1.
Luca
Present Day, Nevada ...
MERE seconds could change everything. Even, the span of time it took Luca to open his eyes and know he was alone in the hotel room. He didn’t need to turn in the bed to see it was empty of Penny’s presence. He felt the loss.
Knew it was real before it actually was. The weight sitting on his chest, and the cold cloud surrounding him made the white ceiling seem like it was closing down in on him. The absolute silence—but for his steady breaths and the beats of his heart—confirmed what he already knew even though he didn’t want to believe it.
He was alone.
Absolutely.
“Penny,” he dared to call.
Daring himself to be wrong.
Willing her to prove him wrong, even.
His call went unanswered.
Before that moment, Luca hadn’t realized loneliness could be such a tangible thing. Beyond a feeling, there was a real presence about it. A heaviness around him that made it all the more real.
And cruel.
There was something to be said about the way loneliness could leave a man confused. Like as he sat up in the bed, confirming Penny’s side was empty and so was the rest of the room, he just couldn’t catch up to speed. He was quite aware Penny wasn’t beside him in the bed like she had been the night before when they fell asleep. And yet, a part of him didn’t want to believe that even when he grabbed the blanket and yanked it away from her empty pillow. Even the indentation of her head was gone.
The room was just ... chilly.
When had she gotten up?
Did she leave or—
“Penny!”
Luca’s shout undoubtedly carried out through the bedroom door to the rest of the hotel room, but to no avail. He didn’t get an answer just like the first time.
Fuck.
He was trying not to panic. Excuses raced through his mind in a shitty attempt to quell how the nervousness skimming over his skin when he exited the bed. Cold floors met the soles of his feet while he thought ... she’s just getting food—maybe coffee. Shit, he couldn’t pretend to know what Penny did during her days. He’d only been back in her life for a short while. Who was to say she didn’t have an entire routine in the mornings, right?
Bullshit.
He knew it.
His heart screamed it.
Of course, that didn’t stop his sleepy brain from trying to brush off the obvious. Like the differences in the bedroom—the shoes Penny had kicked to the side were now gone. Her laptop sat open on the chair, but only the back of the screen faced him. As if she had been sitting there with it, and just left it where it was because she wouldn’t need it. The wall safe next to the bed had been left open.
Why didn’t he hear that?
Right.
Because he thought he was safe. Stupidly, he believed that he had the upper hand where Penny was concerned. Why would she leave again? Hell, she brought him here.
That’s why it didn’t make sense. Why he couldn’t catch up, so to speak.
The obvious stared him in the face as he gathered his clothes from the night before in his arms and headed for the connected bathroom, but he still refused to accept it. He had one leg stuffed into the pair of jeans and was shoving in his second leg as he came to a complete stop in the doorway of the bathroom.
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.
So why was she looking up her mother?
And why did she leave when she found her?
Those were answers Luca didn’t have and wouldn’t have the time to figure out. At least, not at the moment. The yelling from outside the hotel room brought him back to reality and out of his self-pity in a flash.