interested.
“What?”
The man passed him a look; the neat plait of his long braid belied the dirty scuff marks on his black cargo pants. “The Elite—her mother.”
Luca still didn’t understand. Or maybe his tired brain just wasn’t letting him put it all together. Either way, he opted to say nothing at all. Better to keep one’s mouth closed and let someone think he was a fool than open it and prove it.
Right?
“You don’t know, do you?” Cree asked.
Luca swallowed hard. “I know some.”
“But you haven’t put it all together.”
“In a bit of a situation at the moment. I like to prioritize things I have to worry about if you know what I mean. Forgive me.”
That almost had the man smiling. Or smirking, maybe.
“Don’t feel bad,” Cree told him, “no one can understand Penny or what she went through. Not really because no one should have to know the horrors she faced. And not once, but again and again. To get the full picture, you would have to go back in time ... and that’s just not possible, Luca Puzza.”
He had the distinct feeling that Cree was trying to tell Luca something without actually telling him, so to speak. But with little sleep, hunger aching deep in his belly, and an unknown future waiting beyond the doors of the room he currently called home ... well, he just couldn’t pinpoint what Cree wanted him to know.
“You were her last hope,” Luca said. “This was it—wasn’t it? For what she was trying to do, whatever she ran from years ago, this was the end of the road. The last place to go.”
Cree’s throat flexed, and his jaw tensed like he wanted to say something, but he was forcing the words back. Eventually, the man replied, “Apparently not ... look at her now.”
What did that mean?
Cree turned to leave, but Luca was quick to speak up and stop the man, asking, “What are you going to do with me now?”
A sharp gaze looked back.
Luca was still unafraid.
“At least let me know—so I’m ready for whatever it is,” he told the man.
Cree’s broad shoulders lifted almost carelessly. “We haven’t decided yet.”
He didn’t ask why.
He already knew.
The League still thought he might be able to help them. Somehow. Maybe with Penny, or perhaps with something else. Who knew? Either way, they weren’t about to throw him away like trash when he could still be useful.
It was smart business.
Bad for him, though.
But didn’t they know?
“All I ever tried to do was help Penny,” Luca said at Cree’s retreating back as the man left the room, the beep resounded again over top the door, and they started to close him back in. “It never worked.”
That didn’t mean he would stop trying. It wasn’t his style.
“WHERE ARE YOU TAKING me?” Luca demanded.
His captor—face hidden by a black mask—said nothing as he continued shoving the barrel end of his rifle into Luca’s back. The action forced him to keep walking through the many corridors of the compound. All in silence, too, because other than the man’s gun driving into his spine every time the guy wanted him to speed up, shut up, or otherwise, he wasn’t getting anything from the man.
Fucking hell.
The long, empty hallways of The League’s complex still felt cold and impersonal. Like the walls and every closed door had secrets to tell—ones he wasn’t privy to. The entire place seemed full of ghosts that he couldn’t see, and there wasn’t a single part of him that liked it, either.
Luca didn’t recognize the path he was made to take with the armed guard still at his back. They didn’t pass a soul on the way as they climbed two stairwells to an upper level of the building where finally, he started to hear something. Low, murmured voices that he couldn’t discern well enough to distinguish between the number of speakers let alone the conversation as a whole.
He didn’t know what it was until he was walked right into the middle of it, though. One last jab of the rifle to his back, right between his shoulder blades, and Luca stumbled—still tied at his wrists—into a large room.
Walls of screens stared back at him. The handful of men inside the space stopped talking just long enough to turn his way. They—including Cree, and four other men Luca didn’t recognize—turned their attention back on the man standing behind the massive metal and glass desk that dominated the space.
They were still talking.
Luca just wasn’t interested.
The screens had his attention now. And