Page 41 of Harbor

“I’m happy, John. This phone won’t answer another call. Goodbye.”

Lucia hung up the phone knowing that hadn’t been sixty seconds. Renzo was already at her side, and picking up the phone. She could tell by the hardness of his gaze that he had basically gotten the gist of the conversation and what happened.

She was still going to have to explain.

And none of this felt good.

EIGHT

“Ren, open the pizza!”

His attention drifted between his little brother who had no idea the trouble that they just walked into, and Lucia who kept staring at that phone in his hands.

“Just a second,” Renzo replied absently.

The kid didn’t seem to understand that regardless, the pizza was still going to be as hot and good in five minutes as it was right now. Then again, he’d been asking for it every single hour on the hour since he woke up, too. Once Diego set his mind on something, he was going to get it and that’s all there was to it.

“Ren!”

He was not the type to lose his patience with Diego. Literally anyone else—except maybe Lucia—and he didn’t have time to listen to whining and nonsense. But right then, he was a little too close for comfort when it came to snapping at his little brother. It wasn’t even Diego’s fault, honestly.

“Here,” Lucia said, like she could read his mind or something, “let’s get this pizza opened for you, Diego.”

Renzo let her do her thing for Diego. It was easier for him to try and figure out how in the fuck her family—he was assuming it was her family only because she’d used her brother’s name—had gotten a hold of his sister’s phone.

“What did they say?” he asked Lucia as she flipped open the pizza box.

“Not a lot,” she returned. “I couldn’t stay on the phone too long or they would have been able to track me. That’s why I got off as soon as I could.”

Renzo’s brow dipped. “Track, how? I don’t understand.”

Lucia pulled out two pieces of steaming pizza, and set them on one of the paper plates they had grabbed when they went out to shop the day after arriving in Vegas. She barely even had time to slide the plate in front of Diego, and the kid was already ripping into a piece of pizza like he had never been fed a day in his life. It would have been amusing to Renzo on any other day if he wasn’t entirely fucked up over a single phone call.

Funny how something like that could ruin the peace he thought he found here. Even if it had been a short moment of peace, and only an illusion. Renzo hadn’t quite been ready to give it up just yet. Someone was determined to rip it out of his hands whether he was ready for them to or not, and now he had to decide what to do about it.

“Lucia,” he murmured when she didn’t answer him right away.

Lucia took a moment to wipe her hands on a paper towel before she turned her back to Diego. It effectively put her back to the boy so that they could talk quietly, calmly, and without making him think something was wrong. He appreciated her effort, really. He wasn’t even in the right frame of mind to consider how Diego might take all of this.

“I heard someone in the background,” she explained, shrugging. “They said something about needing another sixty seconds to grab the area code and phone number, and possibly a proper location. When I asked my brother how he had gotten ahold of a private phone number, he said hackers could do anything.”

“But they didn’t have the phone number,” Renzo said.

It wasn’t even a question because one of her statements contradicted the other, and he needed to be absolutely clear on this. They couldn’t afford to fuck around if her family knew where they were. He had no doubt the first thing they would do was come here, and take Lucia away from him. Which was fine if that’s what she wanted to do, but he knew it wasn’t. Frankly, the only way Renzo could continue to give Lucia what she wanted—to stay with him—was to keep fucking running.

Lucia sighed. “Didn’t seem like it, no. That’s what they were trying to get, I think, if I can trust what the guy in the background said. Probably the fucking hacker, right? Is …”

“What?”

She glanced away from him. “Rose’s phone … could someone grab that, or no?”

“Doubtful,” Renzo answered simply.

His sister was every fucking seventeen-year-old girl to a fucking T. Her phone was never very far from her hands. She could wake up at the sound of a social media notification, but wouldn’t blink at a damn alarm clock. She had an account for every major social media app that was popular among her age group. Hell, she had taught him how to use one or two of them more than once. Unless someone had broken into his sister’s place while she was sleeping to grab her phone, there was no fucking way they got it away from her.

Simple as that.

And he seriously doubted the Marcellos went that far.