“I’ll call you back,” Luca said.
“No, you won’t.”
“Okay, I won’t. I will, however, make it up to Ma for missing dinner tonight. That can either satisfy you or not. I don’t have the time or the give a damn to keep going back and forth with you about it right now.”
“Luca—”
“Sorry for the attitude. Again.”
Except he wasn’t.
At all.
Luca didn’t bother with an appropriate goodbye. His father should have figured out how the phone call was going to end two minutes ago when they first started it, anyway. Replacing the one phone with the other in his pocket, Luca checked the most recent message.
Confirmation of sighting—cameras at the front caught an arrival of someone matching your Penny’s description. Matches the old picture I have. Except the hair. It’s black.
Black hair.
Probably a wig.
Luca replied, Keep watching the cams. Let me know direction and/or floors.
The next response came fast, before Luca could even turn the corner to get a decent view of the front entrance to the hotel.
Got it, Keys wrote. A black hat hacker named Keys, funnily enough. Like computer keys. As if that wasn’t ironic at all. He kept the guy on call for quick jobs, and the occasional deep dive search of the dark web when Luca couldn’t find what he needed on his own.
Tonight, he had the guy working his magic on the hotel’s security system because a bead he had on a source from months ago suggested his current active mark would show up at the hotel fundraiser after arriving back from a trip overseas.
Why, he didn’t know. Where had she been—another question he couldn’t answer. There were too many unknowns when it came to the ghost he’d been tracking for five long years. She was the entire reason he had stumbled into his current profession, actually.
Every time someone left a clue or a lead popped up, it was scrubbed away as fast as it appeared. Like it hadn’t existed in the first place.
But wasn’t that the point of ghosts?
They didn’t exist.
They couldn’t be seen.
Thing was—Penny Dunsworth wasn’t a ghost. Living, breathing ... heart beating. She was just as real as him or anyone else in the world. She was simply harder to find.
Luca knew her once. So had his friends ... family. The young woman they invited into their world and life, someone they bent over backward to help and protect, until she just up and disappeared one day.
For no reason.
With no trace.
They wanted to know why—or rather, Luca’s friend did. Nazio and his wife couldn’t accept that Penny left on her own. Not considering her history and what led up to her eventual disappearance. Luca wasn’t inclined to believe it either which was why he kept looking.
Even when Penny, a ghost of what they knew her to be, made it particularly hard. She couldn’t hide everything. Or the people she worked for couldn’t, anyway. Which was how he found himself at the hotel. And her supposed connection to an organization based in Nevada known only as The League.
He couldn’t confirm it. That was the kind of the point, he suspected. Not that it stopped him.
Finding the unfindable certainly made Luca a good living, and it kept his head above water. It gave him something to do when his leads on Penny ran dry, and he had to wait for something else to pop up.
But that flash of pin-straight black hair under a large brimmed hat just beyond the entrance of the hotel said his lead on her was currently red-hot. In five years, the closest he had ever been to coming face to face with Penny Dunsworth had been ... never. He was always minutes too late, or entirely off the mark.
He wasn’t about to let this chance slip through his fingers. He owed it to his friends to find the woman they had taken in as one of their own. So they could finally know why.
Right?
Time to get to work.
2.
Penny
“MISS Carter, whenever you’re ready.”
Regardless of how many times Penny Dunsworth used aliases—many times over her five years as an assassin working for The League—she had never really become accustomed to the revolving door of identities. It was part of the job. Expected, even. Yet, hearing another name that wasn’t hers still took Penny a second to answer.
“Thank you,” she told the driver currently holding the right side, rear passenger door open. “We won’t need further help, or the car.”
“I was told to be here at twelve to—”
“Excuse me,” Penny said, stepping out of the vehicle and turning her back to the man as she grabbed the edge of the car door. It forced the driver to move, but also allowed the other passenger in the rear seat to exit as well. “Hurry. We’re not drawing attention here, Delilah. Remember?”
Compared to Penny’s form-fitted black gown, matching hat—that was better suited for the beach than the formal dinner and event happening a few doors away inside the Manhattan hotel—Delilah’s white get-up was quite a sight as she left the vehicle. Well, Delilah wasn’t her real name, but it was what her papers said, and Marise liked the option when Dare handed over the five different identifications for the job. Choices were always good.
Today, Marise was Delilah. Penny was Georgina. And none of it was true.
The skirt of Marise’s white gown, made up of layers of chiffon, ruffled in the wind but not much. The silk cloak with the large hood that kept her blonde hair and most of her face hidden from any view up above—camera angles, mostly—kept the loose layers of the gown from blowing wildly.
Side by side on the street, Penny and Marise probably appeared to be total opposites. She towered over the girl’s four and a half feet by a foot and half in her patent leather pumps. Their gowns were a contrast in both color and style. Even their hair—Marise with blonde curls, and Penny in her pin-straight black wig—couldn’t be more different.
And 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.