Page 120 of Contempt

Because this meant one thing.

One person would die here today.

Him.

“Ren,” John whispered.

He didn’t look away from the bomb. “I don’t want to get inside my head about it, okay? Get them all at the door, and waiting.”

“But you have to—”

“This is the only way, John.”

God, he knew it.

He’d spent the last twenty minutes going over every inch of this bomb, and the wiring. All the electronics. He looked at every possible angle he could to find that failsafe, but he couldn’t see it. He didn’t know where it was.

Because it didn’t exist.

There was no way to disengage the bomb.

It was Christian’s last backup, Renzo realized. Making sure that there was no way to disengage the bomb just in case because the man planned for everything here.

Renzo dragged in a hard breath as he pulled that one latex tube out with the two twisted wires, and held it there with his icepick-like tool. “You’ll tell her I love her, won’t you?”

Because he couldn’t call Lucia right now to tell her himself. Who knew where she was? Still with Christian, probably. Nobody had updated them like they promised they would when they got Lucia away from the asshole.

Renzo glanced up at John. “You’ll tell her that for me, won’t you?”

John stared back, and the deadness in his eyes from earlier was gone. Instead, it’d been replaced with thick emotion, and a line of water. “Every single day, Ren. I’ll remind her every day.”

Yeah, okay.

That seemed like a fair trade.

“Get to the door, John. I’ll call it out.”

“Fuck.” John gave Renzo one last look, and muttered, “At least try, okay?”

“I don’t know how I could.”

“Me either, but try.”

As John passed the cars on the lifts, he struck out with a fist and it connected with the metal control box. It caused the control box to go off, which made the cars on the lifts lower until they were almost level with the cement holes beneath them.

Like a cover.

Metal on top of a cement box.

He stared at it for longer than he should have … because was it possible?

“At the door,” he heard called out.

That broke his daze.

Renzo turned back to the bomb, and pulled out the tool that he would need to cut the latex tubing, and the wires. A skilled, fast hand was the only thing that would make this work. Maybe, in those moments, he shouldn’t have been thinking about The League and their training … but he kind of wanted to thank Cree for cracking his knuckles with a flexible metal switch every time he didn’t move fast enough when he worked on wires.

He didn’t know how to be slow.