Page 7 of One Breath After Another

Luca didn’t mind. He waited for his friend even after Cross said he had to leave—another commitment he couldn’t put off, apparently.

“Where’s my dad?” Naz asked. The first question out of his mouth when he stepped inside the club. “I thought he was going to stick around to talk.”

“Business never stops.”

Well, that was what Cross told Luca. He was just repeating the sentiment.

“And he said you could catch him up,” Luca added. “What’s up?”

Naz joined Luca in the booth with a heavy sigh. He scrubbed his palms over his face, and rolled his shoulders as he settled in. It was probably the most disheveled his friend had ever looked—his clothes were pristine, of course, but Luca found the truth in Naz’s face. Dark circles under his eyes and stress lines deep between his eyes like he’d been scowling for days.

“Have you even slept?”

“Not in three days,” Naz admitted. “It’s been ...”

“Roz is okay, right?” Luca asked.

He figured she was okay if only because his friend wouldn’t hide that from Rosalynn’s family. If something was wrong with his sister, he would have known about it when Nazio first took off overseas without warning.

“She’s ... great,” Naz settled on saying. “We both are. It’s not her.”

“Then, what’s going on?”

Naz glanced away, eyeing the booth across from theirs while he rubbed his hands together and shook his head. “A girl. Penny.”

“Who?”

“Penny,” Naz said again. “A pianist prodigy Kyle wanted Roz to meet on her way home. He intended for her to maybe mentor the girl or something but, shit didn’t go down that way.”

“Fucking Kyle.”

His sister’s mentor was something else sometimes. The man had been beneficial for Roz’s career, but he was also one of those most annoying human beings on the earth. His music over everything philosophy didn’t exactly jam with their family values, either.

“Kyle’s not important,” Naz muttered, waving a hand. “The girl is.”

“Right. Penny, you said?”

“Penny Dunsworth.”

Why did that name sound familiar? It took him a minute to connect it to someone he knew—or rather, a man he knew of.

“Like the New Jersey family—that Dunsworth? Guy’s a multi-billionaire from overseas investments, right?”

“Also a fucking pedophile, apparently.”

Luca stiffened in the booth. “What?”

“She’s sixteen, almost seventeen,” Naz explained. “And in a bad way with an equally bad history, man. She tried to hang herself while Roz was there with Kyle. That kind of bad, Luca. Anyway, after that happened is when I showed up. They committed her, but Roz got it in her head how she wanted to help.”

That sounded like Roz.

But ... “Help, how?”

Naz chuckled sadly. “I guess they got her talking in the institution when the topic came up about sending her home to Jersey. She’s got proof of what her father’s been doing to her for years ... there was no way Roz was going to let her go back there. They’re just waiting for the American officials to take over the investigation at this point because ... well, it’s a whole mess.”

Shit.

As sick as he felt, Luca knew what his friend was trying to say without just saying it outright. “Roz wants you guys to bring her home.”