Page 38 of One Second After Another

“That I paid millions for you to become what you did? That you’re offering a single million to make it all go away? That every effort we made to make you invisible was completely shot to shit? Or how about even that I’ve had to lie to my son and—”

“How did you know it was me—the bounty, I mean?”

Cross smirked, reaching forward for the glass of whiskey on the table. He downed half of what remained in the glass in one go and set it back down on the table with a crack. “Who else, Penny? Who else would do that the way it was done?”

“I’ve got a lot of enemies.”

“Now,” he agreed.

“I always did.”

The second she made her first kill within the ranks of pedophile rings overseas, she became a target. Each kill she added to the list after the first only added more to her back. It never really bothered her—that was a sacrifice she was willing to make, after all. Better her than ... everyone else.

Right?

She wasn’t so sure anymore.

“You didn’t need to come here—not for respect or anything else,” Cross told her, sighing as he cracked his knuckles and leaned back into the booth. “The contract with The League is void. You’re free to do what you want without my input, and honestly, I expect you to do just that.”

Well, then ...

“I am,” she replied softly.

“Then, you’re lying. Again. Like that night in the office on your birthday. You didn’t come here for the respect of the matter because I’m sure nothing I have said is anything you didn’t already know. Or suspect, either way. What are you lying about now?”

Penny swallowed hard, hating how he was right. “I’m trying to figure out something.”

“What?”

“What comes after, I guess. If there is one for me. I’ve been thinking about it. I have a lot of time to do that sort of thing lately. Apparently, they just kept me busy to keep me from thinking ... not because I was doing what everyone else wouldn’t.”

Cross considered her with that hard stare of his. The silence between them dragged on until she thought maybe it would be better to just turn around and leave. “That depends, Penny.”

“On what?”

“When the after is.” He lifted one shoulder, the blazer he wore custom fit to his tall form while the gold cufflinks caught the lights overhead when he waved an arm. “Because as soon as you do something irreversible that would hurt The League, they’re going to answer with an equal action. It’s inevitable. And you’ve made things easy—the cleanup, I mean—with the bounty. Can’t say I’ve ever heard of someone signing their own death warrant in such a way.”

The longer she stared at the man who had only been a part of her life for the last few years from a distance, the more she thought about the last time they had truly talked. Not the usual orders in a file, a new job discussed over a conference call, or a message passed between her handlers and delivered to her. They were never ... a team.

It wasn’t like that.

“I keep thinking back to when I was that terrified eighteen-year-old girl asking you to help me in that office,” Penny said, “and everything felt so hopeless. You were the only person that had a solution to my problem, but it didn’t get better.”

“The hopelessness?”

“Yeah.”

“And the solution wasn’t what I expected it to be, either. It did change everything for me, though.”

“For the better?” he asked.

Well ... look at me, she thought. Was it better?

“That’s yet to be determined,” Penny murmured in reply as she turned on her heel to leave, saying, “Thank you for seeing me tonight.”

“Penny,” Cross called at her back.

She hesitated. “What?”