Page 65 of Contempt

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.”