Page 77 of One Second After Another

Anything.

Right then, she was ... nothing.

Empty.

Alone.

• • •

PENNY WAS GRATEFUL for the cobblestone walkway that led up the final hill at the far end of the cemetery. It led to the same entrance she had used that connected to the side of the church. A quick way to the crypt, but not one that the hearse could drive while the hundreds of people followed behind.

Heels and grass were never friends, but at least the cobblestone made things slightly easier for Penny at the end of her trek out of the cemetery. With a little more conscious effort, that was, because nothing about cobblestone and heels were friends, either.

She blamed her distraction with moving fast—but also staying upright—for why she didn’t see the figure waiting on the other side of the hill when she came up over it. Hollers for help had already started to echo for Allegra when Penny first exited the left wing. A siren wailed in the distance—was it for the dead woman who couldn’t be saved?

“Was it like I promised it would be?” he asked.

Penny came to a standstill on the pathway, her skirt billowing from the wind as her head snapped up. She didn’t even react to snatch the hat that blew off her head in the wind that had picked up a lot more since she first arrived at the church that morning.

Cree waited for an answer. A gun rested in his right hand.

Penny rocked against the wind, her slight sway the only thing that moved between her and Cree for more seconds than she cared to count. The scent of ammonia from the boxed, black hair dye that she had ruined her white-blonde locks with the night before danced over her face when strands of her hair whipped against her skin.

She swallowed.

Her words.

The air.

Those few final seconds ...

“Do you remember,” he asked her, “when I made that promise?”

She did.

Two months into her training at The League, swallowed by her fear, with bloodshot eyes, and tears that tasted like salt staining her lips, he promised she would feel nothing when she killed Allegra. Cree had bent over her in the darkness of a room that she never wanted to even smell again and told her she could have the thing she wanted the most—to feel nothing when it was finally the end.

“I was scared,” Penny told him.

Cree dared to smile, as tiny and fast as it was. “And then?”

“She was gone.”

“And you felt—”

“Nothing,” Penny said, her words a rushed ache leaving her lips. “Nothing at all.”

His expression softened even as he raised his weapon. His dark eyes met hers, and she found remorse there—waiting for her, though he wouldn’t offer it in words. That was okay.

“When you killed her, or two weeks—whichever came first,” he reminded her.

“Tell Dare I’m not sorry.”

Cree nodded once. “You shouldn’t be.”

Ever.

She was owed this.