Page 44 of Contempt

The man liked his respect, Renzo noticed. He didn’t open his own doors, and hell, he wouldn’t even clear an empty dish away from himself lest it seem like he was a servant. The man never left his hotel unless he was impeccably dressed, and usually, with a man or two following behind. Always one, at the very least.

Christian went nowhere alone.

Renzo was still trying to figure out why he was following this fucker. If he went by the information provided to him in the file—which, honestly, didn’t mean much when M could easily not include relevant details about Christian—then it might have something to do with Christian’s involvement in the drug trafficking trade. Maybe this Italian was encroaching on M’s business in a way, but he needed to know it for sure before he acted on it.

It could be a lot of things.

None of them mattered right now.

Renzo had to move as Christian was now standing on the side of the road, and looked as though he was going to head for that club. Business or pleasure? He didn’t know, but it seemed like he was going to get to see the inside of a club for the first time in God knew how long.

Thankfully, Christian hadn’t noticed Renzo tailing him for the week he’d been in New York, but that was kind of the point. He suspected the man regularly had paranoia about being followed anyway, so he took extra precautions when it came to the Italian just to be safe.

Like now.

Renzo waited until Christian had crossed the street with his driver, and then disappeared into the club before he too got out of his vehicle. There was no way he was going to get past the idiot at the front manning the doors and deciding who could get in or out of the business. Instead, he slipped into an alleyway beside the club, and looked for … there it was.

An exit door.

And it had a lock on the outside, too.

A pickable lock.

Renzo grinned, bent down a little, and pulled the tool from the back of his jeans that had served him well over the years. Even before he was brought into The League, he’d been damn good at picking a lock. It got him out of some tough situations.

This was cake.

Before long, Renzo was standing in the middle of the club’s dance floor. In the swell of moving people, he was able to blend in better as he searched the tables and booths for Christian. Apparently, he had been looking in the wrong place.

Renzo found the man in the VIP section.

Maybe that wasn’t surprising.

But the fact he was sitting across the table from Johnathan Marcello certainly was fucking surprising, and confusing.

It had been years since Renzo last laid eyes on Lucia’s older brother. The last time, the man had been dragging her out of an apartment in San Francisco after letting his men beat the shit out of Renzo. He might have been pissed to see John again after all this time, if not for the fact that Renzo was starting to feel like something wasn’t right here.

Christian had been in Cali, too.

Near Lucia.

And here he was in New York, talking to her brother?

What was going on?

Nothing good, he suspected.

• • •

“John, you still working that Capo job for your family, or have you gotten yourself something better since the last time we met up?”

Johnathan Marcello’s head snapped up at the sound of Renzo’s voice. Renzo grinned, and stepped out of the alleyway, the cigarette on his lips bouncing with his chuckles. The Marcello man’s gaze landed on him, and for a second, he looked as though he didn’t believe what he was seeing.

He’d just stepped out of his club—yeah, Renzo heard someone talking; the place was John’s—about thirty minutes after Christian left. He’d managed to get close enough to their meeting that he heard some of the details. Drugs, imports … Lucia came up once, which made his blood boil because apparently Christian had taken a liking to her.

John didn’t seem to notice.

Renzo did.