Page 2 of One Second After Another

There was no ignoring it now. Everything became painfully clear.

And written in red.

Literally.

The bathroom looked like someone had went knife happy on the place—or rather, over the sink. The shirt dangled from Luca’s clenched fist as he dared to step closer to the mess, reading the words that had been hastily scrawled on the mirror that faced him while he took in the bloody mess in the sink.

A knife sat on the rim. Half on, blade hanging over the edge. Balancing dangerously ... like the woman who put it there, he knew. Holding on, but barely. Blood still red on the blade.

In the mirror, he read Penny’s bloody words: Sorry, this is on my terms now. He had the distinct feeling the message wasn’t directed at him, and yet, it still stung just the same.

Luca started moving a little faster, then. While he raced to put everything together—to figure out how he went to bed with Penny only to wake up alone with a bloody bathroom next door—he managed to shove his shirt down over his head.

Maybe he could catch up with Penny ... wherever in the hell she went. And deal with whatever reason for her disappearance, too. Punching his arms through the sleeves, he went in search of his hoodie and jacket but—

Bang. Bang. Bang.

“Penny, open up! Penny!”

Luca’s stride came to a stop just beyond the bathroom threshold as the noise became louder.

“Penny, open this goddamn door right now!”

Not that Luca needed more confirmation that Penny had disappeared the night before after she let him fuck her and slept tucked into his side, but the noise outside the hotel room did exactly that for him. He didn’t even have time to figure out how that made him feel or what it meant that she left.

Again.

It wasn’t the same as the last time.

He knew that.

It still ... hurt.

The banging came again—louder and harder. The hint of desperation in the familiar voice calling through the thick hotel door made Luca think the man didn’t want to believe what was happening, either.

He recognized the man’s voice even though he had only heard it once before. Cree. Given their first meeting, he couldn’t exactly forget the man.

“Penny, come on—open the fuck up!”

Luca almost missed it. To his right, the flicker of the laptop screen, he almost fucking missed it because he was distracted by the bloody mess behind him, and the unwelcomed visitors barking at one another between hitting their fists against the door. He could have blamed the fact he just woke up, too, but now he was wide awake so that didn’t work.

Nonetheless, Luca saw it.

He watched as the screen of Penny’s laptop flickered—the cursor jumped from one side of the page to the other, tabs closing and opening, pages scrolling downward fast before flipping to another one. He didn’t even have the chance to blink. He was watching, in real-time, as someone hacked Penny’s laptop.

The only good thing about it?

He could see what they saw.

Probably the same thing Penny had been looking at before she set the laptop down and walked away from it the night before. The last thing he saw before the laptop’s screen went entirely black was an image and a headline.

He was only able to read the name in the headline: Allegra Hatheway. Except he knew that woman—the one in the image at the top of the article before the screen blanked out—as Allegra Dunsworth, Penny’s mother. Once, he sat at the same table as the woman while lawyers worked out the final details of an estate that was split between two beneficiaries.

Penny and her mother.

But he knew a lot more about Allegra through his years of tracking down every scrap of Penny’s history and proof of existence that he could find. It wasn’t a lot. It was just enough to tell him that there had never been anything good between the two.

That was all he knew.