Page 10 of One Step After Another

4.

Penny

PEOPLE liked to saythe past always catches up eventually. No matter how hard someone tried to leave it behind or how fast they ran away from it, it would eventually show right back up to laugh in someone’s face.

Penny didn’t think the sentiment was untrue ... she had simply hoped that with enough time and distance, her past would stay where it belonged. It’s what she worked for—what her handlers tried to make happen by keeping her out of North America as much as possible for the better part of her first three years working under The League as an assassin.

That way, everyone was safe.

Or so she was told.

All of that effort was totally blown to shit when Luca Puzza stepped inside the elevator after sticking his arm into the closing door to keep it from shutting completely. Given there were another five people in the space, a family guessing by the way they all chatted behind her, Penny did her best to keep from swearing out loud. She hadn’t expected people to be on the elevator at all when the Smithenson floor wasn’t available to other patrons of the hotel. But the elevator would open up to let people on from the Smithenson floor when it was carrying others from higher floors lower, she supposed. It was just her good luck that the elevator hadn’t been empty coming down.

She didn’t, however, hide the burning stare she leveled on Luca when he cocked a brow and grinned as he came to stand directly in front of her, and the elevator doors closed behind him. Effectively closing the two of them together in a small space.

Exactly what she needed to avoid. She’d hoped the door would close before he could reach it, maybe he’d make a run for the stairwell where he first came out of,

but he couldn’t guarantee which floor she would exit on ... giving her a better chance to get away.

She wasn’t so lucky.

And didn’t he look happy about it.

The handsome bastard.

Fuck.

It was those green-blue eyes of his—so intense and familiar—that threw her back in time. Years. So many years. Back to an entirely different world when she was a different person running from monsters instead of just hunting them down. To a family—who despite not being her own blood, had loved her, and taught her how to love—she had left behind.

It wasn’t just her past Penny ran from but everything she left there, too. Her feelings and fears; her truths and lies.

Now, one of them was staring her right in the face. She might not have laid eyes on Luca in five years, but time meant nothing at that moment. Time stopped. Everything about his face was exactly the same from the chiseled cheekbones and strong jaw to the way his stare froze her in place from the heaviness that grew in her chest.

“Been a while,” Luca said. “Hasn’t it, Pen—”

“Don’t.”

He stopped talking.

She didn’t say more.

The last thing she needed was this man saying her first name in an elevator full of witnesses after she had just murdered a man. Not that they knew it—or even Luca.

The family behind her kept talking.

Luca’s lips twisted in a smile that made Penny’s chest even heavier when he reached behind himself to push a button on the elevator as he asked, “Ground floor, then? You leaving? I’d like to come along. Have a word. Naz and Roz miss you.”

Apparently, time meant nothing. That weight making her heart pound harder was the same thing she used to feel whenever this man smiled at her all those years ago. What a cruel, sad joke that even her foolish notions of a young woman would chase her into adulthood, too.

Her crush, that was.

On Luca.

Everything about Penny was different from how she used to be. She made sure of that. Her training helped. Her handlers promised it. It seemed that also wasn’t the case because Luca could still make her tongue-tied at the worst possible time.

She hated how smug and gorgeous he looked when he moved to stand beside her, also putting his back to the chatting people in the elevator. She hated it even more that she noticed how well his suit fit him and that she could appreciate that fact when she could only remember one other time when he’d worn a suit in her presence.

Her eighteenth birthday.