Page 26 of One Step After Another

8.

Penny

THE only good thingPenny truly liked about the hotel on the Vegas strip where The League kept her a room, was the view. Add on the small balcony where she could sit and chain smoke while she became lost in her thoughts, and the Bellagio suite basically had it all.

Oh, there was a bed, bathroom, and whatever else she needed was just a phone call to the concierge away. The three-room suite had all the comforts and amenities that a furnished apartment might, too. The decor was modern, expensive, and gave a sense of good taste. Even the artwork on the walls was nice to look at, she supposed.

And she cared nothing for all of that. At all.

Penny wanted a place to sleep, clean, and eat. The only bonus she cared about was the balcony with the view. She had never been the type that enjoyed being closed into any particular space, after all. And despite calling the hotel a home of sorts for the past couple of years once she had earned her right to live outside of The League’s complex whenever she was back in the country, well ... the hotel suite was as good as anything.

A brown-filtered Marlboro burned between Penny’s fingertips, but she wasn’t losing herself in memories for the moment. Instead, the laptop on her bare legs kept her pale skin warm despite the bit of wind whipping around the loose strands of her white hair that had fallen from the braid she made earlier. With her free hand, her fingertips danced over the keys, pulling up the dark web browser after turning on the security measures installed by the computer geeks at the complex that could make anything happen with a piece of electronic.

People didn’t realize how easy it was to hack something. All someone needed was a Wi-Fi connection—public, especially, but private wasn’t safe, either—and they had their easy way in. The rest was child’s play to a hacker.

Unless ...

Well, it didn’t matter.

Penny’s devices couldn’t be hacked now. Part of the job and she was always careful to keep her Bluetooth turned off and never connected to any Wi-Fi that wasn’t her own. She also rarely took a device out in public where someone else might see.

Was it all a little much?

Maybe.

It was also the advice given to Penny after she joined The League, and she followed it because she needed to. She didn’t have a choice when the dark web had been a part of her life since before she could even remember. Now at least, she was the one capable of searching forums and chats and classifieds for whatever she was looking for. She didn’t need to bring someone else into it unless the situation called for it.

Sometimes, that was because someone in her business had left a message in the classifieds about seeing her—usually, that was done as a warning to The League or other assassins. Rogues, mostly. Those were more common than not, but their little notes, when not caught, were a possible problem when Penny couldn’t afford to leave even the slightest breadcrumb about her existence behind.

If she found something in the usual places of the dark web, then she could get ahead of a situation. Typically, she found nothing. Mostly because the people kept employed by her handlers to watch over this sort of thing were half decent at their job.

They did miss shit.

Occasionally.

Which was why Penny also liked to check. Certainly not because she spent hours searching the classifieds with all the right buzzwords.

TU\11. F. Papers. Compliant.

Touched. Unclean. Eleven years old. Female. The girl comes with papers to look legit. Compliant. Once someone knew the language, those confusing black and white characters on the screen suddenly became a hell of a lot more horrifying spelled out. Penny really shouldn’t be putting herself through the punishment of the personal classifieds, but it was a good check and balance for her. The reason why she was here, or part of it.

Placing the cigarette between her lips for a drag, she pulled hard to fill her lungs with smoke. Holding it just far enough from her face to eye the red lipstick stain that matched the color she had painted on her almond-shaped fingernails. Against the ghostly tone of her skin—so pale one could see the blue veins running beneath the surface—the color was quite a contrast.

She liked that.

The white of innocence—which she was not. Red like blood; something she knew all too well.

Flicking the ash from the cigarette, Penny went back to the dark web classifieds. She punished herself a little longer, finding more and more reminders to answer all the whys of her current situation, and the reasons for all that she did.

It was only once she had satisfied her masochistic nature that she switched to a common—popular—forum for known rogue assassins in the underground criminal world. People who took bounties or worked unmanaged by a larger organization that often took jobs from what they found online in the same places Penny was currently scouring.

Then, something caught her eye.

The white ghost is back—got word she had a job in New York a couple of weeks ago. Did anybody hear anything about it?

That message in the forum had been posted by MG546. It almost made Penny smirk at how everyone knew to stay far away from her when she was in town on a job. To not get in her way. That’s what she wanted.

The one and only reply to the original post, only a few seconds earlier before Penny logged onto the forum, came from a username Penny recognized as a guy that watched the forums for any useable—sellable—info he could find. The League’s hackers who scrubbed the net of her presence on a regular basis, even if it was just the mention of a white ghost, said they were pretty sure he was one of the people who fed information to Luca on occasion.