Time to die
An almost pretty face marred by a harelip. DREADFUL PENNY Ep. 7
From Episode 6: Penny finally gets Timur naked on the floor, but can she get the paralyzing poison into him?
Savagely she tilted his head aside and used her feet to push him into a roll. He was too engrossed to be surprised by her deft manipulation of his mass so that she was on top. She bent her lips to his ear. “Bite me…oh, please bite me…yes…” Pain electrified her body and she couldn’t stop her feet from kicking, but it must have sparked some dark desire in him because he practically devoured her breast. “Use your tongue…like that.”
The pain wasn’t anything like her fear of what would happen if he stopped. Every time he tried to sample her other nipple, she found a way to steer him back, until his fondling hands slipped away, and his jaw went slack.
She straddled the unconscious chairman.
Five, maybe six minutes before paralysis imprisoned her.
The iPad with its gold plating was heavy in her hands. Getting a Wi-Fi signal ate up a long thirty seconds. Another forty-five seconds to navigate her way onto the hook-up site. Veronique’s Tinder account found Majaplaya, fronted by a ragamuffin of a little Black boy.
One crazy Arabian night, he messaged.
Aladdin’s not my type, she replied to his pre-arranged code.
Laptop ready?
Opening chat.
She messaged him with the iPad’s phone number and reached for Kasym’s briefcase. It was heavy and she carried it with both hands over to Timur’s side. The chairman began to snore.
She opened Signal for encrypted chat and in a minute it murmured with an incoming call. She opened a screen, propping the iPad upright. Stack appeared in the window. Then Lev, boasting a hipster beard, stuck his head in the camera to have a look. “More girls on Tinder should look like you,” he said.
Penny didn’t have time for this amateur. “I have three minutes,” she hissed.
“Get back to work,” Stack said, pushing Lev out of view. “Chairman ready, Pen?”
She raised Timur’s hand and forced his thumb onto the obsidian button on the handle of the briefcase. The locks were silent but when she pressed Timur’s thumb down, the lid cracked open. She removed the laptop, displaying it for Stack to see, and powered it on.
Penny glanced at the bedroom door. All clear.
“So how much time I got?” Stack asked, keeping his voice low.
“About twenty minutes,” she said.
“Thought it was thirty.”
“I’ll need time to escape before he wakes up.” Starting with: get the antidote.
A black-and-white QR code popped up on the laptop screen. She twisted Timur’s arm around to press his forefinger against it but the position was awkward. When they had been fooling around, she had used his own energy to spin him over. But now he was just dead weight.
Stack waited with eyes wide behind his red frames. “Clock’s running, Pen.”
She pushed Timur’s finger onto the code.
“Retina,” Stack said.
She grabbed Timur’s hair and lifted his chin onto the keyboard, then used both hands to pull open the lids of his right eye. Using her knee and elbow to maneuver the laptop, she waited for a laser embedded in the camera above the screen to run its ocular test. His face twitched.
“It’s waking him up,” she warned, stifling the bile of panic in her chest.
“It’s just a reflex,” Stack assured her. “Lev, you reading it?”
“Yeah, I’m making my way in,” Lev said off-screen. “Penny, I’m going to need you to do some typing now. All right?”
She checked the laptop’s clock. Two minutes left. No margin. She jerked around. The light emanating from the crack beneath the bedroom door—it bisected.
Someone was on the other side of the door.
Veronique let out a playful groan.
Whoever was there didn’t move. Perhaps he was enjoying what he thought he heard: Kasym was a deviant worm. She cooed a series of yeses, eyes pinned on the divided crack of light. The intruder left.
After a moment, Stack said, “Do that one more time, Lev might faint.”
“Next step,” she snapped.
Lines of code ribbed the laptop screen.
Lev appeared in the Signal screen on the iPad. “Type in control function five.”
She pressed the three keys. The lines of code sped across the laptop.
“We’re in!” Lev whooped.
She had to get to the bathroom. Now.
The line of light below the hallway door remained unbroken—clear—
An unusual sound came from the Signal link, as if someone had struck the microphone with a pillow.
“Hey,” Stack shouted, “what the—”
She stopped. Looked at the screen.
Stack’s head darted out of view, as if an invisible cane had yanked him off screen, and something viscous and cloudy obscured the camera.
“Stack?”
She heard Lev off camera: “No, please, no!”
The cloud half-blocking the screen moved, or oozed, further down the Signal window. Was that blood?
This isn’t happening.
The striking-pillow sound again. A shadow flitted in the Signal window’s background and she identified the long cylinder of a gun’s suppressor. Lev’s face filled the Telegram window—or what was left of it. Someone had blown most of it off.
Stack and Lev were gone.
A white man dressed in a butler’s outfit put his face into view. Wide, Slavic cheekbones, big lips and gray, joyless eyes. An almost pretty face marred by a harelip that scarred the flesh below his nose. He saw her nakedness without interest. “Penelope,” Viktor said. “Time to die.”
Once again, the line of light beneath the bedroom door was broken in two.
Whoever was out there had come back.
She sprang at the bedroom door.
Threw her shoulder against it, slamming it shut as the intruder was pushing it open. Turned the lock, rolled away on her shoulder. Three holes appeared around the doorknob; the bullets nicked the bedposts, spangled one of the great dark windows.
Penny made for the en suite. She drew the door shut and locked it. It wouldn’t stop the intruder but would buy her—
Time.
The mirror revealed red bite marks on her breasts. They stung when she smeared on the hand cream.
She stepped into the Jacuzzi, out of the doorway’s line of sight. Two bams. The doorknob jolted in place; another bullet whinged off a marble column, destination anywhere.
The door withstood the first kick, giving her enough time to step back onto the floor. She needed space.
Assuming the antidote was working…. If not, whoever had come to kill her wouldn’t have to do anything more than wait.