She refused to look away from Cree but staring at him also gave the man the upper hand of seemingly looking into her soul where she kept most of her secrets close to her heart. One of those secrets, he had just stripped bare and laid out in front of her, as if she might deny it.
“He’s not going to be a problem,” Penny whispered. “He’s just ... a guy.”
She wouldn’t admit to the many sleepless nights since she came face to face with Luca. Never mind the cold showers when she woke up from lustful dreams that she desperately wished would stop. None of it made any sense; there wasn’t a single reason for her to feel those things. They just were. She wouldn’t feed into it by even discussing it.
Cree wouldn’t call her out on any of that—he wouldn’t even ask those sorts of details. Which was why he kept focusing on her old friendship with Luca and less on the crush she had once admitted to having on the man. Her sexual activities had never been something that Cree put on the table unless Penny did first, and that was only because of her own confusion and fear as she learned to deal with becoming a woman with her own desires and needs after being nothing more than a body with holes to fill for the right price.
For years.
Besides, Penny no longer gave anyone that right. She refused to hand over any power to that aspect of her life. Even if that power was only knowledge because, for her, it wasn’t an only kind of thing. It was too much.
Too much power.
Sex wasn’t a weapon. At least, not one she let anyone use against her. Not in any way. Not anymore.
“For what it’s worth,” Cree said when Penny began to climb the stairs without waiting for him to dismiss her, “I think you’re right, and Dare is being his typical, worrisome self because he has to be. He has to put the safety of The League above all other things, even his own rationale. A hazard of the job, one could say.”
Stopping just long enough to peer over her shoulder, Penny asked, “Then why bother with any of this at all? It seems like a waste of time, and if there’s anything we all know about you ... you hate that shit, Cree.”
“This life isn’t forever, Penny. This place—what you do now. No one has ever told you that before, but there will be an after.”
“What does that even mean?”
“After this. The League. Who you are right now. What you’re doing. There will be an after. Have you ever thought about what you might want, then?”
Penny hadn’t ever thought about what would come after. Maybe because she didn’t know there would be one, as that was never discussed when she became a member here. That wasn’t the deal but then again ... she also hadn’t understood the sacrifice she became for this place to do what they did to her, either.
“There’s going to be an after?” she asked.
Cree cleared his throat, climbing the stairs until he came to stand beside her. While she usually didn’t leave her hotel without a full get-up that would cover her legs, arms, and any other patch of skin where her scars could be seen, she hadn’t done that tonight. Instead, she settled on fishnet tights under cut-off jean shorts, and a black tank top.
Her scars didn’t bother her. Not anymore. While cutting had eventually become something destructive that she couldn’t control, at one time it had been her only savior in a hellish life. It was everyone else that had to look away from her imperfections.
But not Cree.
Reaching over to place his hand on her elbow, his thumb swept the patch of skin where she had once cut so deep that she nearly ruined the muscle there from infection.
“Do you remember what I told you the first time I let you inside the knife room here? You were scared ... a little mouse walking straight into the cat’s mouth. You thought even having access to those weapons would be too much for your self-control. And I said what?”
Penny’s heart thumped hard. “That I would never cut again.”
“And you haven’t. What else?”
“I was the weapon. I just had to learn how to hurt instead of being hurt.”
Cree nodded and released his grip on her arm, replying, “But even weapons become dull and unusable, Penny, for one reason or another. We replace them—if we’re attached to the weapon, then maybe we display it or use it for something else. This—you—isn’t any different. There is always an after; it’s all in what you want to do with it.” Then, he added with a nod at the stairwell, “Go on upstairs. Job first. Everything else second.”
Right.
For now, that was how it had to be.
It was only while Penny walked the hallway that led to Dare’s office when she had another thought. Or maybe an epiphany.
Cree brought up Luca—and everything else regarding the man—because he was trying to find out if she wanted him to be part of what came after. All because of what? After years of chasing her, Luca had finally caught up? She didn’t know what to do with that at all.
She also didn’t know if Cree was wrong.
That bothered her more.
THE LAST PERSON SHE expected to see when she walked through the open door of Dare’s office was the man standing with his back facing her on the other side of the dominating glass and metal desk. The laptop in front of him glowed to say he was going over something, but she wasn’t close enough to discern what. One of the top hackers for The League, Marcel, was kind of a legend around the compound in a lot of ways.
A notorious loner.
Easily provoked.
Dangerous with a laptop.
Specifically, the laptop in front of him that he never went anywhere without it being firmly in his hand like an extension of his own body. Supposedly, there wasn’t a system the man couldn’t breach. As the stories went, he had found himself under the protection of The League after draining the offshore bank accounts of several major criminal figureheads across many organizations. The bounty on his life had been the highest ever known.
And yet, there he stood.
Still alive and well.
“We have a plan,” Dare snapped, not even noticing Penny just beyond the doorway as he spoke to the infamous hacker. “One we’re seeing out one step at a time, Marcel, but if we continue these little side trips and indulging her with them, then we’re missing valuable chances to infiltrate the lives of The Elite when we need to the most and when we can make the most impact on the organization.”
“What’s happened?”
Marcel’s shoulders stiffened at Penny’s question. Dare, on the other hand, barely even graced her with his attention.
“I said I wanted to be gone by the time she—”
“Yeah, yeah,” her handler muttered with a flick of his hand in the hacker’s direction. “We all know you hate having to even speak to something with a beating heart that doesn’t sign your paychecks.”
“I asked a question,” Penny said.
She didn’t care about their bullshit. That was something they could handle on their own time when she wasn’t in the room.
Dare didn’t respond.
Or maybe Marcel spoke up before he could, saying to her without ever turning around, “In the process of doing a secondary dive into the Smithenson laptop, I came across an upcoming transaction between him and a wealthy businessman from Florida who makes frequent trips into New York and surrounding states for work-related things. Actually, I found messages between him and a known skin trafficker who works on the dark web for most transactions. He was apparently working on something more permanent than his usual monthly fixes, but the only proof was the fact he was working with the other man. That man was handling all the details.”