One Step After Another (The After Another Series #1) - Bethany-Kris Page 0,3

yet despite those obvious physical differences, if anyone asked, the story was simple—Penny was Marise’s mother. Or ... the identities they had taken on were a mother and daughter pair, for that matter.

On the surface, anyway.

Beneath that, well, things were a lot darker. As was usually the way in their business. A person couldn’t play with monsters and never come face to face with one, after all. In all her twenty-three years, it was one lesson Penny almost wished she had never learned. Thing was, if she hadn’t learned it, then she wouldn’t be who she was now.

“Miss Carter, this way, please,” said the man in a three-piece black suit with coiled wire hanging down from the comm in his ear. He held open the front door of the hotel while another man, dressed similarly, stood a foot back in the entryway. Definitely not hotel security—more likely part of the team for the father of the man Penny would soon be visiting upstairs in a suite.

Penny smiled. “Absolutely. Delilah, follow me.”

Her partner on the job said nothing but didn’t hesitate to trail behind Penny who followed the two men dressed in black. The men didn’t speak to each other, or the women walking only two feet behind. Or to any of the many people milling about in the large entry of the upscale hotel. Music and laughter filtered in through the open doorways of the bar and ballroom decorated in lengthy, sheer drapes.

Penny took all of it in. And barely even moved her head to do it.

Besides, it wasn’t like she hadn’t been to a dozen of these kinds of events when she was younger. A wealthy family, too much privilege and power ... of course, she had been dressed up and dragged to things exactly like this just because it was good for their last name to be tied to it all.

Not that she cared to think about it.

She never did.

Liar, her mind hissed as a hundred memories passed through her brain, making her heart beat harder and her chest tight. She was a liar because she thought about it too much.

Penny had just become better at hiding it. The League helped with that. Not that she was willing to admit the training they put her through had helped beyond anything more than teaching her how to kill another human in fifty different ways.

“Step inside,” the man to the left said as he and his partner came to a stop near the elevators. Only one was already open and waiting.

Penny moved into the open elevator at the far right of a bank of four. Marise didn’t need to be told to follow, nor did she raise her head enough to allow the cameras outside or inside the elevator to catch more than a shadow or the curve of her lips. The same way Penny’s hat kept her face from view despite it not really going with the outfit.

Win some, lose some.

“Floor eight, right?” Penny asked, smiling at the suits waiting outside.

“Floor eight. Suite eight-oh-one.”

She knew that, too.

At least the assholes could feel like they were really doing something more than just delivering a man’s fetish.

Penny hit the button for the appropriate floor and waited until the door closed before she hit another. Two floors lower than the eighth. “You’ll be fine—just get the hell out of here and make sure they don’t see you leave, huh?”

Marise passed her a look. “What if he has someone waiting up there? Another one of those assholes in a suit—one with a gun?”

That was cute.

Funny, even.

She could do these jobs alone except for when she couldn’t and needed a decoy. Say like another assassin who, when dressed up a certain way looked younger than she was. As far as Penny knew, Marise was somewhere in the range of eighteen years or so. About the same age Penny had been when she walked into The League five years earlier with a black folder in hand and no idea what would come next.

Except for tonight.

Because tonight, Marise—or Delilah—wasn’t supposed to look her age at all.

“Get off on the sixth floor,” Penny said. “No one will be waiting up there with him. They never have anyone. The entire point of what they do is the less who know, the better.”

Marise didn’t argue. She also got off the elevator on the sixth floor.

The rest, Penny could do alone.

Besides, she liked it that way.

ELIJAH EDWARD SMITHENSON the III.

Yes, his lineage was as arrogant as his name suggested. He