Page 85 of Harbor

He let Diego go, then. It wasn’t like he felt steady enough to get to his feet, but he did just that. He made it all of two steps across the room when three guns came out, racked back, aimed at him, and ready to fire. One from John, and two from the other men. But if a gun was going to be the thing that took Lucia away from him, he was going to have to be dead on the ground with a fucking bullet in his head.

Simple as that.

Renzo took one more step.

“Move again, and I’ll blow your fucking brains out,” John murmured coldly.

“John,” Lucia whispered. “Please …”

“You’re going home.”

“I don’t want—”

John’s gaze snapped back to Renzo. “One more fucking step, Renzo. Take it, I dare you.”

“John!” Lucia tried to pull away from her brother, but it was useless. He had one hold on her, and another firmly on the gun that Renzo was staring down. “Let me go right now.”

The man never looked away from Renzo. It was like Lucia’s fight and defiance didn’t affect him at all. He was bigger than her; stronger, too. Her frustration was his annoyance.

“You had a good run,” John told him, “but it’s done now. You got me?”

Renzo’s jaw clenched.

How the fuck was he going to get Lucia away—

He didn’t even get to finish his thought process. The next crack to his head sent him to the floor again, but this time, his vision blacked out altogether. He was so busy staring at John and the love of his life that was too far away from him that he forgot to be mindful of the other two men who had moved to either side of him. He was still dealing with that blinding rage instead of trying to be smart.

As he drifted out of consciousness, he heard Lucia screaming. Diego was crying.

He blacked out again. The second time he almost came to, Diego was asking someone to help. And he heard the owner of the place—Todd—say he was calling the cops. The third time, he heard sirens. Renzo knew what that meant.

It was all over, now.

There would be no coming back from this.

Ever.

SEVENTEEN

“I didn’t want to do this to you, you know,” John said.

Lucia continued staring out the port window of the private jet. She heard her brother, of course, but she just didn’t care to listen. Therein was the difference. Not that John seemed to understand or anything. He seemed perfectly fine with chatting like she was talking back, even though she clearly wasn’t.

In fact, she wasn’t even pretending to give a fuck what her brother was telling her. She wished he would get the hint, and fuck off. The last several hours of her life had been … traumatic, to say the least. Nothing she had done with Renzo … none of the things they experienced together, including killing Tuck, came close to the trauma of the last few hours. She was never going to forget the sight of Renzo bleeding and broken with his little brother crawling on top of him as he tried to wake him up while Lucia was dragged away.

She couldn’t help.

All she could do was scream, cry, and fight.

It wasn’t enough.

Not to help him.

So yeah. Fuck John if he thought Lucia was going to entertain his conversation and apologies. Like they were supposed to mean something to her? They didn’t.

Not at all.

“You didn’t think after the mess you all left behind, that no one would come looking for you, did you?” her brother asked. “Dad wasn’t going to let the police catch up to you first, Lucia. You have to understand where he was coming from. At first, he was just worried about you and making sure you were safe. But then we started to find messes that we had to try and clean everywhere you two went. The robbery—then Vegas. Stolen cars. The hotel. If we could find the problems, then you could bet the police were going to catch on, too. They already started to. You gotta understand where he’s—”