Redemption - Garrett Leigh Page 0,62

you know how he is, I didn’t have a choice.”

There was nothing Luis didn’t understand about that. It was his entire life wrapped up in one sentence. But Dante had bled him dry. He had nothing left for Asa. He slammed him against the railings again. “I don’t give a fuck why you suck my brother’s dick, metaphorical or otherwise, just stay the hell out of my way.”

He let Asa go and strode down the corridor until he came to the stairs. Martell stepped onto the landing. He shot Luis major side-eye. Luis ignored him and jogged down the stairs and out of the building. Let Martell chase him down and stick a knife between his ribs. Luis wouldn’t hear him coming, and he didn’t care. Heaviness dragged in his gut. His legs slowed.

Fuck, I really don’t.

With shaking hands, he pulled the cash Dante had given from his pocket and dumped it in a nearby bin, but even without it burning a hole in his pocket, it still followed him as he walked away. The fresh air of the outside world became a suffocating cloud of invisible smoke. Acrid and thick, it filled his throat, closing it off like he was breathing through a straw of an orange Capri-Sun, the only thing him and Dante had ever drunk until they’d figured out how to break into Ma’s gin cabinet.

Luis’s lungs heaved. He was a mile away from the bedsit, and his legs weren’t working.

The cafe was around the next corner. The temptation to stumble back into Paolo’s life was so strong Luis could taste it, but the memory of Dante’s leer won out. Staying away from Paolo was the only way. Perhaps one day, after—

No. Don’t you get it? You never fit with his life in the first place. He deserves better than you. Luis thought of Nonna pottering around her room at the nursing home with no clue half the time who Paolo was. Of Toni scowling at any soul who dared to come near him, saving his good humour for Paolo and Luis. Fuck, they all do.

Somehow, Luis made it home. The exterior door had been busted down a few nights before—a police raid on the ganja dude upstairs—and was still wide open. Luis ducked into the house and hurried to his own front door. The bedsit was the same spartan piece of shit it had been since he’d moved in, but without Paolo keeping him warm, the barren walls had become his only sanctuary.

He shut the door behind him and leant against it, closing his eyes. The battered wood was warm to his numb skin. Paolo’s storage-heater sorcery had worked, and the bedsit was no longer as cold as it was outside.

Neither was Luis’s heart. Or his nerves as they jangled and buzzed, alive with a fear that had nothing to do with the imminent drugs run.

He pushed off the door and drifted to the kitchen. His legs still felt weak, and his hands still shook. You need to eat. He opened the cupboard and stared, unseeing, at the handful of provisions leftover from the last time he’d shopped. When was that? Damn, he had no idea. And he wasn’t hungry. Hadn’t been since the last meal he’d shared with Paolo.

But he had to eat. Tomorrow he’d need his wits about him, not to be on his knees with low blood sugar.

He opened a can of spaghetti hoops and emptied it into his only saucepan. The hob was slow to heat. Lights off, Luis gripped the counter and let his eyes fall closed again, wondering if it was possible to fall asleep standing up. If, perhaps, after days of tossing and turning in his lumpy bed, this was the answer, a slow, hypnotic sway over a tin of Heinz.

The metallic snap of the letterbox roused him. Startled, he opened his eyes to find the carby orange gloop in the saucepan was boiling. He turned it off and ventured into the hallway. An envelope was on the floor by the front door.

He picked it up and turned it over. His name was scrawled on one side, and it was sealed shut with thick brown parcel tape. Jesus fucking Christ, please tell me that bellend hasn’t dropped the package off here . . .

But the thought tailed off as Luis looked closer at his scribbled name. At the exaggerated capital letters and barely legible lowercase. He knew that handwriting. He’d spent the last two months staring at it, deciphering