Page 97 of Contempt

Fuck.

It was starting to fall together.

Renzo was beginning to feel like an idiot.

“Hey, are you listening to me?” Cree asked.

Renzo cleared his throat. “How much more time is on my contract, Cree?”

The man on the other end of the phone went quiet. “A few weeks, Ren.”

Right.

A few weeks.

There was absolutely no way that The League, or M, didn’t know Renzo had been around Lucia. It was their one line this whole time—the one thing they didn’t allow him to even test with them. They made sure of that.

And yet, here he had been … for quite a while, in New York, with her. And her family. Publicly, on more than one occasion.

It was funny.

Renzo had forgot about it. He’d stopped worrying about being with her when he wasn’t supposed to be because no one had stepped in to tell him to stop.

He had a fucking chip in his arm, tracking him. He had a phone that kept track of him, too. It probably recorded his conversations on a regular basis, for all he knew. That would make sense, considering other things that didn’t matter right now.

The League knew where he was staying.

They probably knew where Lucia was staying.

And they didn’t know he was with her?

That he had been with her?

Renzo called bullshit.

Or … someone, like his boss, no longer cared about seeing the contract out with all of those previous rules attached because Renzo needed to be close to Lucia now. He needed to keep an eye on her … and his boss didn’t care, because his boss … M, was Lucia’s father.

Lucian won the bid on Renzo.

Lucian was M.

It was Lucian.

“So, no update for—”

“No update,” Renzo said.

Because he’d give it himself.

He hung up the phone before Cree could reply.

• • •

Renzo wasn’t sure if it was just circumstance, but Lucian’s final chemo treatment also fell on the same day that the Marcellos intended to meet with Christian to begin business negotiations. Or at least, Johnathan and Andino Marcello’s side of things for the business—their people, and men.

“There’s usually more people here with him,” Lucia said as she dropped her stuff in the family room just down the hall from her father’s room. “It’s quiet today. I thought more people would—”

“Attention might be elsewhere,” Renzo said.