Page 39 of One Step After Another

With a gun in each hand, she aimed around the table and fired two shots. They both hit the man with the scar, straight in the face, marring him further and taking him to the ground.

“Move,” she snapped at Chase.

The only sound he made was a grunt when a bullet plugged into his back. She quickly realized it wasn’t the only gunshot he had taken. The one that ended up in his chest was bleeding through his button-down over Penny’s black dress.

He wasn’t dead.

Yet.

He would be.

Soon.

“Masters? Masters, look at me!”

Penny slipped out from under Chase on trembling legs as her adrenaline kicked into high gear. The only asshole left alive, while the few patrons scattered to the exit, was currently leaning over his partner in crime. As she stood to her full height, the guy finally realized she was still alive. His gun started to raise as she lifted her own.

Bang.

The bullet plugged between his eyes. He hit the ground, slumped over his partner’s corpse, but it wasn’t over.

Not even close.

All it took was Penny glancing to the side where the window had been shattered by an earlier bullet. She could have tried to help Chase. If it weren’t for the two men who rushed out of the backseat of the still-running vehicle outside. Like the men dead on the pizzeria’s floor, they also wore black suits. And had guns in hand.

She had hoped a girl waited there for her to save from a far worse fate—the same hellish existence she had been forced to live through for years. She couldn’t have been more wrong. Now, Chase was dying on the floor because of it, and her one option was to leave him there.

Penny headed for the back of the restaurant. Her companion would die alone; she would hear his final grunt for the rest of her life knowing it had been her fault, like so many other things.

What choice did she have?

It was her only chance to get out of this alive.