Page 3 of Deathless & Divided

“Wish they’d forget that name.”

“You earned it, D.”

Damian shrugged. “Whatever. That doesn’t mean I like it.”

Growing up without his parents meant Damian spent a lot of time under the feet of others. He’d been a small, scrawny kid. Instantly forgettable. The only thing that made living in his aunt and uncle’s house bearable was his cousins; Tommas, Lea, and Cara. Not that they had it any better. Laurent and Serena Rossi hadn’t been made to have kids. The four kids spent more time moving from family to family than they spent actually living with their guardians.

Yeah, easily overlooked.

A little ghost.

Damian ended up being raised by several people instead of the ones delegated to the task. When he should have been focusing on school, he’d been shoved knee-deep into the mafia and that lifestyle. Looking back on it all, he knew the reality was simple. He’d been groomed for the life. Numbed to violence and business. Accepting of the expectations and rules of their family and ways. He liked it, though.

Damian supposed that worked out well for him. Being forgettable as a kid ended up carrying over to his adulthood and his career in the Outfit. Not every man was cut out to be a killer. No one ever saw him coming. They didn’t get the chance to see him leave. Rarely was he suspected when a body showed up. He simply took the call, did the job, and moved on. No questions ever got asked.

“Figured you would be inside filling your face with food,” Damian said.

Dino eyed his large home. “Enjoying the outside while I can.”

“Trial is coming up, right?”

“A little over two months,” Dino said under his breath.

Getting in some kind of trouble was unavoidable when it came to the mafia. Dino refused to take a deal on the racketeering, laundering, and fraud charges that had been plaguing him for a couple of years. He wouldn’t plead guilty, either. The man had a damn good lawyer though, but everybody knew what he was looking at.

Twenty years max when totaled up.

Damian knew the bastards wanted the maximum and were going for it, too.

“Do you ever wonder why I liked you so damned much way back when you were a kid?” Dino asked.

Damian laughed. “No.”

“Life hasn’t treated either one of us very fairly, I suppose. I probably saw a lot of me in you when you were just a punk-ass kid following us around.”

“You’re not that much older than me.”

“Five years.”

“What is your point, Dino?”

“You never sat around waiting for your pity party, D. When your parents died, you got shuffled around from place to place. When my parents died, we had to pretend like they didn’t even exist. You just accepted the hand dealt to you; we were forced to. So, I guess I liked that about you and the fact we had a common loss helped, too. Made me sympathetic, if anything. Rarely does someone get that from me. Hell, even Theo doesn’t get a goddamn Christmas card from me anymore. You got an invite to the dinner table.”

Damian hid his surprise with a cough. Dino rarely spoke of his siblings. Even when Dino and his younger brother Theo needed to spend time in the same room together, the rival Capos acted like strangers instead of brothers. A five-year age gap separated the two men. Dino’s sister, on the other hand, had been MIA from the DeLuca family for a few years.

If Damian thought about it hard enough, he was pretty sure he could remember a blonde-haired, brown-eyed girl following Dino and Theo around way back when. Apparently, the majority of the girl’s teen years were spent at a private boarding school. Dino didn’t talk much about her. An even bigger age gap separated them, as far as Damian understood.

“Lily is your sister’s name, right?” Damian asked.

Dino cocked a brow. “Why?”

“Curious.”

“It is. She’s twenty-one, almost twenty-two. Her birthday is coming right up. She spent the last three years after she graduated gallivanting across Europe. Backpacking, mostly.”

“Kept out of trouble?”

“Yes, which I appreciate. Well, as far as I know. Lily isn’t … fond of me. She checked in once a month. It was my only demand.”