One Second After Another (The After Another Series #3) - Bethany-Kris Page 0,58
on the pathway, her skirt billowing from the wind as her head snapped up. She didn’t even react to snatch the hat that blew off her head in the wind that had picked up a lot more since she first arrived at the church that morning.
Cree waited for an answer. A gun rested in his right hand.
Penny rocked against the wind, her slight sway the only thing that moved between her and Cree for more seconds than she cared to count. The scent of ammonia from the boxed, black hair dye that she had ruined her white-blonde locks with the night before danced over her face when strands of her hair whipped against her skin.
She swallowed.
Her words.
The air.
Those few final seconds ...
“Do you remember,” he asked her, “when I made that promise?”
She did.
Two months into her training at The League, swallowed by her fear, with bloodshot eyes, and tears that tasted like salt staining her lips, he promised she would feel nothing when she killed Allegra. Cree had bent over her in the darkness of a room that she never wanted to even smell again and told her she could have the thing she wanted the most—to feel nothing when it was finally the end.
“I was scared,” Penny told him.
Cree dared to smile, as tiny and fast as it was. “And then?”
“She was gone.”
“And you felt—”
“Nothing,” Penny said, her words a rushed ache leaving her lips. “Nothing at all.”
His expression softened even as he raised his weapon. His dark eyes met hers, and she found remorse there—waiting for her, though he wouldn’t offer it in words. That was okay.
“When you killed her, or two weeks—whichever came first,” he reminded her.
“Tell Dare I’m not sorry.”
Cree nodded once. “You shouldn’t be.”
Ever.
She was owed this.
“Dare made me a deal, too,” Cree said, his finger wrapping the trigger. “You only have to die, Penny ... and maybe then you can live.”
He pulled the trigger back. The last thing Penny remembered was coughing and the taste of blood thick in her clogged airpipe as she stared up at a bright blue sky, and rolling white clouds. She heard a click—a digital ding as her heart fought to keep beating.
She felt every single one.
And how they slowed.
Penny would have liked to say that she had no regrets at the moment of her death, but that was a lie.
She regretted not saying goodbye.
21.
Luca
THERE was nothing quite like the streets of New York City, mid-week, at the end of a long workday. Often congested, and yet fast-paced in a blink, driving in that mess could make a normal man insane. He kind of liked it.
Luca could thank his father for demanding he learn how to drive in downtown Manhattan during early Monday morning traffic when he hadn’t even known how to back a vehicle up at that point. And it was one of the only times that he couldn’t focus long enough to think.
At least, not too deep. That was better, lately.
Thinking led him down too many rabbit holes—Luca didn’t enjoy the helpless feeling he was left with every time he was reminded that Penny was ... somewhere.
Somewhere without him.
Luca let those thoughts drift away as he finally rounded onto the block where he had to meet up with a Donati capo. Being the go-between to pick up payments so the capos weren’t forced into the same spot when things in the city were tense was just one way Luca was helping to keep shit steady for Naz and la famiglia.
He didn’t mind.
It kept him busy, too.
And if this was the only way he could help to keep the streets of New York from becoming anymore bloodier than they already were, then this was what he was happy to do. Simple as that.
Before long, Luca was able to pull his car to the side of the street where temporary parking allowed him to sit for five minutes or less. He sent off a quick text—a confirmation that he was outside the coffee shop where the capo spent his evenings in a rear office handling paperwork.
Luca didn’t expect the capo to bring out the money—the dues owed to the new, sitting Doanti boss. He was right. A familiar family enforcer stepped out of the alley at the side of the coffee shop, telling Luca he had probably exited the business from a rear door. He didn’t linger at the open window of Luca’s latest buy—a new, two-door Mercedes that was blacked-out from the rims to the front windshield.