Page 22 of One Breath After Another

But more.

“Is that code?” Penny asked.

“Good call,” Naz returned.

“You write code?”

Naz lifted one shoulder like it wasn’t a big thing. “I do a little bit of everything, it’s how my brain focuses.”

Right.

Over the last few months, Penny had heard more than one person refer to Naz as a literal genius. She had seen enough of his whiteboards filled with formulas that she didn’t understand around their house to know he was smart.

He was also more.

He left early in the morning—drove a black car and wore a suit. Words like family business and made man were thrown around in low tones like Penny wouldn’t be able to hear if they spoke quietly. Which was crap, because she did hear. And because she had access to the internet, she looked that shit up.

Apparently, Naz’s family, and Roz’s ... well, they were criminals. Not the kind of criminals that hurt Penny, but criminals under the law, anyway. And they had been that way for a long time. Penny never asked about it, she didn’t think the details of what the internet told her where mafia families had reigned in New York for years was something she really needed to understand, but here she was.

“What’s the code for?” Penny asked.

Naz sucked air through his teeth. “That’s ... a harder answer.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“That’s a non-answer.”

Naz gave her a look. “I just don’t think I should talk—”

“Is it about the mafia?”

He kept staring at her, expression unmovable. “And what do you know about that?”

“What I found on the internet.”

“That shit lies.”

“But does it really?”

Naz’s cheek twitched. “Are we talking about this code or the fucking mafia?”

“You’re not a very good liar, are you?”

“Not to people I care about, no.”

Huh.

He cared about her.

Penny peeked at the screen. “Is it going to run something?”

“Yes, a program.”

“That does what?”

“Crawls the dark web, the public internet, and government servers, so long as they don’t detect it. It’ll cross countries, it’ll even break through the secure internet protections countries like China has that they use to monitor and control their citizens.”