by Bethany-Kris
“Are you sure?” Karen asked. “Nothing’s changed?”
Dino passed Karen a look before he reached out and snagged her by the wrist, drawing her closer into his side. “You’re worrying about nothing. Enjoy the night out. You don’t get to do that much, Karen.”
Fine.
That was true enough.
It still didn’t settle her concerns.
Again, as much as she liked being close to Dino, as much as she enjoyed being normal with Dino and acting like the couple they were, it was all a little strange. They didn’t go out in public together. They weren’t seen even in the same vicinity together.
And for good reason.
Sure, he had been extra careful that night, it seemed, making sure no one was following him, showing up in a rental car, and taking the long way to the Pier, which actually just meant he drove aimlessly to make sure no one was following him.
He’d still been careful.
But she had to wonder …
“What if someone sees us?” Karen asked quietly.
Dino kissed the top of her head. “Not worried about it.”
His flippant reply was clearly meant to placate her, but she wasn’t sure he was telling her the truth.
“I wanted to do something with you two tonight,” Dino said quietly, drawing Karen’s attention back to him. “Can’t I do that?”
“You’ve never done it before.”
Dino smiled. “Not for lack of wanting to, Karen.”
Oh.
“Besides,” he added, “a lot of people I know are distracted by a very important man’s birthday party tonight, and I needed a break. Something other than holing myself up in an apartment with you and Junior. This is good, right?”
“It’s great,” Karen said.
She still worried.
She wanted normal.
Of course, she did.
But she didn’t want to be scared of it, either.
Soon, the food was ready, their son’s attention was snagged by a waiting hotdog, and Karen decided to let her worries go as much as she could.
Dino wanted them to have a good night, to have some fun together.
She wasn’t going to spoil that with nonsense.
“Oh, my God,” Karen mumbled when Dino sat the tiny boxes of take-out in front of her on the coffee table. “Chinese, too—you’re a life saver.”
He dropped a quick kiss to the very top of her head, lingering there for a while as she opened the first container to find chow mein noodles inside.
Her very favorite.
“You said you were having a bad day,” he murmured.
Karen shrugged. “Busy day.”
He dropped to the couch beside her, grabbing his own container and opening it up. Chopsticks in hand, Dino dug in while Karen ate happily beside him.
“Tell me about it,” Dino said.
Karen sighed. “Client after client at the studio.”
“You like it there, don’t you?”
“Love it. I was lucky to get the job. Some days are just harder than others. You don’t get to pick and choose your clients most of the time, unless someone specifically asks for you. The boss kind of shoved a harder-to-deal-with mother on me, and yeah.”
Dino grunted under his breath. “Shitty.”
“I did okay.”
“That all?”
“No, Junior bit someone at daycare. They told me if he keeps that up, he’ll lose his spot.”
Dino’s brow lifted as he looked over to Karen, a million and one questions in his eyes. “Really?”
“Which part do you find hard to believe—the biting, or the kicking him out?”
“The kicking him out bit.”
Yeah, Karen found that hard to believe, too.
Their son didn’t bite people every chance he got, unless he was put under stressful situations or someone tried to hold him still, and he really did prefer to play alone, rather than with other children. She had a sneaking suspicion that the daycare was attempting to get Junior in situations where he needed to play more with other children. She understood why. It was good for his developmental skills, and team building, she supposed.
Still, the toddler likely wasn’t having it.
“I just apologized,” Karen said lamely.
“For what? You can’t control where his teeth go.”
“Apparently, I am supposed to.”
Dino scoffed. “That’s fucking stupid.”
“I thought so.”
“Listen, if they kick him out, we’ll figure something else out,” Dino said.
Karen’s chopstick froze on the way to her mouth, and she looked over at Dino. “Oh, will you be calling around to local daycares for me to get him a spot last minute?”
Dino sat his container of food down. “Karen.”
“Well?”
“Come on.”
She scowled at her food, knowing none of this was really Dino’s fault, but her stress was manifesting outwardly and he was the closest person for her to take her anger out on. He didn’t deserve it, as far as that went, but she didn’t know how else to deal.
“Sorry,” Karen said quietly.
In a flash, Dino had taken her food from her, sat it aside, and then he pulled her into his lap without a word. There, the stress seemed to wash away, and she was okay.
“I try to help all the time,” Dino said, resting his chin on the top of her head.
He wasn’t lying.
He did help, when Karen would let him.
She rarely took money from him, and he offered that a lot. He often came over at the drop of a hat when she asked him to, just because she needed a break. And then there were lots of nights like this one where she hadn’t eaten, she’d been stressed out to the max, and he’d showed up just because he heard the exhaustion in her voice over a phone call.
“You do help,” Karen said. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“I’d like to help more,” Dino admitted.
“Giving me money—”
“Not you, the baby.”
Karen rolled her eyes. “It’s the same thing, because you mean for me to control the cash.”
Dino shrugged. “For the baby.”
“You’re not being sneaky enough about this. I can see right through it.”
“Fine,” Dino said heavily. “But it’s right there. All you have to do is ask.”
Not yet.
“He understands he is not allowed to bite people,” she said to herself.
“Maybe he’s picking up on your stress lately, too.”
That was a good point.
Then, Dino added just as quickly, “Why don’t you … I don’t know, take some time off, get away with him for a bit?”
He’d offered the suggestion rather carefully, but it felt laced with something Karen couldn’t quite put her finger on.
“What do you mean?” Karen asked.
Dino made a dismissive sound, almost as if to make it seem like it wasn’t a big deal when he said, “You know, use some of your vacation time for whatever. Say it’s an emergency, they won’t know the difference. Hell, the cabin is an hour and a half away, out in the middle of nowhere, and private. You could stay there for a while even. Get away from the world.”
That sounded wonderful, actually.
It was probably exactly what she and the baby needed.
Still, something in Dino’s voice was just … off.
She sat up in his lap, and pushed off him to then sit back on her own side of the couch. Dino watched her from the side, and by the look on his face, Karen knew she had been right.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
A month ago, they had gone to the carnival, and had a great night out with their son. Sure, summer was here, and the cabin would be a great way to spend it with her son, but she didn’t think that was what Dino was trying to get her to do.
Something just told her to look deeper.
Something inside demanded she ask more question
s.
Dino met her gaze, never dropping it as he said, “Everything is fine.”
“Here, sure, but tell me about there.”
There was the Outfit.
There was his other life.
There was people he rarely talked about.
There was a strange and unknown place to her.
A tic worked in Dino’s jaw, an action Karen recognized as his anxiety. He had very few tells, but that was absolutely one of them.
“Dino,” Karen pressed.
“If I wanted to send you away for a while, just to be safe, would you do it for me, no questions asked?”
She would.
“I’d want a reason,” Karen said.
Dino nodded once. “I’m not going back to prison.”
“You keep saying that—the media coverage on your case thinks differently.”
He didn’t look like he particularly cared.
“I’m not going back there,” he said firmly. “But I also can’t just leave, either. Things need to be right—good—for the people I might have to leave behind.”
Karen blinked. “Leave?”
“Not you,” he murmured.
“Leave,” she repeated, not posing it as a question that time.
“Not J, either.”
“Leave where?”
Dino didn’t answer that one. “Would you go for me if I asked you to?”
“How long?”
“A couple months.”
“I only have a couple of weeks of vacation to use. I’ll lose my job.”
Dino reached for his blazer he’d left hanging over the back of the couch, and pulled out a manila envelope from the inner pocket. The last time she had seen a package like that, it had been bursting with money.
“Dino …”
“Junior always comes first, right?” Dino asked. “You don’t need to work, and you don’t have to like it, but you do need to use this and whatever else I give. It’s for him, it’s not for you.”
Fuck.
He had her there.
And he knew it.
“What’s going to happen, Dino, that you need to send us away?” Karen dared to ask.
“I’m not entirely sure yet.”
For some reason, maybe it was because of the tenor his voice took on, she believed him.
Dino
IT was such a warm May day that Dino wanted to enjoy it outside, but the chilly attitude of his company was making the nice weather less than pleasant.
“If you’re going to sit there and glare at me all goddamn day, go find something else to do, little one,” Dino muttered.
Lily, his younger sister, continued to glower at him from her position on the porch bench. Dino tried to act like her mood wasn’t bothering him all that much by resting further into his reclining lawn chair and staring up at the near cloudless sky.
His sister was due her anger.
He wouldn’t deny that.
After all, it had been him who demanded two months ago, that she come home from traveling Europe without so much as an explanation. And with a threat to track her down himself if needed to boot. She hadn’t appreciated that very much.
Dino did what he had to.
Well, what he was going to be doing.
Soon.
It was all to her best interests, but he knew explaining it all to Lily would be a waste of his time. She was too stubborn—too bitter towards him, and the entire Outfit as a whole—to really listen to what he would try and tell her.
So he wasn’t going to try at all.
“You want to grab some grub?” Dino asked. “Take-out for supper, maybe?”
Lily stayed silent.
So was her way, it seemed.
Since she had arrived home the week before, all she ever did was glare at him, refuse to speak, and if she did talk to him, it was almost always to call him a bastard.
“Should save that energy and anger up,” Dino said under his breath.
Apparently, Lily had heard him. “Why?”
“You’re going to need it soon, little one.”
More than she knew …
Damian Rossi was an interesting man—a dangerous man, to be sure, but interesting nonetheless. His history with Dino had been long, and quite far-reaching, if he were honest.
It started when they were just kids.
Well, Damian had been a kid.
Dino had been an older teenager at the time.
Damian struck up a friendship with Theo all those years ago that had seemed to weather the storms of life that was the Outfit and mafia. As the boys had grown into men, Damian had moved more towards the Rossi side of the Outfit, while Theo stayed firmly stuck in the DeLuca side. Still, they remained friends.
As kids, they’d chummed around a lot. Theo, Damian, and Lily—because she was never far behind her older brother after their parents’ murder, which meant she was often shoved in the friends’ messes, too.
Neither boy seemed to mind.
Now, as an Outfit man, Damian was … well, as Dino had said before, dangerous.
Working as a personal hitman for the boss, and doing work on his cousin, Tommas’, crew, Damian had certainly earned his spot. But if Dino knew anything about the man that he had learned over the years, it was that one thing never changed about Damian’s personality.
The man liked the shadows.
He liked being unknown—unseen.
They called him Ghost for a reason, and it was a good one.
Over the years, Dino had taken inventory of the people around him, of the many facets of life inside each of the four Outfit families. There were certainly personality traits of each person that might be considered a weakness, or even a strength, depending on how a person looked at it.
Dino only looked at what he could use.
Ben had taught him that in his many lessons.
Damian was someone Dino could use for more than one reason.
“You’re going to marry my sister,” Dino said.
Across his desk, Damian’s head snapped up from the file of information he was overlooking that had as many details about Lily DeLuca and her life as Dino could put together on his sister. She was going to hate him for this; she would fight him tooth and fucking nail on it, but what was done, would be done.
Men in the Outfit got to make those plays and calls for the women.
Nobody said it was fair.
Nobody said it was nice.
Nobody had to fucking like it.
But God knew if Dino didn’t do this for his sister—give her somebody he knew had history with her, someone she wouldn’t be able to hate once she got to know him, and somebody who was capable of caring for her and keeping her safe—Jesus, who would be left to do it?
Ben, probably.
Their uncle was already looking for someone to marry her off to since she arrived back in Chicago. That was just how Ben made his moves in the Outfit, by manipulating those he could, and using the backs of others to get where he needed to be.
Isn’t that what you’re about to do, too?
Dino ignored his inner voice.
His was for the betterment of many people, not only himself.
Ben never thought of others when he made moves in a game he never really understood how to play fairly.
“What?” Damian asked.
“You owe me.”
A life for a life—that was how the mafia worked.
Damian had owed his life to Dino for a long time, ever since a younger Damian had gotten himself into some trouble that Dino stepped in on to save the guy’s ass. He took the rap for Damian killing a made man, got the guy out of it, and he went on to do half decent things with his mafia career.
“It’s time to pay up,” Dino added.
And by that, he meant Damian would pay up by marrying Lily.
By keeping her safe.
By making her happy.
By doing whatever he needed to do so that she had whatever she needed.
“It seem
s pretty simple, doesn’t it?” Dino said. “And you know, with all the attention from the boss on you lately, you should be careful.”
Dino wasn’t the type to manipulate others—he didn’t like to play on the fears of men around him because his whole life had been nothing but that, and it wasn’t fair to play that game with people when they didn’t know they too were playing it.
He didn’t have a choice here.
“Seems the boss has really taken a liking to you,” Dino said, leaning forward. “Some people don’t like that—Ben, Riley, the usual. You know what happens in the Outfit when a man is going somewhere that another man doesn’t want him to go, don’t you?”
Damian didn’t blink, his features cold and schooled. “I know—stop the man by whatever means necessary.”
“Seems you have a lot to think about.”
Yeah, over the years, he’d watched people like Damian Rossi.
He learned things about them. Things he could use if he ever needed to.
That time had finally come.
Damian didn’t like attention, and he liked being free to do his own thing, even if that freedom came at a cost where others lost for him to win. He didn’t like others making moves on his life that would put him in a position where he didn’t want to be, and he didn’t mind culling people who spoke out against him.
A few choice words, a bit of manipulation on Dino’s part, and he could already see that Damian wasn’t about to let the men around him make choices on his future within the Outfit without his say so.
“I don’t care what you do about it, really,” Dino said, “as long as your end of the bargain with me regarding Lily and the marriage is kept.”
Damian didn’t reply.
Dino didn’t really need him to.
What was done, was already done.
Just like that.
So easy.
“Except, of course, Ben,” Dino added after a moment. “You see, in order to keep Lily safe, Ben needs to go. He’ll be vocal about his dislike of you, and of this whole thing, really. And as it is, he already doesn’t like you very much because the boss is fond of you. Either I can worry about that, or you can, Damian.”
“And what about the people who will look to retaliate for Ben?” Damian asked.
Dino shrugged. “Deal with it, I suppose.”
“You make it sound easy.”