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 came from a long line of politicians. His great-grandfather, grandfather, and so on. The son of a current prominent democratic senator who was planning a run for president in the coming election. Or that was the rumor amongst the political crowd.
People who knew what they were talking about.
Apparently.
Elijah himself was being looked at to follow in his father’s footsteps seeing as how the last state election won him the mayor’s seat. A position his father, the second, first won that started his overall career in the political sphere.
On the outside, the man seemed like he had everything he wanted. Wealth. Prestige. Power.
And none of that meant anything to Penny except for the fact that he ran in the same circles as people she had been hunting for years. One member of the elusive Elite. One more for her to kill.
Or that was the plan.
Currently.
Room 801 faced a long hallway with no guards keeping watch as Penny stepped out of the elevator. The hallways to the right and left of the bank of elevators where she stepped out were also empty. One led to what looked like two more suites. The other ended at an exit stairwell.
Penny headed for suite 801.
She didn’t bother to knock but instead simply opened the door and entered the hotel room as was previously agreed upon. No locked doors—nothing and no one would see Elijah come and willingly greet and invite in a visually young girl and her older handler inside his room.
The filthy rich could get whatever they wanted; whenever they wanted it. And sometimes, on nights when everyone was distracted around them—like Elijah’s father’s fundraiser dinner downstairs—and they had time to celebrate, they were known and prone to indulging their desires.
Illegal, immoral, or otherwise.
And sloppy about it, too.
Which was why Penny showed up with a girl who wasn’t the age Elijah wanted but also wasn’t going anywhere near his hotel room despite the high price he paid to make sure she did exactly that. Maybe his people—or him—hadn’t been able to get a hold of one of his regular trafficked girls through the normal methods but either way ...
His vice was her weakness to exploit.
Penny didn’t mind at all.
“Mr. Smithenson?” Penny called when the hotel door clicked shut behind her. “Your delivery is here and ready for your attention.”
“Just a sec,” came the reply.
From a room across the large space; probably the master bedroom in the space. A quiet, dimly lit hotel room stared back at her as she pulled the nine-millimeter from the bag that the men in suits downstairs hadn’t even bothered to check.
So fucking sloppy.
It was kind of sad, really.
“A million dollars earned to smile and eat dinner. Two hundred guests at five thousand dollars a plate. I can do the math ... not a bad night for a politician raising funds for his next run,” Penny said, screwing in the silencer she had taken from the bag.
“Oh, that’s before the donations are added into the—”
Penny glanced up when Elijah’s words cut off. She took in many things at once. The suite was about as fancy, large, and expensive as she expected. Luxurious rugs. Rich tapestries. Ornate lighting overhead and furniture that was appropriately stuffy but also old. Nothing that interested her.
Except for the man who had come to stand in the doorway across the room. He was already prepped to party. Dress shirt unbuttoned; slacks undone and showcasing the band of his briefs. A glass of something amber colored in his left hand.
Maybe it was the shock of seeing only one woman—and no little girl—standing there or it could have been the gun in her hand that stunned him into silence.
“What the fuck are—”
“Nighty night,” Penny said, not wasting time.
She couldn’t. Not when she had to be in and out of the hotel in fifteen minutes or less.
Before Elijah could react—run, scream or otherwise—Penny did what she was there to do. Fifty hours of target practice with weapons meant she didn’t miss a shot. Shit, she didn’t unholster a weapon unless she intended to fire it, and she didn’t shoot unless she meant for it to hit the target in front of her.
That was her training. She couldn’t forget it.
It was a single shot. Hit Elijah between the eyes.
Penny had already tucked the weapon back away into her bag and stepped further away from the door before the dead man’s body hit the carpeted floor with a dull thud. Such a morbid, but indifferent, sound for the end of a life.