It also changed nothing.
Penny was done following orders that would not serve her best interests or the interests of the people who she had done this for in the first place. She wasn’t going to make it easy on The League—or anyone else that dared to get in her way—while she finished her business with Allegra Dunsworth.
She shouldn’t have come back to Naz and Roz when they would undoubtedly be the first place The League came to look for Penny. Very few others knew her past like her handlers did, though, so she was willing to take the risk. It wasn’t like she planned to stay for long.
And yet, despite it all, Penny couldn’t help but come back one more time before everything changed again. Before she changed everything.
She didn’t plan to show herself or even walk up and knock on the backdoor. Her adoptive family would never even know she had been there after she left. They deserved better than a random appearance and another disappearance. She threw their world into upheaval once just by being there and then again when she left without an explanation. There was no good reason to do it to them again. Even she knew that.
No, she just wanted to ... see them.
Or their home, rather.
Remind herself why she was here in the first place and what brought her to the point that she was willing to ... give it all up.
Her protection from being who she was. The family she desperately missed. A career that had allowed her both healing and retribution for the wrongs done to her. The chance to start over, or to be someone else, even.
To learn what came after ...
All of it and more.
Penny was giving it up—or any chance of it by doing what she had done, really.
Still, as she lingered at the edge of the forest, ten feet beyond where the treeline ended on Naz and Roz’s property, she couldn’t help but think it was still worth it. For them, and their life, even if it was one without her.
And for her, too.
For her peace of mind. Something she never had—not while her mother still walked and breathed.
Soon, Allegra wouldn’t.
Penny needed to start over first. Go back to the beginning and remember. To know that for a time, before all of this happened, she was happy. Or ... she was starting to learn how to be happy in her own way. Until her mother ruined that, too.
Some things never changed ...
Lost in her thoughts and still staring at the only home she had ever known, Penny was too distracted to hear the crack of twigs from her left. That was, until a little voice said, “Hey, Penny.”
Whether it was the shock of someone saying her name, or just the fact that they had managed to sneak up on her in the forest behind Naz and Roz’s property, it still earned a reaction from Penny. She hadn’t heard the approach from her left until the new voice joined a silent conversation she’d been having inside her head while the memories raced for attention in her mind.
Despite her years of training to stand calm and steady no matter the situation, she let out a yelp and fell backward when she stumbled over an exposed root of a tree. The white strands of her hair made a curtain over her eyes as her palms hit the ground to catch her fall from turning into something much worse.
A quiet, child-like laugh rang out in the forest. The sound was almost musical and a total contrast to the way her heart thumped loudly in her chest.
“Sorry,” her new companion said, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Penny didn’t bother to get up, or even fix her hair. Instead, she pushed sideways and came to sit right on her ass, so she could stare directly at the guest who had joined her in the forest. He was maybe three and half feet tall, not quite four, if that. Dark hair. Soul-deep eyes. She found familiarity in the softness of his boyish features. Even the way his grin tilted a little more on the right side in a smirk she had seen time and time again.
She didn’t need to ask his name.
She already knew.
“Cross,” she said.
The boy shrugged. “Well, everybody calls me little Cross when they think I can’t hear. I don’t like that very much. But since Grandpapa doesn’t like being called Senior, I have to deal with it. Or that’s what he said.”
His words were clear. His sentences, smart. For his age, anyway.
“And you are, right—Penny, I mean?”
She stared at the boy, blinking as if he might disappear in the next minute. She was still trying to figure out why in the hell he was even in the woods. Where were his parents? Was this something he did on the regular?
Hell ...
Penny hadn’t seen his face since he was six months old. Not once in all the years since she left had she even been graced with a picture of the boy as he grew. She always wondered, of course ... did he keep his father’s features, or change to look more like his mom?
She missed a lot.
About him.
His first steps.
Those first words.
Even his first day at school.
“You don’t talk?” Cross asked. “Ma says you were always quiet.”
She swallowed hard, knowing what she needed to tell the boy because she wasn’t even supposed to be here in the first place. “I don’t know who you think I am, but I’m not—”
“Yeah, you’re Penny. I have pictures.”
So sure.
And true.
God.
Penny dragged in a quick breath. “You didn’t scare m—”
“Yeah, I did,” he interjected again, seemingly unbothered that he kept interrupting her. “Sorry. It was kind of funny, though.”
She couldn’t help the smile fighting to get out. He was quite the kid. It only killed her more.
“You know they’re looking for you, right?” Cross asked.
Penny wet her lips. “How do you know that?”
“Uncle Luca came back. I heard Papa say he was lying. There was a lot of yelling.”
“You call him your uncle?”
Cross lifted one shoulder covered by a leather jacket that looked strikingly like one his father would have worn years ago. The children’s Doc Martens on his feet matched the whole vibe. The one thing he didn’t have was the slicked-back hair, but the wild strands of his black hair looked better all crazy anyway.
“He’s my godfather, too,” Luca added. “So ...”
Penny knew.
“And you’re supposed to be my godmother.”
“Yeah, I am,” she admitted quietly.
“Supposed to be,” the boy said again, “because you’re not here. You never were. And even though everybody else knows you, I don’t.”
“You knew me. Just for a short time.”
That didn’t satisfy the boy at all.
“Yeah, well. Not the same.” He sighed hard, glancing through the trees at his house when he said, “I like it out here. I’m not supposed to go past the trees, but ... well, I do what I want.”
Penny laughed under her breath. “We all do.”
“Not like me.”
What did that mean?
“You’re smart, aren’t you?” she asked.
Cross pressed his lips together as he considered that before saying, “Yeah, but not like my papa. Different.”
“How?”
“He’s ... smart-smart, you know? Numbers, and books, and things. All the things. Universe stuff. I see people and just know.”