One Second After Another (The After Another Series #3) - Bethany-Kris Page 0,1
wherever in the hell she went. And deal with whatever reason for her disappearance, too. Punching his arms through the sleeves, he went in search of his hoodie and jacket but—
Bang. Bang. Bang.
“Penny, open up! Penny!”
Luca’s stride came to a stop just beyond the bathroom threshold as the noise became louder.
“Penny, open this goddamn door right now!”
Not that Luca needed more confirmation that Penny had disappeared the night before after she let him fuck her and slept tucked into his side, but the noise outside the hotel room did exactly that for him. He didn’t even have time to figure out how that made him feel or what it meant that she left.
Again.
It wasn’t the same as the last time.
He knew that.
It still ... hurt.
The banging came again—louder and harder. The hint of desperation in the familiar voice calling through the thick hotel door made Luca think the man didn’t want to believe what was happening, either.
He recognized the man’s voice even though he had only heard it once before. Cree. Given their first meeting, he couldn’t exactly forget the man.
“Penny, come on—open the fuck up!”
Luca almost missed it. To his right, the flicker of the laptop screen, he almost fucking missed it because he was distracted by the bloody mess behind him, and the unwelcomed visitors barking at one another between hitting their fists against the door. He could have blamed the fact he just woke up, too, but now he was wide awake so that didn’t work.
Nonetheless, Luca saw it.
He watched as the screen of Penny’s laptop flickered—the cursor jumped from one side of the page to the other, tabs closing and opening, pages scrolling downward fast before flipping to another one. He didn’t even have the chance to blink. He was watching, in real-time, as someone hacked Penny’s laptop.
The only good thing about it?
He could see what they saw.
Probably the same thing Penny had been looking at before she set the laptop down and walked away from it the night before. The last thing he saw before the laptop’s screen went entirely black was an image and a headline.
He was only able to read the name in the headline: Allegra Hatheway. Except he knew that woman—the one in the image at the top of the article before the screen blanked out—as Allegra Dunsworth, Penny’s mother. Once, he sat at the same table as the woman while lawyers worked out the final details of an estate that was split between two beneficiaries.
Penny and her mother.
But he knew a lot more about Allegra through his years of tracking down every scrap of Penny’s history and proof of existence that he could find. It wasn’t a lot. It was just enough to tell him that there had never been anything good between the two.
That was all he knew.
So why was she looking up her mother?
And why did she leave when she found her?
Those were answers Luca didn’t have and wouldn’t have the time to figure out. At least, not at the moment. The yelling from outside the hotel room brought him back to reality and out of his self-pity in a flash.
“Open the door or I am breaking it down,” he heard called.
Well ...
Time for him to go.
It took all of two seconds for Luca to realize what Penny had done and why there was blood in the bathroom. She told him once that The League could find her no matter where she was. He bet the blood wasn’t the only thing she left behind for them to find. Might they find a tracking chip at the bottom of the sink drain?
He didn’t plan to find out.
How would this situation end for him if Cree—and whoever was with him—broke down the hotel door just to find Luca in there alone? Fuck, they already threatened to kill him. He wasn’t about to give them another reason to see it through.
He did like being alive.
Even if he didn’t know why.
Luca was just beginning to scale the ledge of the hotel room’s small veranda when he heard wood crack as the door was kicked in. Lucky for him, it wasn’t the first time he had to make a quick exit ... or take an unconventional route of escape.
Unluckily for the people in the hotel room below Penny’s, too. Because the naked couple—the redheaded female riding her partner on the bed facing the veranda down below where Luca landed—certainly hadn’t expected him to dart through their hotel room with a quick, “My bad!”