One Second After Another (The After Another Series #3) - Bethany-Kris Page 0,56

phone number. He’s never changed it.”

She did know it.

Penny dialed the number without much thought to what she would say when someone answered the phone. Someone did—it was Roz. Through a painful whisper, she asked for the man who had given her everything to live for more times than he probably knew.

She didn’t know what she would say to him, either. And because of that, when Luca’s dark Penny echoed through the phone’s speaker, she lied.

But she also told the truth.

“I love you, Luca—I’ll see you soon.”

20.

Penny

THE sniffles, soft murmurs, and footsteps followed the sea of the grieving that walked behind a casket made of gold. From the bars the ten pallbearers used to lift the ornate, gaudy casket to the lids that had shut Charles Hatheway into his coffin.

Well ...

Someone who didn’t know the infected, poisonous history of her family ... they might assume she would feel something watching a church full of people follow her grandfather’s casket out to the waiting hearse that would deliver him to the crypt deep within a New Jersey cemetery where the rest of his family rotted together.

As rotten as him.

After all, he learned his vile ways from somewhere—or someone. To her, the abuse seemed like a disease that had chased her family for generations. Spreading and killing and ruining everything that it touched.

Even her.

No, she felt nothing as she watched the casket leave the church. She didn’t even care to look back over her shoulder at the altar where the family and friends of Charles had left a memorial in his body’s wake. The mountains of flowers and framed photographs that had followed her grandfather’s life from boyhood to a senior widower. From an innocent child to ... a monster.

One of many.

Instead, Penny stayed in the pew, pretending to fuss with the purse in her lap as the last few stragglers headed down the aisle after the family. She couldn’t help but hear their conversation as the women passed. Not that they could see her interest—the black, birdcage veil attached to the large-rimmed hat kept her face covered well enough when she had added a handkerchief to the mix just for good measure.

And for show, obviously.

“Gilles wasn’t here, I noticed,” the taller of the two women said to her friend.

The other one snickered. “Oh, I think Allegra can count her marriage over before it even began, Lydia.”

Before the women said anything else, they were already gone. Drifting down the aisle, their voices turning to whispers as they neared other people who might hear their unsavory conversation. Not a soul had dared to say one word about the fact that the senator had not shown up for his fiancée’s father’s funeral.

Statements were being made.

Apparently.

Penny no longer cared about the business or life of Allegra’s fake fiancé. Everything about the senator suggested the man had simply gotten tangled up in a web of lies—nothing more, and nothing less. He certainly wasn’t attached to The Elite or their business beyond his connection to her mother, and that had quickly fallen apart. She was sure the man had gone through a whole education about who exactly Allegra Dunsworth really was over the past few weeks.

She hoped his daughters were safe, now.

But that was all.

All that remained in the church besides the dying flowers on the altar and the scent of incense lingering in the air was Penny and the nuns starting to clean up at the front. There had been a large crowd at the funeral, but she expected that. She wondered if that was purposeful on the part of Allegra—another way to keep herself safe in the mess that she had created—or was it just the influence of a horrible man.

Hell, even tyrants were adored.

Why wouldn’t a monster be loved, too?

At the far end of the church, she heard a man tell one of the women, “Well, we better hurry if we’re going to see them carry him into the crypt.”

Yes.

Penny had to hurry now, too. She had a long-overdue meeting with a woman, and Allegra always did hate to wait.

“I’LL MISS YOU, DADDY.”

How sweet ...

Those were the first words that Penny had heard her mother speak over the course of the day—from a safe distance, of course—that she believed were true. Probably because Allegra was finally alone for the first time since arriving at the funeral in the back of a blacked-out town car with black sunglasses and a matching hat to keep anyone from seeing just how many layers of makeup she had