Page 6 of Waste of Worth

So … Dino made another choice.

Nearly a year later, to the very day he’d moved out, his parents were murdered in that quaint little Melrose Park home. His father, shot in the face as he sat at the kitchen table, and his mother in the back of the head as she ran for the front door.

It’d been a fucking bloodbath.

Dino had only seen the aftermath, weeks later when the blood on the walls was dried and the red puddles on the yellow-tiled floor had turned to crusted stains. He’d gone back in the house to get things of his and his siblings’—memories for them when they were older and they wouldn’t be able to remember their mother and father all too well.

The police hadn’t cleaned it up.

It wasn’t their job, apparently.

Despite how he’d left the relationship with his parents, strained and distant, he still loved them. The last thing he wanted was for the memories that his siblings had to be turned into something foul.

The whispers and rumors had begun damn near instantly.

Joseph was a rat, feeding police with inside information as to their business and the inner workings of the Chicago mob like he had every right. He’d gotten what he deserved.

Dino never argued his father’s fate—never once spoke against the people who said Joseph earned the punishment that put him in the ground. And despite learning that it was Joseph’s own brother to pull the trigger—Ben, that was—Dino’s only desire was to protect his siblings from a similar fate.

Traitors ate bullets.

Simple as that.

But that didn’t mean he liked it.

Or that it didn’t fill him with rage every time he considered his mother being caught up in it all.

Valerie had been an innocent, stuck in a mess of her husband’s making, a man she loved, yes, but not one she was able to protect. Like most mafia wives, she was born into the lifestyle with a father and grandfather who had been gangsters, and she married a man just like them because that was what she had been taught to do. She raised her family from home, never working or asking for more than what her husband provided because women of the mafia were expected not to complain if they wanted to keep their husbands at home, in their bed and their place.

Dino remembered his mother being sweet—loving her husband and her family.

She only died that night because she’d opted to stay in with Joseph, instead of taking one of her very infrequent ladies’ nights that had been pre-planned.

Sighing, Dino wished all of this past shit was easier for him to deal with, but it wasn’t. It was these choices, both those he made himself and those made by his father, that led him to the hell that was Ben DeLuca.

Maybe he hated the dead man a little for it.

Not his mother, though.

Never her.

Bending down in front of the gravestone, Dino pulled the pristine white handkerchief from his suit pocket, and began wiping the bits of dirt and blades of grass from the front of the shiny marker. He read his mother’s name, and took in the dates she had lived and died.

He always tried to stop by whenever Sunday rolled around.

Guilt was a silent killer.

Dino couldn’t help but wonder if he had stayed, if he had done what his mother and father wanted all those years ago, would she have been spared? Would she have been home, or gone like she was supposed to be?

Would he have died, too?

She was the innocent one.

He was filthy like his father.

Why did those who deserved angel wings earn them far faster than those who didn’t?

“Lily’s gone to Europe,” Dino said to the gravestone, tucking the cloth back into his pocket. “She was pretty determined to go, Ma, and I didn’t want her around here more than she needed to be. I love her—she needs to be happy, right?”