Page 22 of Contempt

Like that fucking bothered Renzo, now.

It didn’t.

Mostly, he tried to keep his tattoos where people couldn’t see them—the design up the back of his neck, double guns pointed down, with two doves holding a ribbon that wrapped a heart, was the first one where he hadn’t done that. And Dare had not been impressed, clearly. He had one sleeve done on one arm, and his other was entirely bare. Besides his back, he kept his tattoos mostly to one side of his body.

“It looked kind of stupid with a big spot there,” Renzo pointed out.

Dare’s gaze narrowed. “You …”

He didn’t know Dare’s real name, except that Dare wasn’t it. That was about all he was told. They all called the asshole Dare. A last name wasn’t even in the equation for them to know.

Turning to face the man fully, Renzo shrugged. “It’s there now, so …”

Which was the same thing he always told Dare whenever he added something new to his body without permission. They had to know when he went in for another ink session. They had a tracker in his body. He always took his phone, and he knew that fucking thing was tracked, too. They could stop him, if they wanted. They never did. That told him one thing—they either enjoyed punishing him, or they knew it would be pointless to try and stop Renzo from doing this simple thing.

A rebellious thing, sure. But it was a constant need he had since he’d been here. It never left him. He blamed them. They controlled everything about his life—sure, they loosened up a bit over the last year, letting him take trips out alone, and call his sister on occasion, but it was still an illusion. He was not making those choices because he could. He made them because they allowed him to. And this was the one way they seemed to allow him to rebel, even if he did suffer for it.

The need was never going to leave him.

Not while he was here, anyway.

Dare scowled, but shook his head. “And you still have that nose ring in, I see?”

Renzo chewed on the piece of mint gum in his mouth, unbothered by the dangerous edge to Dare’s tone. “Yeah, it’s healed now. Nice, huh?”

The gold ring in his left nostril had been another split-second decision. Not that he had any particular reason why he had it done during his second to last tattoo session, but it was in there now. Unless someone wanted to rip it out of his face, he wasn’t removing it.

Renzo could tell he was pushing Dare’s very thin patience to the limit, but that was just fine, too. He needed to do something back to this man for all the hell he put Renzo through daily. Dare, one of the main owners of The League, rivaled Cree for the biggest asshole in the building regularly.

Dare also thought Renzo was too … difficult.

Stubborn.

Wild.

Insubordinate.

The man also wasn’t wrong.

Ren just didn’t care.

God knew he had to keep a bit of pride—The League had stripped the rest of it away in different ways.

“You got a job for me, or what?” Renzo asked.

Dare’s jaw muscles tightened, but he nodded. Probably happy that they were now onto an entirely different conversation. Nobody said dealing with Renzo when he was in one of his moods was particularly easy.

Even he knew that about himself.

“Folder on the desk—black strip across the front,” Dare murmured.

Ah, great.

A black strip on the folder meant the job came directly from M. It was the only way Dare chose to differentiate from the jobs he negotiated for Renzo, and the ones that came specifically from M for him to do.

Crossing the office, Renzo picked up the folder, and flipped it open. He found the picture of a tanned-skinned man with short, black cropped hair and brown eyes attached to a sheet of details with a simple paper clip. He gave the picture about five seconds of his attention before lifting it up to read the bit of details it covered.

Christian Savino.