Luca couldn’t help but notice how Naz didn’t mention Penny amongst the stress in his life. That also reminded him that he should probably let his friend know about the run-in he had with the girl at the house.
“Penny was at the house, by the way,” Luca said.
Next to him, Naz nodded. “Skipped school again, probably.”
“Again?”
Naz didn’t seem concerned when he explained, “Sometimes, she makes it a whole day. Other times, she barely makes it through the front doors before she turns back around. I pay enough money to the school that they ... overlook small infractions.”
“Does Roz know—”
“She’s the one who told Penny not to push it. If shit isn’t good for her, then she doesn’t need to be stressing out over something like classes. She’s got enough going on. We give her the freedom she needs to work through it. What else can we do?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Naz sighed, scrubbing a hand over his face. “My shit seems small in comparison. I mean, her father was just sentenced, and the lawyers are pressuring everyone to finish the paperwork needed for the asshole’s estate and restitution payments. Imagine, Luca, the man who raped and sold you to others for them to do the same is basically handing you millions of dollars ... a way to apologize. Like that shit should fix what he did to her. I’m surprised when she does make the effort to get up and go to school, honestly.”
Luca swallowed the uncomfortable lump in his throat, thinking about Penny at the house all alone. Hell, should she even be alone? That was the real question. Was there too much freedom for the girl in her situation?
He didn’t know.
“Do you ever think,” Luca asked his friend, “that if you give someone too much rope ... they might just hang themselves with it?”
Naz lifted his brow and reached for the glass with a mouthful of liquor left in the bottom. He drained what remained of the whiskey, and then muttered heavily, “All the fucking time, man. All the time.”
4.
Penny
CLICK, click, clack, click, clack, click, click.
Penny blinked, bleary-eyed and still tired, as she climbed down the dark stairwell of the suburban house where she had called home for the last several months. Maybe it had been the trip to her therapist yesterday evening, but she’d had a train of nightmares since falling asleep, and she just wasn’t in the mood to try again.
But what was that sound?
Penny found the source of the late-night noise soon enough. “What are you doing?”
The man on the couch stiffened, and just as quickly, shot a look over his shoulder at her. Reaching up, he was quick to close the laptop he’d been leaning over the coffee table to type on. “Nothing. What are you doing out of bed?”
“Can’t sleep. Usually, when people say nothing they don’t also feel the need to hide their computer screens, you know?”
Penny had a love-slash-hate relationship with the internet, and computers. She was like every sixteen-year-old girl who seemed to find too much self-worth on social media, and that was how she preferred to connect with people she wanted to keep in her life. It was easier than trying in real life because that always ended badly.
She had no friends in her new, private high school. She had a few hundred on her socials.
It just didn’t have to be deep.
But in the same breath, she hated the internet for many reasons. On certain places in the dark web, one could find folders upon folders of photos of her that were up for sale. Ranging from the age of one, up until she was almost thirteen. Those photos had not yet fallen into hands that could distribute them beyond the dark web where it would touch the people in her real life, but it all still felt a little too real to her.
And raw.
Sometimes, her life felt like a time bomb that was constantly ticking down. Someday—maybe—those photos would find their way out into the world. Penny wasn’t fucking stupid, she knew how horrible people could be. They wouldn’t care that she was a child trafficking victim. They wouldn’t care that those photos were proof of her sexual abuse. All they would see, for the slightly older ones, were a young girl showing her body to a camera.
She hoped they never saw the light of day.
Naz sighed, and then chuckled. “Maybe you’re not wrong, then, but that doesn’t mean it’s any of your business about what I was doing, either.”
“Fair enough.” Penny crossed around the couch and dropped into the recliner across from where Naz was sitting. “So, what are you hiding?”
“You think I would tell you?”
“Why not?”
“You know, I think this is the longest conversation we’ve had since you moved in with us months ago, Penny.”
She had to think about it, but it didn’t take her very long at all to realize that he wasn’t exaggerating. She blinked, trying to pull something out of her zipped lips to say that would be appropriate. All she managed to settle on was, “I didn’t know there was a me for a long time—I didn’t have a voice to use.”
Naz nodded. “I know, I didn’t take it personally.”
“You know I like you, right?”
He raised his brows. “Oh?”
Penny shrugged. “I haven’t tried to ruin your life yet—that’s good sign number one.”
“That’s not funny.”
“And that doesn’t make it less true, either.”
Naz made a noise under his breath. “All right.”
“Now that all the deflections are past us,” Penny said with a smile and a wave of her hand between them, “what are you hiding?”
Because he was, she knew.
Penny just had that sense—she looked at people, and she could tell when they were lying, or if they were someone who might hurt her. Naz didn’t fall into the hurt category. Like Roz, all he ever did was try to help her, but in his own way. Sometimes, that meant giving her space, and letting her figure out whatever she needed on her own time. She appreciated that more than he could possibly know.
Rarely did people leave her alone.
Naz sighed loudly. “You tell me.”
Flipping open the laptop, he turned it around on the table so Penny could see what was on the screen ... which wasn’t anything that made sense to her. A bunch of letters and numbers and symbols on a white screen, filling it from side to side.
It looked like ... HTML?
But more.
“Is that code?” Penny asked.
“Good call,” Naz returned.
“You write code?”
Naz lifted one shoulder like it wasn’t a big thing. “I do a little bit of everything, it’s how my brain focuses.”
Right.
Over the last few months, Penny had heard more than one person refer to Naz as a literal genius. She had seen enough of his whiteboards filled with formulas that she didn’t understand around their house to know he was smart.
He was also more.
He left early in the morning—drove a black car and wore a suit. Words like family business and made man were thrown around in low tones like Penny wouldn’t be able to hear if they spoke quietly. Which was crap, because she did hear. And because she had access to the internet, she looked that shit up.