Page 66 of Contempt

She laughed bleakly. “Are you like them now, too? They used to tell me that about you all the time—my family, I mean. You were bad news. A bad guy … I should stay away. Not that it matters, anyway. I’m not interested in Christian.”

“It’s not the same, baby.”

There wasn’t a hint of jealously in his voice. No heat, or anger. He wasn’t trying to tell her to stay away from another man for his own pride.

She stilled on the bed, and met his gaze again. “I’ll be careful, but he’s probably not any different than my family, Ren. I’m not worried.”

“I don’t think he’s like your family at all,” Renzo murmured. “I think he’s worse.”

Well …

What did that mean?

ELEVEN

Renzo paced the length of his hotel room, and tried to ignore the giant fucking elephant that was taunting him from the bed. Not a literal elephant, no, but it felt like it. That stack of white envelopes felt like the weight of an elephant had come to sit on his chest from the moment he had them in his hands.

He’d flipped through them, briefly. Not in front of Lucia, of course, but after he’d left her hotel. Twenty-two, he’d counted. She’d written him twenty-two fucking times. Her last letter had been dated and stamped from a year ago—when she’d sent it out. The Return to Sender stamp on the front had been dated three months after that.

Every single letter was the same.

Dated to send.

Stamped to send back.

And yet, she’d kept sending them. Over and over again, she kept trying.

Renzo hadn’t said anything to Lucia, but he recognized that address she had scrawled on the front of each envelope. It was a PO box The League used for different things—he’d never checked the box, sure, but he’d seen mail on Dare’s desk more than once with that exact address on it. There was no way those letters didn’t get in someone’s hand at The League. There’s no way someone—likely Dare—didn’t see them.

Which only meant one thing to Renzo, now. Dare purposely kept them from him—another choice taken away from Renzo. Another way to control his life, and the contact he had with the outside.

Or … just Lucia, it seemed.

One by one, they’d allowed him to go back to people from his past in one way or another. Like the phone calls to his sister, for example. It was just Lucia who they kept away from him for all this fucking time.

And God …

It made him want to rage.

He still wondered who had given her an address to use to contact him—her father, maybe? Johnathan, possibly? Her brother had seemed to know something about his involvement with The League, so it was possible. Nonetheless, whoever it was that gave it to her, they’d tried to give her someway to contact him.

It was The League that had kept her away.

His fucking heart clenched as his gaze fell on that stack of letters again. Resting on the sheets of his bed, they looked innocent enough. Paper—that was all. Stacks of papers. Ink scrawled across the front in black and red. Black, from her. Red, from the post office. Paper shouldn’t be able to kill a person, but it felt like those might have done exactly that. Just looking at them, and before, when he’d shuffled through each of the twenty-two … they all felt like a slice across the muscles of his heart.

She sent letter after letter—they came back unanswered every single time. One after another. And yet, she kept trying. She kept sending.

She kept hoping.

What must that have felt like?

To hope, and then have it ruined.

To try again, and get another slap in the face.

Fuck.

It was no wonder she was stuck in her head about this—no fucking wonder she didn’t know what to think, and why she was so hurt. For years, she’d believed Renzo purposely didn’t answer her back. That he had made the choice to keep a distance between the two of them. That he was the one who refused to answer her back.