Page 30 of One Step After Another

“Jewel isn’t a friend.”

The Native man nodded. “Right, because you don’t have those, do you?”

Ouch.

Penny didn’t show the nerve that touched, either.

“Except for that man—Luca,” Cree clarified, lifting one silk—covered shoulder. “He was a friend, right? You told me that years ago during your initial training when we would do our sessions. Your very first real friend, you said. You had a terrible crush on him, but he was too old for you and never acted inappropriately to even encourage your feelings. Nonetheless, you trusted him. Maybe more than even Nazio and Rosalynn Donati. And that’s where I keep coming back to with this little issue of him showing up now. That trust ... his friendship.”

She refused to look away from Cree but staring at him also gave the man the upper hand of seemingly looking into her soul where she kept most of her secrets close to her heart. One of those secrets, he had just stripped bare and laid out in front of her, as if she might deny it.

“He’s not going to be a problem,” Penny whispered. “He’s just ... a guy.”

She wouldn’t admit to the many sleepless nights since she came face to face with Luca. Never mind the cold showers when she woke up from lustful dreams that she desperately wished would stop. None of it made any sense; there wasn’t a single reason for her to feel those things. They just were. She wouldn’t feed into it by even discussing it.

Cree wouldn’t call her out on any of that—he wouldn’t even ask those sorts of details. Which was why he kept focusing on her old friendship with Luca and less on the crush she had once admitted to having on the man. Her sexual activities had never been something that Cree put on the table unless Penny did first, and that was only because of her own confusion and fear as she learned to deal with becoming a woman with her own desires and needs after being nothing more than a body with holes to fill for the right price.

For years.

Besides, Penny no longer gave anyone that right. She refused to hand over any power to that aspect of her life. Even if that power was only knowledge because, for her, it wasn’t an only kind of thing. It was too much.

Too much power.

Sex wasn’t a weapon. At least, not one she let anyone use against her. Not in any way. Not anymore.

“For what it’s worth,” Cree said when Penny began to climb the stairs without waiting for him to dismiss her, “I think you’re right, and Dare is being his typical, worrisome self because he has to be. He has to put the safety of The League above all other things, even his own rationale. A hazard of the job, one could say.”

Stopping just long enough to peer over her shoulder, Penny asked, “Then why bother with any of this at all? It seems like a waste of time, and if there’s anything we all know about you ... you hate that shit, Cree.”

“This life isn’t forever, Penny. This place—what you do now. No one has ever told you that before, but there will be an after.”

“What does that even mean?”

“After this. The League. Who you are right now. What you’re doing. There will be an after. Have you ever thought about what you might want, then?”

Penny hadn’t ever thought about what would come after. Maybe because she didn’t know there would be one, as that was never discussed when she became a member here. That wasn’t the deal but then again ... she also hadn’t understood the sacrifice she became for this place to do what they did to her, either.

“There’s going to be an after?” she asked.

Cree cleared his throat, climbing the stairs until he came to stand beside her. While she usually didn’t leave her hotel without a full get-up that would cover her legs, arms, and any other patch of skin where her scars could be seen, she hadn’t done that tonight. Instead, she settled on fishnet tights under cut-off jean shorts, and a black tank top.

Her scars didn’t bother her. Not anymore. While cutting had eventually become something destructive that she couldn’t control, at one time it had been her only savior in a hellish life. It was everyone else that had to look away from her imperfections.

But not Cree.

Reaching over to place his hand on her elbow, his thumb swept the patch of skin where she had once cut so deep that she nearly ruined the muscle there from infection.

“Do you remember what I told you the first time I let you inside the knife room here? You were scared ... a little mouse walking straight into the cat’s mouth. You thought even having access to those weapons would be too much for your self-control. And I said what?”

Penny’s heart thumped hard. “That I would never cut again.”

“And you haven’t. What else?”

“I was the weapon. I just had to learn how to hurt instead of being hurt.”

Cree nodded and released his grip on her arm, replying, “But even weapons become dull and unusable, Penny, for one reason or another. We replace them—if we’re attached to the weapon, then maybe we display it or use it for something else. This—you—isn’t any different. There is always an after; it’s all in what you want to do with it.” Then, he added with a nod at the stairwell, “Go on upstairs. Job first. Everything else second.”

Right.