Eat your heart out, Mother.
It’s what you deserve.
“Because I said so—one more thing,” Penny said to Marcel as she readied to end the call.
“Christ, what now?”
“How are they doing? The League, I mean?”
“Tracking you.”
“Obviously. I meant—”
“You’re ahead of them,” Marcel murmured. “But only barely. You’re both in New York now. Or at least, a team is there. It’s only a matter of time, Penny.”
Right.
But she just afforded herself some more.
And that’s what counted.
One second after another.
It all added up.
8.
Luca
“WHAT are you doing right now?”
Luca didn’t usually like when conversations opened up that way. It almost always meant someone was going to pile more shit on top of his to-do list, and he really couldn’t afford more at the moment.
“Depends on what you’ve got to tell me,” Luca said, taking a right turn onto the next block. “And my godson is in the back seat, so keep that shit clean, you know?”
Keys chuckled deeply. “Thanks for the heads-up—Naz Donati’s son, right? He’s in that fancy fucking private school for gifted youth, huh? Smart kid.”
Luca tensed a bit at the hacker’s personal knowledge of a side of his life that he had never shared with the man.
Before he could even say anything about it, Keys added, “Sorry, I check out shit about everybody when I’m bored. Bad habit—you start to feel like you can just join in on people’s lives when they don’t even realize you’re a part of it. Know what I mean?”
“Not really.”
“It’s ... a hacker thing. Speaking of which—”
“What?”
“Just listen, things are looking up for you,” Keys muttered, making Luca remove one hand from the steering wheel to massage at the side of his temple where a headache was starting to form.
The thing about life lately? It was really testing his patience. In every single aspect—including people. He took a second to check on little Cross in the backseat, safe in his booster seat while he ate a cup of gelato and watched the city streets pass them by. At least, the kid was happy and unconcerned. But Cross always seemed that way. The people around him over the years had learned the boy was always listening.
Always.
And he heard what people thought he didn’t. He understood more than people could sometimes be comfortable with—honestly. Gifted didn’t begin to cover his nephew, but the way the kid’s eyes flickered back and forth at passing buildings told Luca he was distracted. The conversation happening between the hacker and his uncle didn’t interest him at all.
One thing to his favor.
Back to Keys, Luca said, “Things are going to be looking some way for you if you don’t stop wasting my time with this conversation, too.”
“Hey, be nice.”
“Keys.”
“All right—I was only trying to make conversation.”
“I don’t have time for conversation right now, man. I’m running out of time to find her here, remember?”
The hacker on the other end of the line cleared his throat, a more serious note taking a hold of his tone when he replied, “Shit, right, okay. Back to it, then?”
“Please.”
“You got it—was going to ease you into this, but that’s not going to work. So, I have a ... friend.”
Luca’s gaze narrowed. “Are you fucking with me again—”
“Nah, listen. I can count on one hand the number of times Marcel has called me in the last ten years. He’s an old friend, shit went bad years ago, and he got out. And I don’t know what happened to him, but sometimes I’d get a call. A friend in the business that started where I did—there’s a code, Luca.”
“Why am I getting an entire backstory here?”
Keys sighed so loudly the speakers crackled in the Bluetooth. “The point is—I never asked about what happened because it wasn’t on the table. The code. If you’re safe, that’s great. But he called again. I was over here minding my own goddamn business and checking up on that shit about the white ghost you sent me.”
“What does this have anything to do with—”
“He wanted to ask a favor—a million-dollar bounty to be listed in New York. He figured since the last known location was here, it’d be better to open the bounty here. Really get the underground moving here while the bounty spreads outside the state. The man isn’t wrong, and he wanted to go through my servers to do it because they’re the most secure in the state to do it remotely, but that’s not the good part.”
“What is?”
“Who the bounty is on.”
Luca blinked, finally catching up to speed. No, Keys hadn’t been wasting his time at all. “The white ghost.”
“Yeah, man. So—”
“Did he have her location nailed down within New York?”
It was the only thing he cared to ask. The only thing that really mattered.
Keys quieted, and Luca had his answer before the man even said it. His heart sunk deep in his gut when the hacker muttered, “Most he could say was she had been in the state for a while and he could pinpoint her at or near the Hudson river in the past two days because she confirmed it. And we know that basically tells us nothing.”
The urge to punch his steering wheel came on so strongly that it shocked even himself. Luca swallowed back the desire, remembering the little boy still eating his gelato in the backseat. Not that the kid hadn’t occasionally seen violent things. It was the nature of their life.
He at least tried to give Cross some semblance of normal when he could—a lot like his father had done for him, and Naz still tried to do. Which was every reason why when something came up for business unexpectedly on Naz’s side of things, Luca was quick to jump in and take his godson off the man’s hands even though he had his own shit going on.
Life didn’t relent.
Luca was her bitch lately.
“Wait,” Luca said, realizing something else, “she confirmed it—he talked to her?”
“Man, I’ve already said too much. It’s ... the code, okay?”
“Nothing you know will help me? That’s all I wanna know.”
“She put it on herself.”
“What?”
Keys swore severely under his breath before spitting out, “The bounty. She put it on herself.”
Jesus Christ.
The silence stretched on deafeningly as Luca tried to absorb what that meant for Penny. He couldn’t even pretend he came from her ... world. He only graced the surface with his business through Naz and doing retrieval work over the years. It wasn’t the same as the life Penny lived as an assassin for The League. He knew that.
But he wasn’t so ignorant that he couldn’t comprehend what it meant for her to take a step to put a bounty on herself. A world-class assassin whose moniker had only been whispered about in the tightest of circles for years.
It might take a week for New York to be in a state of chaos as anyone who had the means and motive to see the bounty through mobilized to New York to hunt down the infamous white ghost, but the next few days would be dangerous for Penny to even breathe near an uncovered window where she might be recognized or seen.