Page 4 of Contempt

“Did you know he hated me?” she asked softly.

John’s brow dipped. “Who?”

“Renzo,” Lucia said. “At first, he thought I was just some little rich bitch with an air-filled head, and a pretty face. I didn’t know what it was like to be poor, or to struggle. I didn’t know the streets, or how hard they are on people like him. I didn’t know what it was like to come where he comes from, or how to survive without a trust fund.”

“Lucia—”

Lucia shrugged, feeling the bitter laugher rising in her throat, though she managed to hold it back somehow. “He was right, too. And maybe I should have thanked him for making that obvious to me, you know? He woke me up. It took thirty days to change my life, and seconds to make it worse all over again.”

John dragged his hand down over his jaw, and looked away from her. Lucia didn’t know what to expect from her brother, then. She wanted him to understand how different her life had become because Renzo stepped into it, and then how irrevocably worse it had changed yet again because her brother and father took him away from her. If he could know those things, and understand what it meant for Lucia, then maybe … God, maybe, she could work on this wall between them.

He had to understand, though.

That had to come first.

John slipped a hand into his pocket, and without a word, pulled out a piece of folded up paper. He held it out to Lucia like he wanted her to take it, but she stared at it, unmoving.

“Here,” John said.

Lucia didn’t move a muscle. “What is it?”

“A better apology.”

What?

Lucia took the paper from his outstretched hand, but didn’t take her eyes off him. She didn’t have a reason to distrust her brother at this moment, but he’d given her one in the past. She didn’t know what she might find when she opened that damn paper up, and she was not willing to find more pain and heartache in whatever he was giving to her.

Simple as that.

Lucia unfolded the paper, and felt the air catch painfully in her chest as she read over the information that had been scribbled down in her brother’s familiar, messy handwriting. To someone else, this information might be nothing. To her, though, it was fucking everything.

And more.

Renzo Zulla, it read at the top. And then right below, an address had been written down. She could tell it was just a PO box, and nothing more. Not an actual address to a home or … something. Not even a prison address with an inmate number.

She’d searched for him in the system. Tried to find him time and time again. No one seemed to know where Renzo had been moved after New York. It was like he vanished into thin air. Lucia was mad—too mad to ask her father what in the hell was happening with Renzo, but she didn’t think Lucian would be honest with her even if she did ask him for the truth. But she knew … something wasn’t right. Something had happened with Renzo.

But what?

Where was he?

Here, apparently. This fucking PO box. In Nevada?

Lucia’s fingers tightened around the paper, and crumpled the edges. She glanced up at her brother to see the firmness in John’s gaze as he stared back at her. She had so many more questions than she had answers as she looked between her brother and the paper.

Where is he?

What happened to him?

Can I see him?

All she found staring back from John was a silent request to not ask a damn thing. Sometimes, that’s how their life went. Sometimes, she couldn’t ask questions. None of them could. Sometimes, it was just better not to know.

Even if all of her was begging to know.

Hadn’t a year been long enough?

She just wanted Renzo back.