by Bethany-Kris
He certainly hadn’t thought of her.
Not at night when his cellmate slept.
Not during the one hour a day when he got to go outside and breathe real air.
Not when he wasted time working on stupid fucking crossword puzzles.
Karen.
The moment her name passed through his mind in a whisper, Dino felt an aching emptiness start to grow in his chest.
This was why he tried not to think of her, why he couldn’t do it.
She would be better off without him, he knew. She could start over, if that’s what was best for her, and shit, maybe she’d get the hell out of Chicago and go as far away as she could possibly get with the money he’d sent to her before his arrest had happened. She could raise his child away from the danger that he and his life posed to them.
If she were a smart woman, those were the exact things she whould do.
Dino wouldn’t blame her at all.
No, Dino tried not to think of Karen Martin at all.
Except he did.
Every damn day.
All the fucking time.
He loved her, after all.
He hoped she had done none of those things. He hoped she had figured out a way to stay, that she had used his money, and maybe—God, maybe—she’d be waiting for that explanation he had promised all those months ago.
Still …
Dino had to pretend like he didn’t want any of those things.
It was easier to remember why he had gotten where he was and what he was going to do when he was out, if he didn’t focus on only her. Someday, he’d be able to do that for Karen and give her what she deserved to have from him.
Someday.
Today was just not that day.
“Visiting day, you said?” Dino asked, tossing his crossword puzzle and pencil aside before he jumped down from the top bunk. “Do you have someone coming to visit you today, or what?”
Todd was already at the bars, his arms hanging out between the holes as he looked for one of the guards that would signal breakfast was soon. “Maybe.”
“Maybe is a non-answer, kid.”
“Maybe I wait every week, thinking this will be the one she actually shows up to, but she never comes.”
Dino’s brow rose high. “She?”
Shit, he actually thought Todd might have been gay. Not that he would have cared if the kid was, but it was surprising that he had a she in his life that he talked about with a sort of fondness that did not speak of a family relation. After all, Dino had heard the kid talk about his mother and sister, and he didn’t use that kind of tone.
“Yeah, she,” Todd repeated. “She—the one that I ended up in here for.”
Well, then …
Dino wasn’t touching that.
Tit for tat, you know.
“Good luck with that,” Dino muttered.
Todd didn’t reply.
The guards shouted out for the block as the buzzers started above the cell doors, and the bars slid open.
Breakfast was served.
Not that it would be anything good.
Because Dino’s block in the prison happened to house non-violent offenders as the general population, they were lucky enough to have their cells open for a majority of the afternoon. The inmates were allowed to wander around the block and as long as no trouble was started, the guards wouldn’t hit the alarm and push the button to lock all the cell doors.
Dino had only had one problem during the free-cell time.
Once, he’d been on the lower level where the cafeteria was located, sitting in the corner and looking out the barred Plexiglas windows. Something had prickled at the back of his neck—a sensation he hadn’t felt in a long time.
Like his long-dormant instincts were suddenly waking back up.
He’d found Todd in their cell, beaten bloody, and some of their things missing. It hadn’t taken long to figure out who had done it, once Todd had woken up. Dino had gotten the bastard back on the next free-cell time, when the guards’ backs were turned and the inmate’s cellmate had gone downstairs, just like Dino had the day before.
Prison liked its tit for tat.
Dino simply provided that without getting himself in shit.
Thankfully, there hadn’t been an issue since, and guards were more than willing to turn their cheek to a bruise or bloody nose when inmates worked out their own problems without a fucking riot of some sort. He had also effectively sealed his reputation amongst the prisoners that he wasn’t going to take shit from anybody, and that included someone bothering his cellmate.
“DeLuca!”
Dino damn near fell off the top bunk at the shout of his name. He’d been lost in his zone, enjoying the quiet that the block was rarely afforded. It was one of the only things he really enjoyed about visitation days. Most of the inmates on his block had someone who showed up, and they’d either be put into the visitation area, or be placed in the waiting area for when their time came.
Todd had gotten his visitor, as far as Dino knew.
He’d been called down to the waiting area earlier, leaving Dino alone to his thoughts. He didn’t mind.
As the guard came into view outside of Dino’s cell, the blue-suited man tapped his knuckles against the door, glancing up at the camera. “Open it for me.”
“What is it?” Dino asked.
The guard didn’t answer, simply waited for his request to be heeded. It was only after the door was unlocked and the bars slid open did he turn his attention back to Dino. “You’ve got a visitor downstairs. Apparently, they didn’t register that they were coming in, so they had to wait for when there was a cancelation in the schedule.”
What?
Dino pushed off the bed, landing soundlessly on the cement floor. “Who is it?”
“I don’t get details, DeLuca, just orders.”
As the guard cuffed Dino—common procedure when inmates were being moved between blocks where it was less secure than other areas of the prison—he considered who might have shown up.
His uncle was a good possibility.
Ben DeLuca hadn’t come to the prison once since Dino’s arrival, but he figured he was due one of his uncle’s usual threats that would remind him of just how and why he was there in the first fucking place.
His brother was another option.
Theo had come to the first hearing with a clean suit for Dino to wear. Even though Dino would never ask for his brother to show up like he had. That would only put Theo on Ben’s shit list.
Being a Capo for the Chicago Outfit, meant Dino wasn’t likely to have a lot of visitors by way of friends or family. No man affiliated to the mob wanted to be seen having interactions with another man who was locked up. It simply wouldn’t look good, and it didn’t lend any credence to a man’s reputation of staying away from cops or officials. It would be better for any sort of interaction from a man outside and a man inside to be had over a phone call, and even then, very little talk of business or the mafia was likely to be had.
It was an unspoken rule of the lifestyle.
Women were the only exception to the rule, but his mother was long dead, and his sister was out of the country.
Dino shouldn’t have a visitor.
He hadn’t called his lawyer in.
He didn’t have family or friends that were unconnected to the mob.
Who in the hell was it?
“Let’s go,” the guard said, directing Dino out of the cell.
He would find out soon enough.
Karen
KAREN hadn’t thought about how cold a prison must feel like on the inside. She had always been the passerby on the outside, getting just a glimpse of the large building with its concrete walls. She hadn’t actually given much thought as to how the people inside must feel to be locked away.
Of course, she knew criminals deserved to be exactly where they were—locked up, hidden away from society to do their time.
She was not naive to what prisons were me
ant for, she simply hadn’t been put in a position where she needed to care about the people—or rather, one person—inside the concrete walls. Until now, it seemed.
Karen tugged her jacket closer to her chest, trying not to be bothered by the guards on both sides of the Plexiglas windows. The hard chair was doing nothing to soothe the sudden ache in her back, and even sitting didn’t help the restlessness coursing through her nervous system.
She still wasn’t sure if she should have come to visit Dino. A part of her wanted to see him, needed to talk to him, if only for a few minutes. She needed answers that only he could give her, but whether or not he would be willing to talk was a whole other story.
The other part of her, a little louder than the part that wanted to be where she was, had her squirming in her seat with an anxious flare that just wouldn’t let go, no matter how hard she tried to ignore it.
Maybe she shouldn’t have come at all.
Shit, as it were, it had taken her a good two weeks just to gain up the courage to go looking for where Dino had been placed, and then another two weeks to talk herself into a visit. Karen hadn’t realized just how involved visiting an inmate actually was. There was much more to it than just showing up and asking for time to see a prisoner.
She had been smart enough to call ahead and find out if there were scheduled visiting days, but no one had thought to mention during that phone call that visitors needed to sign in, reserve certain times, plus go through a massive amount of security before they could even get their visit with an inmate.
Showing up with no previous sign-in, no visiting reservation, and having no clue how the security for the prison was actually run, Karen had been left waiting for hours on the off chance that someone might flake on their visiting time.
She hadn’t even been guaranteed a visit with Dino when she finally got through the sign-in information, but rather, shoved into a waiting area where she fiddled with her phone and stared at gray walls for hours.
Thankfully, someone hadn’t shown up for their visitation, and Karen was walked through another hallway and sat down in a hard chair, facing a Plexiglas window where she could see another chair waited. On the walls of both sides of the glass, phones sat waiting for her to pick up one, and Dino to pick up the other. Thin barrier walls separated her seating section from a row of several others.
The barriers did nothing to help hide the conversations going on.
She could still hear the conversations of others visiting inmates, though she couldn’t hear what the inmates were saying from their side of the wall, or even see them behind their barriers.
Hearing them was more than enough.
A mother talking to her son.
A girlfriend crying to her boyfriend.
A friend reassuring his friend.
Karen wished there was a bit more privacy offered for people, but as soon as the thought came on, she knew how ridiculous it was. This was prison, for fuck’s sake.
There was no privacy.
No one expected any sort of discretion.
That was probably her first real understanding that coming to the prison to see and talk to Dino was absolutely a mistake. It didn’t matter that a huge portion of her heart was still owned by a man she didn’t really know at all. It didn’t make a difference that his lies did little to cut away at the feelings she still held for him.
The questions she wanted to ask—the things she needed to know—could not be asked here.
Still, even knowing this, Karen didn’t move from her chair. Her fingers drummed a fast beat to the small ledge that acted as a shelf in front of the Plexiglas window.
Just knowing she would see Dino was enough to make her stay there.
Tiny, smudged finger and palm prints on the edge of the glass caught her attention, and she could tell immediately that by the size of the prints, they were owned by someone small. A child, probably. It looked as though they had put their whole little hands against the glass, almost as if they thought if they could push hard enough on the window, if they got a little bit closer, then they would be able to crawl right through it.
For a split second, caught by the sight of those smudged prints, Karen was … heartbroken.
Would that be her child someday?
Would it be her baby learning who its father was and finding love on the other side of a Plexiglas window?
Would it be her son or daughter’s fingerprints breaking someone else’s heart at the heavy realization of what sitting in that spot meant for their future?
Karen blinked away the sudden prickling sensation in her eyes, willing the wetness gathering to go away. She couldn’t afford a breakdown. Not now, not here. When she was alone, when there weren’t guards just down the way and cameras trained on her every move, then maybe she could take a moment to let her situation sink in and deal with how all of this made her feel, and what it would mean.
She had only glanced over her shoulder to check the time on the clock behind her for a second before a knock on the glass made her spin back around in her seat.
A guard was standing on the other side of the glass, his hand still lifted with his knuckles coming forward to hit the window again if he needed.
Karen wasn’t paying attention to him at all.
No, she was too busy staring at the man behind him.
Dino met Karen’s gaze as the guard said something she couldn’t hear, and then turned to leave without another word. The man she had thought about for weeks on end, the man she worried and fretted over, the man she had been so angry with and hurt by his actions, only stared at her, never moving or even attempting to sit and grab the phone at the wall.
No, he just fucking stared at her. Karen sucked in a hard breath, a deep pain settling in the middle of her chest. She hadn’t thought about how hard it would be to see him locked up, locked down, and out of her reach.
The gray uniform and cuffs around his wrists only added to that difficult, painful emptiness growing in her soul.
Those words she had wanted to ask, all the things she wanted to say, suddenly stuck on her tongue like cement.
They wouldn’t come.
The words wouldn’t form.
Even when Karen reached for the phone, putting it to her ear and looking to Dino expectantly, he didn’t move. He didn’t sit or reach for his own phone, but rather, kept staring at her as though he wasn’t sure what he was seeing.
“Talk to me?” Karen asked, hoping he understood what she was saying without needing to hear it.
Then, all at once, it was like Dino had woken up from his daze. He still didn’t pick up the phone, but he shook his head quickly and mouthed, “You shouldn’t be here, Karen.”
All over again, her heart broke.
“But—”
She was going to tell him she missed him—loved him.
She wanted to tell him about the baby, how far along the pregnancy was, and when she was due.
She needed to ask what in the hell she was supposed to do?
Dino didn’t give her a chance to ask or say anything. “Go home.”
Karen blinked, sitting a little straighter in her chair. “What?”
He pointed at her, then behind her. “Go home and don’t come back here.”
She didn’t move, because something inside wouldn’t let her go. His rejection stung like acid on her skin, but the coldness reflecting in his brown gaze was something far worse, as far as she was concerned. She had broken through that coldness once, a long time ago. She had been able to see the small bit of light that colored the edges of his blackened soul.
There was so much more to Dino DeLuca than what he showed.
No one truly knew.
Except for maybe her.
Dino dropped Karen’s gaze when she still stayed right where she was, not budging even an inch. Then, he reached over and grabbed the phone, putting it to his ear. For a long moment, Karen cradled her own phone tighter, listening to the rhythmic crackle of Dino’s breaths through the speaker
.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
That was not what she expected to hear.
She didn’t ask him what he was apologizing for because without needing to tell her, they both knew damn well he had a lot to offer her where repentance was concerned. He had done a lot of things, said a lot of things, and it had left them with nothing more than Plexiglas windows and two phones away from one another.
“You have to go,” Dino said, still keeping that soft tone, “because it’s not safe for you to be here.”
Karen shook her head. “You’d be surprised at just how safe this place is for housing thousands of criminals.”
Dino flinched. “Not the people here—the people who are outside of here.”
She suspected he meant his family, that other life that he’d kept hidden from her until she didn’t have a choice but to open her eyes and see everything Dino had been hiding.
“Dino—”
His gaze met hers, dark and sure.
There was fear there, and she hadn’t expected to see that at all.
The last thing she had ever seen from Dino was fear.
“It’s not safe for you to be coming here,” he repeated firmly.
With that, he put the phone back to the hook, and turned away. He’d only taken one step, probably moving toward a waiting guard that she couldn’t see, before Karen was up off the chair and moving closer to the window.
Her hands slammed into the Plexiglas window hard, making Dino stop. She’d dropped the phone to the small ledge, not even bothering to hang it up like he had for his. Those tears she had been holding at bay started to fall, making tracks down her cheeks as she stared at the man who refused to even talk to her.
“Dino!”
Her shout of his name must have been loud enough for him to hear behind the glass, because his back tensed. He looked over his shoulder at her, that fear still present, but it was accompanied by something else, too.
Understanding, maybe?
A bit of want, too.
She had so many things to say to him, so many things to ask.
