Page 40 of One Second After Another

Body language spoke volumes—theirs was screaming. Yeah, Penny bet it was hard to sleep next to Allegra lately what with all the trouble Penny had caused for her mother and the senator. She couldn’t say she was sorry for it.

The only problem?

Penny didn’t have a clear shot.

But she might if only the senator would just mo—

“If you shoot,” she heard a dark, but familiar, voice say from somewhere behind her, “then anyone looking for you within a five-block radius will know exactly where you are. This building is twenty stories high—you’ll never make it down before someone is here.”

Penny had been holding her breath. The air slipped out with a name as her shoulders sagged, “Luca.”

She didn’t look away from the scope—didn’t know where he was except behind her. She didn’t take her finger off the trigger, either.

“Let’s be real, they’re all here—anyone wanting to claim the bounty, people from The League ... definitely protection for Allegra. You’ve made it entirely possible for them to connect the dots. Why wouldn’t they be here? You’ll have, at most, two minutes. Can you do this in two minutes, babe?”

God.

She still didn’t move even as she asked Luca, “How did you find me?”

10.

Luca

“HOW did you find me?”

Luca drew in the cold whisper of the wind with his next breath, wishing for even a second that he could remember what it felt like to be sane again. Penny’s question hung in the air between them, although from his vantage point where he had exited onto the roof through a hatched door, he could see her body flattened against the roof. He imagined he didn’t have the same vantage point as her, though, seeing as how she hadn’t looked away from the scope on the rather impressive rifle for even a blink in time.

Who was she seeing?

Someone driving on the street? A passerby on the sidewalk? Her target?

Allegra?

Luca couldn’t help but wonder if he was too late—it always felt like he arrived seconds after the big bang at every fucking point in his life.

“Well?” he heard her ask. “How?”

The question seemed simple. It wasn’t.

“Details aren’t really important,” he tried to say.

Hoping she took the deflection. She didn’t.

“But they always are. Especially in your business,” she tacked on for good measure. As if he needed the goddamn reminder.

Details were what got him here in the first place.

He’d been awake for going on forty-two hours. All it took was a single, early-morning phone call from his godfather. Cross confirmed what Luca already believed—Penny was going to take her chance of making a hit on Allegra at the woman’s official engagement dinner in Manhattan. Luca suddenly found himself in the heart of a city pouring over every square inch of a six-block radius that he could because ...

Shit, she had to be there. That’s where she was going to be.

No one could tell Luca that in all her years of training as an assassin that Penny would leave things to chance. She was exactly the type to stand out in a crowd—dangerous for her considering the current circumstances of a bounty on her head—so he expected he would have to find her in the shadows.

But the days turned into hours. And then minutes.

Luca should have been used to chasing ghosts by now, but it didn’t get easier. For whatever reason, the universe had decided to bless him with putting him in the right place at the right time that morning as he watched Penny scout the office building with several floors currently undergoing construction.

She was just there. He thought he’d hallucinated.