Page 5 of One Step After Another

Penny hit the button for the appropriate floor and waited until the door closed before she hit another. Two floors lower than the eighth. “You’ll be fine—just get the hell out of here and make sure they don’t see you leave, huh?”

Marise passed her a look. “What if he has someone waiting up there? Another one of those assholes in a suit—one with a gun?”

That was cute.

Funny, even.

She could do these jobs alone except for when she couldn’t and needed a decoy. Say like another assassin who, when dressed up a certain way looked younger than she was. As far as Penny knew, Marise was somewhere in the range of eighteen years or so. About the same age Penny had been when she walked into The League five years earlier with a black folder in hand and no idea what would come next.

Except for tonight.

Because tonight, Marise—or Delilah—wasn’t supposed to look her age at all.

“Get off on the sixth floor,” Penny said. “No one will be waiting up there with him. They never have anyone. The entire point of what they do is the less who know, the better.”

Marise didn’t argue. She also got off the elevator on the sixth floor.

The rest, Penny could do alone.

Besides, she liked it that way.

• • •

ELIJAH EDWARD SMITHENSONthe III.

Yes, his lineage was as arrogant as his name suggested. He came from a long line of politicians. His great-grandfather, grandfather, and so on. The son of a current prominent democratic senator who was planning a run for president in the coming election. Or that was the rumor amongst the political crowd.

People who knew what they were talking about.

Apparently.

Elijah himself was being looked at to follow in his father’s footsteps seeing as how the last state election won him the mayor’s seat. A position his father, the second, first won that started his overall career in the political sphere.

On the outside, the man seemed like he had everything he wanted. Wealth. Prestige. Power.

And none of that meant anything to Penny except for the fact that he ran in the same circles as people she had been hunting for years. One member of the elusive Elite. One more for her to kill.

Or that was the plan.

Currently.

Room 801 faced a long hallway with no guards keeping watch as Penny stepped out of the elevator. The hallways to the right and left of the bank of elevators where she stepped out were also empty. One led to what looked like two more suites. The other ended at an exit stairwell.

Penny headed for suite 801.

She didn’t bother to knock but instead simply opened the door and entered the hotel room as was previously agreed upon. No locked doors—nothing and no one would see Elijah come and willingly greet and invite in a visually young girl and her older handler inside his room.

The filthy rich could get whatever they wanted; whenever they wanted it. And sometimes, on nights when everyone was distracted around them—like Elijah’s father’s fundraiser dinner downstairs—and they had time to celebrate, they were known and prone to indulging their desires.

Illegal, immoral, or otherwise.

And sloppy about it, too.

Which was why Penny showed up with a girl who wasn’t the age Elijah wanted but also wasn’t going anywhere near his hotel room despite the high price he paid to make sure she did exactly that. Maybe his people—or him—hadn’t been able to get a hold of one of his regular trafficked girls through the normal methods but either way ...

His vice was her weakness to exploit.

Penny didn’t mind at all.