Page 31 of Contempt

The man didn’t do a lot of shit. Dinner meets, and phone calls. Christian Savino kept his head down, and didn’t cause problems. Or at least, that’s what it seemed like to Renzo. He visited a lot of art galleries, for whatever reason. One of them happened to be the one Renzo knew Lucia worked at—if the information he had on her was to be trusted, anyway, but that was probably just circumstance.

He’d not seen her, either.

He looked, though.

Fuck yeah, he looked.

Five years.

That was the deal.

Nonetheless, The League had to know what Renzo had done. They could locate him with his phone, and the chip in his arm. He wasn’t hiding this—they were welcome to come get him, if they wanted to. But until then, he had other business to handle.

Finishing off the last bit of his cigarette, he eyed the cherry red tip before cocking his boot up over his knee to stub the smoke. Then, he stuffed the ruined cigarette into the pocket of his leather jacket, tucking it safely away. That way, he left nothing behind to say he had been standing in this alleyway for almost an hour now trying to convince himself just to walk across the goddamn street and say hello. Force of habit, maybe—The League liked to think of them all as ghosts, and the first thing they learned was how to behave like one.

Now that the cigarette was gone, Renzo had no choice but to stare across the road again. The small shop with the pretty sign above the large bay windows overlooking the inside didn’t seem like much, maybe. A small place, but he bet his sister loved it like nothing else.

It was hers.

Her shop—or gallery … studio, whatever.

Renzo didn’t know what Rose considered the place. Maybe a mixture of all three things. She had rented the place out for two years, now. She used it to work, display, and sell her many pieces of art. It was all hers.

Like he wanted, she’d done something. Made something of herself, and took care of Diego all the while. Some of it, after a while, had been with his help from afar. He called maybe once a month after the first two years of being with The League, but those phone calls were contingent on a lot of things.

One, that he never talked about business.

Two, that he behaved.

Three, that it never lasted more than ten minutes.

Four, she could never talk about him to anyone.

God knew he fucking wanted those phone calls. He craved them like nothing else. His sister was his one contact with the outside world, and honestly, his past. Before The League had happened, and all of the rest of it. Rose was his one connection—so fuck yeah, he didn’t talk about where he was, or what happened, regardless of how many times his sister begged; he didn’t step out of line, mostly, and he kept to the time limit they demanded when he called. He wanted those calls to Rose, so he did what they told him to.

Simple as that.

As for whether or not Rose kept up her end of the bargain … well, he didn’t know. He suspected she did if only because he explained how important it was that she follow the rules, so he could keep calling.

Anyway, contact with Rose allowed him the ability to help her. At first, she hadn’t wanted to take any money from him—some shit never changed. Still, she took it when he didn’t give her a choice. The one thing he wanted the most from their conversations was the chance to speak to Diego again.

It’d yet to happen.

Rose offered, and Diego always refused quietly in the background. It killed Renzo—like a knife right into his heart, but what could he do?

It was what it was.

He’d just worked up the nerve to head across the street to his sister’s shop when the phone in his pocket started to vibrate.

Fuck.

Renzo knew better than to ignore a call, but especially because the only people who ever called him were those from The League. Pulling the phone out, he swiped his thumb across the screen to answer it, and put the device to his ear.

He didn’t even say hello.

He didn’t have to.

“What are you doing?”