Contempt renzo lucia boo.., p.13
Contempt (Renzo + Lucia Book 3), page 13
Renzo chuckled.
Dark.
And oh, so haunted.
She loved that sound.
It was the last thought to drift through her mind before he slammed inside her. It took one good thrust to fill her full, and shatter her mind. But those broken pieces were beautiful, too. Reflections of him and her like this.
He dragged himself away from her body again, and then slammed right back in. Harder than before—deeper, too, if it were possible.
“I wanna watch this, Lucia,” he murmured. “I need to watch this.”
She couldn’t breathe again.
But he was fucking her now, so it didn’t matter. It was the slapping of skin, and the sexy noises that slipped past Renzo’s lips that dragged her back under into a greater state of bliss. There was nothing better than watching a man use your body the way he wanted just to get himself off.
He made it quite clear that he didn’t intend to come until she did—again. His thumb found her clit and worked small circles into it with every beat of his hips against hers. The rhythm was enough to hit every nerve Lucia had.
“I’m going to come again,” she gasped.
“Good.”
She came—faster and harder.
“Fuck, yeah,” Renzo said thickly.
He fucked her harder.
She was all too happy to get on her knees when he was ready, pull that condom off, and swallow every drop he had to give her, too.
• • •
“You should go,” Lucia whispered.
Renzo’s head lifted the second he walked out of the bathroom, and his gaze instantly fell on her. There was no surprise in his eyes, and no disappointment. It was more like an understanding, she thought. Like he expected her to say that.
This whole thing …
Them … it’d been a lot.
Together, it had been too much.
Lucia needed to be alone again; she needed a second to breathe without him standing right there. She couldn’t think when there wasn’t any distance, and she had shit to work through, now.
Renzo nodded. “All right.”
She wasn’t even going to let him spend the night.
Fuck, she wanted to, though. There was a big part of her that was ready to beg for him to get back in the bed with her. To watch him enjoy the sight of her naked beneath the sheets with him, but she couldn’t.
Lucia had realized something.
That shit she thought she was feeling for all this time—the stuff that held her back, and kept her lonely; the poison that filled her up like an old friend … she’d been holding it too tight, and keeping it too close. She blamed her father; put her pain on him, and let that contempt for him burn through her like a constant wild fire that was ready to devastate every time she fed into it.
The thing was, she wasn’t just mad at her father.
Or even her brother.
She was mad at herself.
She was mad at Renzo.
She was pissed at life.
The world.
That was something she had to deal with alone—he couldn’t help. She’d made friends with this way she felt. She’d found comfort in this contempt burning so deep in her heart that she was scared to know what it might feel like to live without it.
That wasn’t on him to fix.
It was on her.
“I’m sorry,” Lucia said softly, staring at her hands as they twisted into the sheet pooled around her naked waist. “I just … need some time to think, and figure some things out.”
Renzo shrugged as he came around the edge of the bed, and silently, dropped a kiss to the top of her head. “Yeah, I get it, babe.”
She sucked in a shaky breath.
“You asked what I meant,” she murmured.
Glancing up, she found him looking back at her over his shoulder. “What?”
“I wrote letters. You didn’t know what I was talking about.”
Renzo’s brow dipped. “I still don’t.”
Funny.
She couldn’t forget.
Couldn’t let go.
So much so, that she kept those fucking letters with her all the time. Bunched together with an elastic to keep them neat in her messenger bag that she carried with her everywhere, those letters were a constant reminder of pain and of something she didn’t have. Of, what she had thought, was someone who didn’t want her.
Lucia’s gaze drifted to the bag sitting on a chair on the other side of the room. “There in that bag—all addressed to you, Ren. They were all sent back stamped with Return to Sender.”
“Do you want me to—”
“Take them,” she interjected. “They were meant for you. You should have them.”
He didn’t ask how she had gotten an address for him, or how many letters had come back to her with that fucking stamp on them. No, he just crossed the room, and found the pack of letters in her bag.
Lucia thought maybe those letters had been a way she punished herself. For falling in love with him, and making the choice to run all those years ago … for not being able to help him that night in San Francisco, and for watching him sacrifice his freedom for the safety of hers as the charges piled up, and the courts gave him the sentences.
And then with each unanswered letter, the punishment changed. She kept them because she thought … he didn’t want them.
He didn’t want her.
Lucia thought she needed to be reminded of that, so she kept them.
Renzo turned to her as he packed up his jacket, and the weapons he’d discarded earlier. “About Christian Savino …”
Lucia gave him a look from the side. “What—we’re not going to do a whole jealous thing, are we?”
“No, I was going to tell you to be careful. The man is … dangerous, Lucia. For reasons I know, and some that I am sure I don’t know. He’s involved in drug trafficking, but that’s just scratching the surface. The problem is, he doesn’t seem like the type, right? He seems to have some interest in you, so I just want you to be careful.”
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.
And now, she had to face the fact it hadn’t been when she’d believed it for so long. No, he didn’t blame Lucia for needing her space and time.
But fuck.
He hoped she figured it out soon. He needed her to get out of her head, work through her feelings, and come back better than ever. He was ready for that.
She needed to be ready, too.
This wasn’t something he could fix for her, though. Whatever she was dealing with in her head and heart—he couldn’t make it better.
His pacing had finally stopped, but that was just so he could glare at that fucking stack of envelopes, anyway. He had a complex about them. They came from her, meant for him, and for that, he loved them—adored that she took time to write him when that was a lost fucking art. And yet, at the same time, he hated those letters because they had so clearly been a source of pain for Lucia.
Yeah, a complex.
Before Renzo could think better of it, he reached over and snatched up the stack of letters. He was quick to flip through them again, noting the fact that Lucia had kept them all organized. From the very first letter she sent, to the final one a year ago.
Had she finally given up, then?
Was the last letter her last straw?
Renzo sighed, and went back to the first letter in the stack. A part of him didn’t want to read these, at least, not without Lucia right there watching. Another part of him wanted to know what she had written to him—all those years ago, where had her mind gone without him? Had she been in a similar place to him?
Broken and alone?
Probably.
And that just bothered him more.
Not thinking it through, Renzo ripped off the side of the first letter. He tossed the rest of the stack down to the end of the bed, and sat down beside the pile. Tipping the envelope over in his hand, the single sheet of paper inside fell out to his palm. For longer than he cared to admit, he didn’t unfold the three creases keeping the letter hidden.
He just … stared at it.
What would be inside?
Pain, he knew.
Pain and loss.
He’d lived through that time once. He was still kind of living in it, if he was going to be completely honest with himself. Did he want to experience it from her side of things, too? Hadn’t his experience been enough to tell him that he barely made it out sane the first time around?
It didn’t matter.
She deserved to be heard.
Renzo unfolded the letter.
Renzo,
Do you feel like this, too? Alone all the time? Empty, too? That’s me without you.
I don’t know where you are, but I wish you were here.
And I’m sorry.
Love,
Lucia M.
It was short.
Maybe too short.
And then again, maybe those few sentences were all she could manage at the time. He didn’t know, and since she wasn’t here, he couldn’t ask. He also wanted to know what she was apologizing for—none of what happened had been her fault.
Renzo tucked the first letter away, and picked up the second in the pile. It was dated one week after the first letter had been sent. That likely meant she sent out the second letter before the first had even come back with the Return to Sender stamp.
It, too, was short.
Ren,
I talked to Rose today, and Diego, too. I want to go back to New York just to see them, but I can’t go back because I hate it there, now. No, that’s a lie.
I hate other people who are there, and that hate turns me into someone I don’t want to be. That’s scary—I don’t want to be this person. I don’t know this person.
You know, I still feel alone without you.
I’m always alone now.
Miss you.
Love,
Lucia M.
He folded the second letter up, and stuffed it back into its home. The third letter had been sent after the first had finally come back with that Return to Sender stamp on it. It was short, too, but angry. The fourth was the same, and then the fifth, too. Yet, each time, in between her anger and confusion over her letters being sent back, she kept telling him the same things.
I miss you.
I love you.
I’m sorry.
I’m not me without you.
Renzo was about halfway through the stack of letters when his hotel phone started ringing—he already knew who it was going to be before he picked it up. Rose was the only person he had given it to, and since he was still in New York, he’d decided to let his sister know she could keep calling it, if she wanted.
With a letter in his hand, he leaned over and picked up the call. Balancing the phone between his ear and shoulder as he read through the letter, Renzo said the first thing that came to his mind because he needed to tell someone. Who better than his sister?
“She wrote me letters.”
Sure enough, it was his sister.
“Who did?” Rose asked.
“Lucia,” Renzo murmured, thumbing through the first letter that had been more than a single page. It wasn’t as angry as the last couple, and she’d purposely written that in the first couple of lines. That she wanted to just … talk, and update him on her life with school, and everything else. “She wrote me letters that I never got—they all went back to her unopened. I never saw them, Rose.”
“How many?”
“Twenty-two.”
Rose made a noise under her breath. “Ouch.”
“I don’t know what to do. I mean, I didn’t get them. And it’s obviously something that hurt her a lot, so what—”
“You write her back,” Rose said instantly, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
Renzo let out a quiet laugh. “Rose, I don’t think that’s what she intended by giving them to me.”
“Why not? That’s obviously what she wanted when she first sent them. That’s the point of writing someone a letter, Ren. They will then write you back. So, they might be a little late getting to her—who cares?”
How simple that seemed.
Renzo didn’t know if it would be.
“Oh, and I am having dinner next week,” Rose said, “that’s why I called. I want you to come, and you better be here for it. As long as you are in this city, I expect you to show up.”
Okay.
His sister wasn’t fucking around.
“And what about Diego?” Renzo asked.
Because he still hadn’t seen his brother since being back in New York. Rose was keeping that boy protected—as Renzo would want her to, but that wasn’t the point. It was the fact that, in a way, she was keeping him protected from him.
That burned.
A little.
“Well, I’m not telling Diego anything,” Rose said. “I don’t want him to get his hopes up and then have them shattered again. So, don’t fuck this up, Ren. I have to be the person who looks out for him now, you know? That means I stop things that hurt him—don’t be something that hurts him again.”
Then, Rose added, “And write her back.”
His sister hung up the phone.
Renzo wasn’t surprised.
• • •
The man who walked into the darkened restaurant didn’t notice Renzo sitting in the corner. He’d perched himself in the back of a booth, and used the table to rest his foot a little higher than the rest of his body.
Lazy, sure, but fuck it.
In fact, the man walked halfway across the floor and was heading toward a back hallway where the sounds of keys clicking on a keyboard continued to tap away. Like it had for the last half of an hour since Renzo broke into the business, and found himself a place to sit while he waited for Johnathan Marcello to show up.
As he always did.
Seemed the man liked to end his wife’s night where she worked by coming to get her, and taking her home.
Fucking sweet.
“John,” Renzo said.
He took great satisfaction in the way John’s back stiffened at the sound of Renzo’s voice. Maybe the man had meant to spin slowly to face Renzo, but it was fast. He didn’t miss the shock in John’s eyes, either, even if he was quick to hide it.
