Page 90 of One Breath After Another

She should have expected that.

In fact, she had been told those exact words when a folder had been placed in her hands before she boarded the private jet at a private airstrip in New York. She glanced down at the matte cover of the black folder, her fingers itching to flip open the front and see what waited inside. The warning in the back of her mind stopped her from doing just that.

Don’t open the folder, Cross had told her. It’s not for you. Think of it ... like a test. Your first of many after this, I’m sure. It’s not yours. And it’s certainly not yours to read. You’re going to deliver it.

To what?

That’s what she wanted to know.

The man had only shrugged and said, To the rest of your life, maybe.

She hadn’t really known what he meant, and maybe a part of her was too scared to ask him to clarify. He said he could help—that he knew people who could make it all go away. There was just one thing ...

We can protect them, he told her, but it won’t be easy.

There was a small part of Penny that was aware she wouldn’t be ready for what came next. The red flags started in New York when she had to leave the night of her eighteenth birthday party after the house was asleep, and no one would know she was gone until the morning.

By then, it was already too late.

The red flags kept popping up that this wasn’t something simple or easily undone when she had been asked to collect the data and devices Naz had been using to crawl the dark web.

We’ll get them all—every last one of them.

She held onto those words.

Repeated them like a mantra.

As long as this made everyone safe again, then that’s all Penny wanted. Or, that’s what she kept telling herself when the fear thrummed with every beat of her heart in the backseat. What else could she do?

• • •

THE COMPLEX OF BUILDINGS seemed to rise up out of the desert from nowhere. Penny didn’t even realize it was there ... until it was.

She didn’t know what to make of the tan, cement walls. From the piece of the building that she could see—along the side where they parked—there weren’t any windows despite the section jutting up from the foundation at least three stories high. Their vehicle had parked in front of two black, metal doors that didn’t even have handles on the outside.

The camera and security light overtop those doors, however, made it clear the place was active. In some way. The camera blinked with a red light while a streak of bright yellow illuminated a small patch of ground in front of the doors. Likely giving the camera a decent view of anyone who dared to step in view.

The driver put the car in park, and without a word, stepped out of the vehicle. He rounded the back to her door, and opened it up, telling her, “Step out.”

Nope.

“What is this place?” Penny asked.

She didn’t move from the backseat.

Refused.

Not until she got some kind of answer.

The man simply stared at her, repeating, “Step out.”

The look he gave her suggested that the next time he had to tell her to follow one of his orders, he was going to make her do it. Penny really didn’t want that to happen, and she didn’t want to test his patience when she had probably already done that enough on the drive there. Instead of asking again, she unbuckled the seatbelt and exited the car clutching the black folder tight to her chest.

The wind whipped around them.

It tasted ... dry.

Definitely still in Nevada.