Page 55 of Waste of Worth

Dino waited her out, and thankfully, she didn’t make him wait very long.

“Seems Dino DeLuca is a pretty powerful name in Chicago,” she said quietly.

Dino chose his words carefully, knowing they mattered to her. “DeLuca, not me.”

“Is it really that different?”

“I think so,” he said honestly.

“I looked you up.”

That did surprise Dino.

Especially the way she had said it so offhandedly, like it didn’t even make a difference to her.

“Find anything interesting?”

Karen smiled, but it fell from her face just as fast. “A lot from when you were younger.”

Dino cleared his throat, leaning against the wall but making sure to keep pressure of his bruised side and injured ribs. It would heal in time—it always did. “A lot more happened to the DeLucas when I was a teenager.”

“Like your mother and father being killed?”

“Like that,” he agreed. “My father turned informant for the cops. I thought it was because he wanted a better life—a clean life.”

Karen turned slightly in the chair, giving him a better view of her profile. “Away from the … mob?”

She said ‘mob’ as though it were a foreign word she didn’t understand.

Dino supposed she probably didn’t.

Those on the outside looking in really couldn’t begin to understand what the mafia was really like. They could only guess and draw their own conclusions based on the information given in the media, on the Internet, or wherever else they could find it.

It was not the same as living it.

It was not the same as being inside the mob.

“That’s what I thought,” Dino said, “but it was after he was dead that I realized he wanted to keep the rest of us away from it all. If only because he was just one man in a sea of men who cared nothing for the rest of them, and he didn’t want us to get lost in it like he had.”

“You don’t sound sure.”

Dino shrugged, though the action hurt a great deal to do it. “I’d got myself mixed up in family business pretty young—my dad was one of the few that tried pushing me away. It took me a decade after his death to realize he was just pushing me away from the monsters he grew up with. By that time, it was already too late.”

He’d always assumed his father just didn’t want him in the Outfit at all. It was only after an argument with Ben did Dino learn that his uncle’s treatment of his family was not limited to the DeLuca siblings. Ben and Joseph had suffered the same handling and manipulation from their own father growing up, and then when he died, Ben had turned his anger on his younger brother.

Dino’s father was probably trying to keep his sons safe from it all.

And when his plans failed, he’d gone to the officials, looking for another way out.

Not for him—for his boys.

It all ended rather terribly, given Ben pulled the trigger for the bullet that put Joseph in the ground, and he was left with the little people Joseph was trying to protect.

Funny how that worked.

“Why didn’t you tell me about it?” Karen asked, drawing Dino from his thoughts.

“There’s nothing to tell.”