by Bethany-Kris
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.
Panic surrounded him.
Not his own, no … someone else’s.
He could hear her crying in the background of the blackness starting to seep into his consciousness.
It wouldn’t be long now and the abyss would be there, waiting.
It almost felt like an old friend considering how much time he’d spent with it over the course of his life.
“Dino! Oh, my God, Dino!”
That voice …
He knew that voice.
He liked that voice.
Dino thought he might have been smiling, but he quickly realized he wasn’t seeing blue tinged with black any longer, but rather, a grueling streak of red oozing down to the pavement.
Blood from his mouth, he thought.
He hated blood in his mouth.
“Dino … Here, let me get you on your back.”
Soft hands roved over his most tender spots.
He barely felt the pain at all.
Somehow, his vision cleared just enough for him to put the familiar face to that sweet voice.
Karen.
Fear stared back at him.
Confusion and pain.
This was exactly why she didn’t need to be mixed up with him.
This was exactly why she was so much better than him.
This was exactly what he didn’t want her knowing.
He should have told her he was sorry.
Instead, he said, “Don’t call the cops.”
That was more important.
For now.
“HOLY shit—he needs a hospital!”
“I’m well aware of that,” Karen snapped, her patience running thin.
Dino, drifting in and out of consciousness as he was shuffled from the ground to something else, had only caught bits and pieces of the conversation.
He didn’t think he could bring back a time from his memories when he had ever heard Karen as irritated and upset as she was in that moment. And God knew he’d pissed her off a couple of times.
“He said no cops,” Karen said quieter, “and the hospital will report the attack, which means—”
“Cops, yeah. I got it.”
Dino groaned low when he was shifted again and his back hit something soft. It should have felt good, but the abrupt movement only caused him a hellish pain in his side.
His rib was cracked or broken.
Each breath hurt.
He recognized that second voice, though.
The cook.
Dino wasn’t the jealous type, but he’d noticed that Karen talked to the guy who worked the kitchen a lot. The two were always laughing and going on like there was some secret they shared.
He didn’t own Karen, and he didn’t put titles on their strange relationship.
He didn’t have any right to tell her not to enjoy someone else’s company.
That didn’t mean he had to like it.
He certainly didn’t want her being with someone else. Not while she was with him, anyway. Well, truth be told, he didn’t want her being with someone else even if she wasn’t with him. He just wasn’t ready to deal with those feelings yet.
Although in his current situation, it wasn’t exactly like he could just say something.
Dino could feel his consciousness floating away again as the conversation turned to something far worse. Something he didn’t want Karen involved in at all.
“Is this because of his connections?” the cook asked.
“His connections?”
“Yeah—Dino’s connected, you know. Everybody knows it, we just don’t say it, Karen. You get to see enough shit when you work around Dino for long enough. People in suits, guns sitting on the table, or you overhear things. You learn not to pay attention, or forget what you do see. That’s how it works.”
“Connected?”
“I know you’re not from Chicago and all, but come on. You don’t know what that means?”
“Obviously not,” Karen said shortly. “Stop being an asshole.”
Just before the door slammed—the car door, likely—Dino heard the cook say, “The mob. He’s connected to the mob.”
Fuck.
Not that it mattered in that moment.
Dino passed out again.
The next time Dino woke up, he wasn’t as fucked up as he had been. It took him a few blinks and one failed, shitty attempt to roll over before he remembered exactly what had happened that was causing the pain to ricochet through his entire body.
Letting out a slow breath, Dino forced his weight to his one side, the one that hurt less than the other, and stood up out of the bed. Pressing the heel of his palm to his throbbing temple, helped to relieve a bit of the pain, but barely. If anything, now his face hurt because he’d touched a part of it.
Wonderful.
He looked out the window, noting the light filtering in between the shades and how it danced across the floor.
Morning light, maybe?
Dino couldn’t be sure.
Mindful of the pain in his ribs, Dino took careful steps, leaving the bedroom behind as he came out in the open of Karen’s apartment. He wasn’t surprised to be there, though he was surprised that she hadn’t caved and taken him to a hospital somewhere through the night. He’d woken up on and off throughout the night to find Karen at his side each time, her soothing voice assuring him he was fine to sleep … and safe.
Almost like she knew.
Maybe she did.
Dino leaned in the entryway of the kitchen that separated the dining space from the small living room. The apartment didn’t have hallways, and it wasn’t like it was big enough for him to hide inside.
He found Karen sitting in a large chair that seemed to swallow her whole, next to the one window in the living room that overlooked Wicker Street. She barely reacted to his presence, but he could see in the way her gaze dropped ever so slightly that she knew he was awake, and just a few feet away.
Dino counted the seconds—too many seconds—that it took for Karen to finally speak.
“Jeremy helped me to get you here. He won’t say anything, so don’t worry about it.”
The cook, she meant.
Dino’s jealousy flared to life again, and he couldn’t help himself when he asked, “Did he drive?”
“No, I did.”
“So he doesn’t know where you live?”
“What does that even matter? I needed help to get you inside. Did you want me to leave you on the damn pavement since you made it perfectly clear I wasn’t allowed to call the cops, Dino?”
“That’s not what I mean.” Dino glanced at the door, noting it was locked. Jeremy obviously wasn’t in the apartment now, and that meant good thi
ngs. “Has he been here before?”
Karen’s brow furrowed. “What?”
“Jeremy—has he been here before?”
“No.”
Dino did smile at that, pleased. “Good.”
“Are you … back up, did you just smile about that?”
Why lie?
“I did. I like that. I don’t want other men being here or with you. Why would I be happy if that were the case?”
Karen stared at him for a long while, taking him in like she was seeing him for the first time all over again. “I’m not with other men, Dino.”
“Good.”
He didn’t have to kill anyone.
That was good for all sides.
“And Jeremy is gay.”
Oh.
Well, then.
“I didn’t know that,” he said.
“Seems there’s a lot between the two of us that we don’t know,” Karen replied.
Yeah, there it was.
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.”
Karen just stared at him, sadness in her eyes and disbelief coloring her expression.
On this, he would never, ever budge.
Not with her.
“You don’t need to know,” Dino continued quieter, “because I don’t want you to.”
It was as simple as that.
She could take it or leave it.
“But are you in it?” she asked. “Is that why you disappear sometimes or you don’t call? Is that why I’ve never been to your place and you park three blocks away from my apartment?”
“Does it matter?”
“Is that why you were attacked last night?”
She was fucking relentless.
Dino gave her credit where it was due.
He still refused to budge.
Maybe someday, she would understand.
This was not a hell she needed to be introduced to.
His life, aside from her, was not normal.
She deserved normal, happy things.
The worst part?
Dino knew he couldn’t ever give Karen normal or happy.
Not entirely.
It was why he kept calling himself selfish where his involvement with her was concerned. It was yet another reminder that eventually, they were going to have to end whatever they were together because it would never go beyond the four walls of her apartment.
They couldn’t be something because he wouldn’t put her in a position to be somehow used against him, simply because he cared.
Simply because a part of him—the part that was hidden from everyone else—cared for her.
He didn’t know how that had happened.
That care thing.
It probably started that day he met her in the cemetery when she picked him out in her day simply to make him smile. Maybe it was when she admitted that even after he rejected her, and purposefully avoided seeing her, she had still gone to his mother’s grave to keep his private tradition. Or maybe it was when Karen just let him be close, or push her away, and she never really asked why.
She never told him not to come back.
She never hurt him.
She always smiled with him.
It was a great many little reasons that he could say he cared and know it was right.
That didn’t mean he was going to tell her.
What if he gave it to her, and then he had to take it away?
That seemed unfair.
Cruel, even.
“Sometimes I’m not who I seem,” Dino finally said, bringing Karen’s attention back to him for the moment. “Sometimes shit happens and it reminds me that I have no business being here with you, no matter what I’m trying to tell myself. But I’m still here, and I keep coming back. You don’t tell me to go, after all, so why wouldn’t I stay when you haven’t given me a reason to go?”
Karen didn’t reply.
Dino didn’t really need her to.
“What I said before still stands—you tell me to go, and I will.”
Karen sighed, looking back out the window with what seemed like the weight of the world resting on her shoulders. “But you’re not going to let me in beyond that, are you?”
She didn’t seem to understand him.
“Why does it matter, Karen?”
“I—”
“You’ve already got the parts that matter.”
The rest never would.
“DINO.”
He could barely move, his body feeling as though a hundred-pound weight rested on top of his back, pinning him to a floor.
A wet floor.
His fingers were able to sink into the floor beneath his body, making claw-like marks in the damp dirt.
“Dino.”
Each movement was a little more painful than the last, his chest aching
with every breath. He couldn’t remember, though he tried like hell to bring the events back, how he got in this place. This awful, dank place.
Again.
She’s just a girl, he remembered saying.
And with that single thought, it all came flying back like a wrecking ball straight to his brain, a force so destructive he had no chance to get out of the way.
She’s just a girl.
Ben had laughed, struck him again, broke another bone, and promised death.
She’s just a girl.
A girl that had caught Dino’s eye—the first girl to see there was something beyond the teenager in the corner who didn’t like to talk a lot. First it was just quiet chats in the hallways of the Trentini mansion, and then it moved on to bowls of soft ice-cream in the backseat of his car.
She had a pretty laugh, like the twinkling of wind chimes.
She wasn’t just a girl.
But because he had known Ben would never approve, because he didn’t want her to get in trouble because he liked her, Dino lied.
She’s just a girl.
She liked to drive fast, and had the speeding tickets to prove it, though her father almost always laughed them off. Nobody thought twice about the accident—no one ever thought she’d have made that turn if only …
If only she hadn’t been just something to Dino.
And that’s why he found himself there … bleeding and unable to call out, to even beg for help. That’s why his clothes were soaked in sweat and blood, and the bottom of his pants were stained with mud and vomit.
In that basement of a worn-down house Ben DeLuca grew up in, Dino could live, die, or learn.
Learn that he didn’t get to choose.
Learn that he couldn’t take what wasn’t given.
Learn that he was still weak.
“Dino!”
She died on a turnpike, going fifteen over the speed limit because her breaks had been cut, while he learned from his mistake.
She’d been the mistake.
Him caring for her had been the mistake.
Dino never got to apologize.
At least not to her.
At her funeral, he’d stood back from the mourners, separated from the crowd because he didn’t belong with them.