.”
“Let me know if you need more than a day. I’ll see what I can do. Anything you want me to know?”
That time, Luca did glance Penny’s way. She had turned her back to the man in the doorway while she surveyed the small closet with four, lonely wire hangers left on the rack. He didn’t think she was interested in the objects, but she was avoiding talking as much as possible.
“Yeah,” Luca muttered. “If anyone asks, we’re not here.”
“Who are we, exactly?” That time, Freddie pointedly stared at the back of Penny’s white-blonde head. “Never knew you to bring guests ... you working, or—”
“Something like that.”
Luca doubted the answer satisfied the man, but Freddie didn’t show it. He also wasn’t the type to be messed with which was why the underground haven was a good place to lie low for a while if needed. Wide-shouldered, built like a brick shithouse and about as tall as one, too, the man could go a round or two without even needing a breath.
The people who could cause a problem for Freddie tended to leave the man alone because he never took sides in anything. He simply offered what he had to whoever needed it as long as they didn’t bring him any issues in the meantime.
A simple give and take. One Luca respected as did many others.
“That all?” he asked Freddie.
The guy sucked air through his teeth, giving Penny one last look before he turned on his heels to leave the room altogether. Grabbing the door handle to shut out the noise from down the hall, he only stopped long enough to say to Luca, “Yeah, but you know the rules.”
“Of course. And as long as everyone is told we’re not here ... they’ll be followed. We cool?”
“Sure. Enjoy your evening.”
Yeah.
Luca doubted that.
The door to the room wasn’t closed longer than ten seconds before Penny turned to face Luca. Her previous disinterested expression had been replaced with a heat he hadn’t expected. And not one that would end well.
No, she was ... angry.
“I’ve got nothing,” she snapped. “No phone. No line of contact to my handlers. I don’t know what the fuck this place is, but I’m pretty sure it’s not safe to go wander the halls and find a phone. If we kept running, then maybe I could have—”
“What, got away again?” Luca scoffed. “Doubt it, sweetheart. Those alleys just keep getting longer and longer. They were too close. I had to make a choice, and I knew this place was close by. Freddie and his people won’t let anybody in here to search for shit. That’s now how it works. You’re safe until you think, or know, it’s clear to go.”
“And how am I supposed to know when that is if I don’t even have a phone—”
Luca closed the distance between them and shoved his hand into the inner pocket of his leather jacket that she was still wearing. Penny jerked slightly away from him, but he was all too aware of the way she watched him—her gaze soft, but wary. Pulling the item out that he was looking for, he held off on handing it to her.
Just long enough to say, “I knew Freddie or one of his guys would hear the knocking. I just needed a couple of minutes. I wouldn’t have kissed you or made it look like we were doing any—”
“It’s fine.”
She said that too fast. He heard that clearly, and the air in her words, too. Also, she wouldn’t meet his gaze, determined that everything else in the room was apparently more interesting than him at that moment.
“It’s not,” Luca said. “If that freaked you out, a guy being on you like that after everything that’s been done to you—”
“Could you not?”
Luca straightened at the sharpness in her tone and the sting of her gaze when it leveled on him. Unashamed and without fear, she challenged his notions of her with nothing more than her presence and a look. He had to keep reminding himself that this woman he finally found was not the same one he had been chasing. Years had changed her; circumstances and life turned her into someone else.
Not that it was a bad thing.
It just ... was.
“I’m not a fragile doll that breaks apart every time someone comes within breathing distance of me, Luca,” Penny said, yanking his jacket off and then throwing it to the bed behind him. “And I know how to make someone stop. You got me?”
He nodded.
“Good,” she muttered.
“Here.” He held out the phone that he’d taken from the jacket. One of two phones he kept on hand—but this one was for work, only. “It’s a burner. No one’s listening in. You’re welcome to use it. Call your ... handler, or whatever.”
Penny eyed the phone in his outstretched hand like it was diseased. He didn’t move a muscle until she did finally take the device. A minute later, he listened from where he sat on the foot of the bed while she spoke to someone she called Cree.
“Definitely dead, yeah,” Penny said. “Probably before I even made it out the back. Is someone going to retrieve his ... no? Why the hell not?”
A beat passed.
Penny scowled. “Fine—but he’s got a kid. Had a kid. Someone’s going to tell them he’s not going to be around, right?” She shifted from foot to foot, watching her reflection in the mirror as the person on the other end of the call replied before she said, “At least two are looking right now. And yeah, I can stay out of sight until the mess is cleaned. How long do you—”
A curse fell from her lips.
“Tell Dare he can fuck off, too. This wasn’t something we could have seen coming. Nobody knew the deal was bait to draw me out. Nothing suggested that in the contacts our man had with them. Don’t let him call anything off, Cree. We’re too close and—”
Another minute passed. Penny grew more irritated by the second. Luca couldn’t help but notice how she didn’t mention him or his involvement in what happened at the pizzeria.
“Fine, I don’t move until someone comes looking for me. Got it.”
Penny offered nothing else before she hung up the call. Before Luca could even ask for his phone back, she proceeded to beat it against the side of the metal sink until the device crumbled into a hundred broken pieces on the floor.
He just ... stared.
Like an idiot.
“Why the fuck did you do that?” he demanded.
Penny didn’t even turn around. “Because I can’t trust you not to trace the call back, or try. Not that it would do you any good because my handlers can’t be found that easily. Either way, I can’t be too safe with you.”
That pissed him off.
“What, like I didn’t help you today? I’m still helping you!”
She didn’t reply.
That annoyed him more.
Getting to his feet, Luca asked, “How are your people even going to find you? Rumor is you work for an organization called The League, right? I hear they don’t take kindly to their members going AWOL.”
Penny laughed darkly, turning around and placing her hands on the edge of the metal sink while she faced him. “Nice try. Who do you think I was just talking to, anyway? God? They can find me anywhere in the world within a few feet of my current position. I don’t need to be carrying anything for them to do it, either. I am what they track.”
What?
“Are you saying they have a chip in—”
“How did you find me today?” she interjected, reverting back to the calm, unbothered demeanor like a light switch had been flipped. It was almost disconcerting to him how easily she could mask or change her emotions altogether. That was new, too.
“Luck,” he admitted. “I wasn’t there looking fo
r you.”
“Don’t think I’ll believe that when less than a few weeks ago, you showed up at another job of mine, too. I’m not that stupid, Luca. We will find out who you’ve made contact with that’s been feeding you information on me, and it will come to an end. Do you understand that? If you keep causing problems and showing up where you’re not supposed to be, the next step is to make sure you can’t. Permanently. I’m trying to warn you here. Stop whatever this stupid shit is before they—”
“They—The League?”
Penny dead stared him.
Luca didn’t care.
“Give me something,” he urged, widening his arms like he was asking for peace. “I’m only trying to do what Naz and Roz can’t. You know that’s why I’m here; why I’ve always looked for you since the day you went missing. I changed my entire life to look for you.”
Now, he was wondering why.
Penny was unfazed. “I’m asking you to stop.”
“I can’t.” Luca chuckled, shaking his head when he muttered, “I could make a call right now—get my sister and Naz down here. All they want is to see you, know you’re okay, and talk. After everything they did for you, can’t you give them that at least?”
“You do that, I’m gone.”
Luca’s brow raised at the threat. “Seriously?”
“This time, I might not leave you alive.”
“Shit, don’t promise a good time, Penny.”
His comment had zero effect.
That was the thing that sent his anger spiraling more than anything else had in their entire conversation. How she seemed so ... unaffected. Indifferent, even. The mere mention of Luca’s sister and best friend, people who had cared and loved and protected Penny until she turned eighteen and then disappeared, did absolutely nothing for her.
Or so it seemed.
“They love you. Fuck, they thought you loved them! You can’t be that removed from what happened five years ago that you don’t even care about them or what you did to them when you left. Why? That’s all they want to know, Penny. Just tell me why.”
His shouts did nothing, too. The rare sight of his temper when he stepped closer to her wasn’t even a blip on her radar. She was like ice. Beautiful, cold, and unmoveable. Who was this woman?
“Don’t you care at all?” he asked, his tone tempering a bit. “Your godson is five years old. We still call him little Cross but not to his face because he doesn’t like people thinking he’s tiny. He still carries around the bear with you made for him, though. Listens to the recording of you playing the piano every—”
“Shut up.”
Ah, there it was.
Luca found the nerve. He hit it with a punch that sent Penny pushing away from the sink to close the distance between the two of them until she was face to face with him and her stare was anything but cold.
“He knows your name,” Luca murmured. “He knows your face; Roz kept pictures. They do love—”
“I’m protecting them!”
His shouts had done nothing. Hers cut into his heart like a hot knife through butter.
“From what—who?” Luca demanded. “Do you know where we come from—who Naz is? The Donati family isn’t little fish, babe. Don’t be stupid.”
Penny didn’t even blink. “From me, people like me ... people I came from and—”
That was it.
She clammed up.
A door had almost opened, but Penny slammed it shut before Luca could even get his foot on the threshold.
“I can’t go back,” she told him, “and it’s better if they don’t know ... so neither will you. I won’t say more. Because the more you get, the faster you chase me, Luca. Today, it might have been a good thing but the next time, it might kill us both.”
Luca’s jaw ached from how hard he clenched his teeth. “I’m not going to stop.”
“You don’t know anything about the world I live in. It’s not like yours. This is dangerous.”
“Not any more or less dangerous than mine.”
She barked out a dark laugh, her gaze hardening when she asked, “Do you wanna bet?”
Luca knew her history all too well. Some, he had learned during her time with his sister and friend. A lot, he stumbled upon in his first few years chasing after her. The shit the public hadn’t known—how deep the pedophile ring really ran that her father was heavily involved in and used to traffic her sexually up until she was nearly twelve. Adding all of that knowledge to what he had seen and heard today, he had to wonder ...
He couldn’t stop himself from asking, “That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? You’re tracking them all down ... you’re killing pedophiles.”
Penny only smiled.
Wicked.
Icy.
“Oh, it’s so much worse than that, Luca. And you’re already in over your head—just stop before you drown.”
14.
Penny
PENNY figured she would be able to do a few hours locked in a room with Luca. Maybe a night, even, if she had no other choice. But when it turned into two days of living and breathing in close quarters with a man who had decided to awaken a long-dormant part of Penny with nothing more than a kiss against a cold, hard brick wall ...
Well, she was going crazy.
And it was her own fault.
Because with nothing else to do but sit and wait for some kind of word or sign from her handlers at The League, all she was left with were her thoughts. Since she wasn’t the type to obsess over the things she couldn’t change—like the fact that what should have been a simple transaction went to total shit in the blink of an eye—she was stuck going over every minute detail of what happened between her and Luca.
It was unexpected.
But she liked it.
He’d apologized.
She hadn’t wanted him to.
Perhaps part of the problem was that she had gone years without any kind of physical intimacy with someone that she felt anything for on a personal level. Sex was a mechanical, chemical need that was easily fulfilled between humans, right? That, she could handle just fine and well. Except, apparently, when a man she had been attracted to for years decided to pin her against a wall, kiss the breath from her lungs, and touch her body with hands that promised they would learn every inch of her and enjoy doing it.
It wasn’t so mechanical, then.
Definitely still chemical.
And she was stupid.
Stupid to focus on how she could still feel Luca’s mouth against her own. Silken lips that made her feel hungry. Hands that grabbed just hard enough to wake up a need for more in the same way it spiked the part of her that was scared, too.
It lasted less than a minute and hadn’t been anything more than a way to escape a bad situation. A distraction for their pursuers to give them a little bit more time to get to safety. That was what she kept telling herself but it was a lie.
He had been hard when he was pressed up against her; a natural reaction, maybe, but she didn’t know any other man who got erections when they were seconds away from losing their life. And if his kiss had made her hungry, then he’d been ravenous. He hadn’t had to touch her the way he did, or keep a hand on her like he didn’t want to let go when the man finally opened the door, but he did.
And that was every reason why she kept obsessing over a single minute in her life that was already over. Something else she couldn’t change, sure, but she wasn’t capable of letting it go, either. Maybe because that one minute was something she had imagined time and time again when she was younger, stupider, and broken, but her imagination hadn’t done it justice.
She was weak.
That’s what it was.
Weak and dumb, and controlled by a part of her body that was practically useless to her at any other time.
It felt punishingly poetic that the easiest part of her old life to escape—a man she had felt nothing more than a young, girlish crush for—was the same thing that was now causing her more problems than
she knew what to do with. In more than just the obvious ways, too. Or was that irony?
Penny didn’t know.
It wouldn’t help if she did.
“What are you doing up there?”
The question had Penny jerking back to the present in an instant. On top of the dresser, resting on her knees so that she could see out the small window, she was quite aware how she must look to Luca with the skirt of her dress hiked up around her hips so that she had more balance on the shitty furniture.
He probably had a partial view of her ass. Despite not wanting to feel embarrassed by that fact—it wasn’t like her body hadn’t been put on display before for various reasons—she still felt the blush creep up her throat into her cheeks.
More foolishness.
Every time he made a comment over the last two days that she could even slightly twist as suggestive, Penny did the same thing. Averted her eyes. Hid her face so that he couldn’t see the pink in her cheeks. Quieted. At least then, she wouldn’t make a fool out of herself. Because if she couldn’t get this stupid attraction under control, then she would make sure he didn’t know it existed in the first place.
Solid plan, her mind taunted. Another bitch in her life currently.
Giving one last look out the window—at nothing because there was nothing to see but the brick of a neighboring building—Penny sighed and turned away from the window. She refused to look at Luca when she climbed down from the dresser to slip on the heels she had kicked off to the floor.
“Checking,” she muttered.
“For what?”
“Someone. Anyone.”
A sign that someone from The League had finally decided to show up and make her hellish existence better. Maybe one of her handlers walking down an alleyway to save her from stumbling over her words while she blushed like a schoolgirl and threw herself at a man that was nothing more than a problem to what should be most important in her life.
She told Luca none of that.
It wouldn’t do any good.
“Your people?” Luca asked. “I doubt you’re gonna see anything looking out that window. Except for maybe—”