Page 51 of Waste of Worth

Jesus.

Ben was not playing around this time.

Dino waited for the inevitable to come. That blissfully beautiful moment when the blackness finally took over and he didn’t feel anything. He almost always woke up from the blackness in the same spot he’d been attacked, but sometimes he woke up in a basement if the beating had been particularly bad. If Ben wasn’t sure his victim would survive, then he liked to leave them to die in a place where the cleanup would be easy.

Still, Dino struggled with the men his uncle had sent, trying uselessly to protect his face and head through the attack, though it did very little when he was still being held in place.

Through his blurry vision, he couldn’t quite make out the faces of the men.

It wouldn’t matter, he knew.

Sometimes Ben used his men connected to the Outfit.

Sometimes he used men outside of his connection.

They were paid to do a job.

Nothing more.

Dino was that job.

The worst part was that Dino was more than capable of protecting himself in a fight or attack. He boxed as a teen, and got into more than enough street fights to know how to take care of his shit. He wasn’t a small man by any means, and he worked out more than enough to have strength, power, and a quickness about his own attack that most people couldn’t see coming until it was too late.

It all meant very little when something like this happened.

Ben knew Dino was capable.

He liked proving that when Dino couldn’t be capable, he was also weak.

Therein lied the game.

Or rather, the lesson.

Even knowing all of this didn’t help Dino to stop struggling. It didn’t stop him from fighting back against the attack, despite knowing that if he just blacked out, if the men could see they had done their job, that it would all come to an end. That was all Ben wanted to do.

Teach Dino that eventually, he would get what he wanted. That Dino would always be under Ben’s thumb in some way, either by manipulation, force, or both.

No, Dino still fought.

Held down.

Battered.

Probably swollen.

Definitely bloodied.

The men never said a word. Not even when Dino got an arm free and landed three solid hits of his own, one of which caused his knuckle to snap in the most painful way—either broken or dislocated, he wasn’t sure.

It wouldn’t be the first fucking time.

It was only when a scream echoed throughout the alleyway did the beating stop. At first, Dino wasn’t sure he’d heard the sound correctly, given that blood was rushing so hard in his ears that all he could hear was the pumping of his own heart. His damn vision was too fucked up to see properly, even when he tried looking around.

He didn’t realize the men were backing off until one last kick slammed into the left side of his rib cage and then it all … stopped.

Dino blinked up at the blue sky, his head feeling like it was swimming. Even still, he tried pushing up from the ground, but the dizziness was worse like that, and he only managed to fall back down.

Grunting out his pain at the movement, he struggled to keep his eyes open.