Page 19 of Waste of Worth

So he made sure not to look back at her as he left the office.

It was for the best, he told himself.

He couldn’t start something with someone.

It would only end in pain.

Nighttime was the worst for Dino.

The darkness brought back rushes of memories he would rather forget in the form of nightmares that he couldn’t escape.

He did well in the day, for the most part, to ignore his simmering anxiety and the pressure constantly building in his chest. He put on a good act with his suits hiding scars and his sunglasses hiding tired, worn eyes.

But at night, when he was alone, there was no way to hide.

His way to combat the need to sleep was to work.

Constant movement helped. So did working out, though sometimes that worked against him and made him even more tired.

Dino could spend hours cleaning guns, or his apartment, and he’d once spent an entire night reorganizing his collection of old books, simply because he’d expended his effort on every other thing and there was nothing else to do.

He’d become a pro at ignoring sleep at night.

Sleeping in the day was slightly easier, and he was less likely to dream when he took a quick hour-long nap on an uncomfortable couch or in the driver’s seat of his car.

Sometimes, though, his days were too busy and he just couldn’t get those hour or two naps in between whatever he had to do.

Those were the worst.

One day led into two, and then three.

The longest he’d gone without sleep was four and a half days.

The night that followed had, quite literally, left him stuck in nightmares he couldn’t wake from for hours.

It was in those nightmares that he relived pain.

Beatings.

Bleeding.

Dark basements.

Damp floors.

Vomit.

Pain.

Ben DeLuca had made it his mission to mold his nephews into the creatures he wanted them to be—into perfect, unfeeling soldiers he could use—after they were left orphans with no parents. The first time it happened was on the night Ben had killed Dino’s parents, and that beating left him damn near dead, and then recovering for a week in the locked basement of one of Ben’s many shoddy, abandoned rental properties.

It didn’t stop with just one.

No, at any slight, at even the smallest of offense to Ben’s mind, a punishment would follow. If for any reason, Dino didn’t do what his uncle wanted, if he didn’t behave the way Ben deemed he should or anything of a similar sort, he would quickly find himself bleeding and healing in a place where his pleads for help couldn’t—or wouldn’t—be heard.

Sometimes Dino had fought back, but it was only after Ben’s awful attention fell more prominently to a young Theo, did he stop.

He never wanted his brother to experience the hell he did where their uncle was concerned.