Page 78 of One Breath After Another

Penny had been so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t even realize the elevator they were riding to a higher floor of an attorney’s office had come to a stop. While Roz stood beside her holding baby Cross against her hip, Luca was at the elevator doors holding it open and looking their way. He had come along for the day trip to the office in place of Naz, who was busy.

What was today?

Oh, just another great part of turning eighteen.

Great, right.

Penny was finally getting her trust fund signed over. Along with the restitution payments from her deceased father’s estate. She didn’t actually want any of it, but that wasn’t her choice. As she had been told many times over, what she did with the money after the accounts were in her name wasn’t their business, but it did have to be hers.

For a time, anyway.

“Penny?” Roz asked.

Penny looked Roz’s way, seeing the worry staring back at her. Shit, even she was worried. She hadn’t been this quiet in months. She had, after all, learned how to have conversations with other people and enjoy it. She didn’t need to be lost inside her head all the time now.

“I don’t want to be here,” Penny admitted.

“I know,” Roz replied, “but it won’t be for long. You’ll sign some papers, get the information you need, and once everything is good, we’re gone.”

“Just like that,” Luca added, drawing Penny’s attention his way, too. “No worries.”

Easy for them to say.

They weren’t facing a meeting with their horrible, manipulative mot—

“Ah, there you are!” A familiar man in a suit—one of the lawyers on Penny’s side of things, stepped out of a room down the hallway from the elevator and headed their way. “We were waiting for you before starting. The other beneficiary to the estate asked for us to do so. Are you about ready?”

All eyes turned on Penny.

That other beneficiary to her father’s estate?

It was Penny’s mother.

And no.

She was nowhere near ready.

• • •

NEARLY TWO YEARS HAD passed since Penny laid eyes on Allegra Dunsworth. Even before she became a ward of the state and her mother signed away any legal right to her own child, there had been entire seas and continents between them for ... a long time.

The last thing her mother said to her?

Penny could still remember it like it was yesterday.

“It’s not okay,” she told her mother. “It’s not.”

Allegra only shook her head. “You don’t even understand what I’ve given you—you’re not worthy.”

For most of her youth, Penny had been far too young to understand that the sexual abuse she suffered under her father—but with her mother’s permission, encouragement, and even control—was bigger than just what it appeared to be on the surface. The blackened veins of abuse had begun long before Penny was even a thought in her parents’ marriage. Before her mother was even married to begin with, honestly.

It started with Allegra and her own father, but even that wasn’t the first in their family’s legacy. It was simply something her mother continued on, while her father pulled the strings from the shadows, growing their disgusting inclinations and dark family secrets into a terrifyingly successful organization where cash was king. And the young princes and princesses were broken on the piles of dirty money.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Wasn’t that how the saying went?

Allegra and her father weren’t the only people with attractions that society said wasn’t acceptable. But money could do anything—it made everyone talk and walk.