“They—The League?”
Penny dead stared him.
Luca didn’t care.
“Give me something,” he urged, widening his arms like he was asking for peace. “I’m only trying to do what Naz and Roz can’t. You know that’s why I’m here; why I’ve always looked for you since the day you went missing. I changed my entire life to look for you.”
Now, he was wondering why.
Penny was unfazed. “I’m asking you to stop.”
“I can’t.” Luca chuckled, shaking his head when he muttered, “I could make a call right now—get my sister and Naz down here. All they want is to see you, know you’re okay, and talk. After everything they did for you, can’t you give them that at least?”
“You do that, I’m gone.”
Luca’s brow raised at the threat. “Seriously?”
“This time, I might not leave you alive.”
“Shit, don’t promise a good time, Penny.”
His comment had zero effect.
That was the thing that sent his anger spiraling more than anything else had in their entire conversation. How she seemed so ... unaffected. Indifferent, even. The mere mention of Luca’s sister and best friend, people who had cared and loved and protected Penny until she turned eighteen and then disappeared, did absolutely nothing for her.
Or so it seemed.
“They love you. Fuck, they thought you loved them! You can’t be that removed from what happened five years ago that you don’t even care about them or what you did to them when you left. Why? That’s all they want to know, Penny. Just tell me why.”
His shouts did nothing, too. The rare sight of his temper when he stepped closer to her wasn’t even a blip on her radar. She was like ice. Beautiful, cold, and unmoveable. Who was this woman?
“Don’t you care at all?” he asked, his tone tempering a bit. “Your godson is five years old. We still call him little Cross but not to his face because he doesn’t like people thinking he’s tiny. He still carries around the bear with you made for him, though. Listens to the recording of you playing the piano every—”
“Shut up.”
Ah, there it was.
Luca found the nerve. He hit it with a punch that sent Penny pushing away from the sink to close the distance between the two of them until she was face to face with him and her stare was anything but cold.
“He knows your name,” Luca murmured. “He knows your face; Roz kept pictures. They do love—”
“I’m protecting them!”
His shouts had done nothing. Hers cut into his heart like a hot knife through butter.
“From what—who?” Luca demanded. “Do you know where we come from—who Naz is? The Donati family isn’t little fish, babe. Don’t be stupid.”
Penny didn’t even blink. “From me, people like me ... people I came from and—”
That was it.
She clammed up.
A door had almost opened, but Penny slammed it shut before Luca could even get his foot on the threshold.
“I can’t go back,” she told him, “and it’s better if they don’t know ... so neither will you. I won’t say more. Because the more you get, the faster you chase me, Luca. Today, it might have been a good thing but the next time, it might kill us both.”
Luca’s jaw ached from how hard he clenched his teeth. “I’m not going to stop.”
“You don’t know anything about the world I live in. It’s not like yours. This is dangerous.”
“Not any more or less dangerous than mine.”
She barked out a dark laugh, her gaze hardening when she asked, “Do you wanna bet?”
Luca knew her history all too well. Some, he had learned during her time with his sister and friend. A lot, he stumbled upon in his first few years chasing after her. The shit the public hadn’t known—how deep the pedophile ring really ran that her father was heavily involved in and used to traffic her sexually up until she was nearly twelve. Adding all of that knowledge to what he had seen and heard today, he had to wonder ...
He couldn’t stop himself from asking, “That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? You’re tracking them all down ... you’re killing pedophiles.”
Penny only smiled.
Wicked.
Icy.
“Oh, it’s so much worse than that, Luca. And you’re already in over your head—just stop before you drown.”
14.
Penny
PENNY figured she would be able to do a few hours locked in a room with Luca. Maybe a night, even, if she had no other choice. But when it turned into two days of living and breathing in close quarters with a man who had decided to awaken a long-dormant part of Penny with nothing more than a kiss against a cold, hard brick wall ...
Well, she was going crazy.
And it was her own fault.
Because with nothing else to do but sit and wait for some kind of word or sign from her handlers at The League, all she was left with were her thoughts. Since she wasn’t the type to obsess over the things she couldn’t change—like the fact that what should have been a simple transaction went to total shit in the blink of an eye—she was stuck going over every minute detail of what happened between her and Luca.
It was unexpected.
But she liked it.
He’d apologized.
She hadn’t wanted him to.
Perhaps part of the problem was that she had gone years without any kind of physical intimacy with someone that she felt anything for on a personal level. Sex was a mechanical, chemical need that was easily fulfilled between humans, right? That, she could handle just fine and well. Except, apparently, when a man she had been attracted to for years decided to pin her against a wall, kiss the breath from her lungs, and touch her body with hands that promised they would learn every inch of her and enjoy doing it.
It wasn’t so mechanical, then.
Definitely still chemical.
And she was stupid.
Stupid to focus on how she could still feel Luca’s mouth against her own. Silken lips that made her feel hungry. Hands that grabbed just hard enough to wake up a need for more in the same way it spiked the part of her that was scared, too.
It lasted less than a minute and hadn’t been anything more than a way to escape a bad situation. A distraction for their pursuers to give them a little bit more time to get to safety. That was what she kept telling herself but it was a lie.
He had been hard when he was pressed up against her; a natural reaction, maybe, but she didn’t know any other man who got erections when they were seconds away from losing their life. And if his kiss had made her hungry, then he’d been ravenous. He hadn’t had to touch her the way he did, or keep a hand on her like he didn’t want to let go when the man finally opened the door, but he did.
And that was every reason why she kept obsessing over a single minute in her life that was already over. Something else she couldn’t change, sure, but she wasn’t capable of letting it go, either. Maybe because that one minute was something she had imagined time and time again when she was younger, stupider, and broken, but her imagination hadn’t done it justice.
She was weak.
That’s what it was.