Page 37 of One Step After Another

11.

Penny

A great wig, makeupto enhance one’s features, and colored contacts could do a great deal to change someone’s appearance. It was the only extra precaution Penny could really take for her second trip to New York within weeks. It also wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy the worries that Dare—and Cree, occasionally—continued to voice right up until the moment she stepped on the private jet.

Nonetheless, while she watched her reflection in the glass of the pizzeria’s bay window, she figured she hadn’t done a half-bad job on making herself look different than the last time she was in the city. Her skin wasn’t as ghostly with a pink-toned foundation, a touch of bronzer, and a dark contour to make her face appear more oval, and her jawline a bit softer. Add in the black kohl she had smoked around her eyes with a winged flair and black wig, and she was one step up from her usual ghostly paleness.

Not by much, though.

She also hated heavy makeup. And wigs. Contacts, too, the itchy bastards. Since landing in New York only hours earlier, she learned something else that she didn’t like very much, as well. This entire city—maybe the state.

She felt too comfortable here.

Or ... comforted.

A sense of nostalgia came along to fill her whenever she recognized a building that she had once visited. Or worse, a memory hit her while she drove down a familiar street and then she was lost to a different time and place that shouldn’t matter to her anymore because she wasn’t the same person she used to be.

Frankly, Penny blamed Cree.

And his mention of the after.

Or what could be.

It had been on her mind for days. The sleepless nights that followed certainly didn’t give her anything else to think about, either. All fun things.

It was only the squeak of the chair next to hers that finally pulled Penny from her thoughts. They had barely been sitting down inside the business for more than thirty seconds, but she was already distracted and annoyed. Neither of those spelled good things for her. Or for the man next to her.

She couldn’t afford to be anything but ready at the moment. This deal—even if it was just a sham for her to help a trafficked girl—would be over before it even began if the men she was supposed to meet to make the transaction thought something was up. Even if that something was just her distraction.

“Stop fidgeting,” Penny told her companion.

Chase was his name. Another assassin for The League who just so happened to be available to take this trip with Penny and see the job through. Cree tried to play it off like it was nothing more than coincidence, but she didn’t think so. Chase was one of the few people she could stand to talk to for more than a few minutes at a time—he’d also been on the team that trained her ... and the first man she ever allowed to sleep with her.

Not in the sex sense.

Although, he had offered.

No, on one of her few free nights out during that first year of her training, Penny did a stupid thing that left her less than sober and in need of a chaperone to make sure she didn’t choke on her vomit in her sleep. Chase was there ... he did the right thing.

Earned her trust, anyway.

A rare feat.

So few people had it.

“Not fidgeting,” Chase replied. “Getting a better look.”

“At what?”

“Our oncoming company. Check it out.”

Well, they were timely.

Penny would give the sex traffickers that, but not much else. They weren’t worth anything more, honestly. And if this were any other job for Penny, then those two men stepping out of the driver and passenger seats of a nondescript black vehicle wouldn’t make it out of the pizzeria with a heart still beating in their chest.

But today wasn’t about death.

It was something else entirely.