by Bethany-Kris
Days he spent with his son and Karen.
Days he didn’t see a detective or federal agent waiting outside one of his places.
Days he was still free.
On the outside, Dino was the perfect picture of composure. He didn’t show how much it bothered him that officials were digging into his businesses and keeping him from making the money he should be through his more illegal ventures. He didn’t bother explaining to the other Capos in the family who were less than willing to work with him because of his increased attention that he’d begun hiding and funneling funds into accounts that couldn’t be touched by officials when the time came for them to once again, freeze his accounts.
Outside, he was perfectly fine.
Business went on to the maximum he could work.
He showed his face when needed or asked.
The world kept turning.
But inside?
Inside, Dino was panicking.
Ostracized by a lot of men in the Outfit for fear they too would come under investigation, he used his brother’s position to get things done when needed. He didn’t tell Karen how close he felt it was to something big happening with the investigations that were currently underway because the very last thing he wanted her to do was worry about him.
It was going to happen.
It was just a matter of when.
Dino was so painfully aware of that fact as he sat at his desk, signing paper after paper, getting asset after asset allocated to where he needed them to go. He didn’t think of very much else, except his current task.
It was a task he had been working on for months.
If he could help it, Dino wouldn’t go to jail. He wasn’t going to spend his life behind bars because officials had some kind of hard-on for him, and hoped that at some point, he would turn for them and work for their benefit.
As much as he hated the Outfit, Dino would never turn rat.
He had far too much pride for that.
But it seemed someone had their eye on him—someone was determined that if they couldn’t get a leg into the Outfit, then they would start smaller by chipping away at what chunks they could, until it all began to crumble in on itself.
Dino refused to be the starting piece to that puzzle.
And also, he had promised.
He’d promised his son to be there for his birthdays.
He’d promised to be there.
Dino was not going to be there from behind bars.
His arrest was inevitable.
The rest was entirely up to him—he just hadn’t figured out a plan yet.
Except this part, he thought, opening up the last folder in front of him.
Last Will and Testament, it read.
Carefully, and privately, he’d worked on things like this over the winter and leading into the unusually warm spring. It had taken a while, and with very well-placed steps and calls, he had gotten a particular lawyer in another state but with a license to work in Illinois under his payroll.
Someone who wouldn’t be picked up on Ben’s radar.
Because yeah, Dino still needed to worry about his bastard of an uncle, too.
He was always on the back of his mind somewhere.
Dino read through the pages of his Will, taking in what he had asked to be done and who should be the one to do it. It was all simple enough, as it should be. He didn’t think his death would be on the table, but shit happened.
An unprepared man was one who left behind a mess.
He wasn’t preparing to die.
However, he was preparing for anything.
Think, Dino.
His internal voice wouldn’t shut up lately.
Get your head in the game—plan, plan, plan!
That would be a hell of a lot easier to do once he knew exactly what he was planning for.
“Dinner, tonight?” Karen asked on the other end of the call.
Dino smiled, happy that he could actually say yes. It had been a long week, one that kept him on the other side of Chicago and away from Karen and his son. He knew she was missing him, and fuck if he didn’t miss them, too.
“Of course,” Dino said. “I have one thing to pick up, and I’ll be over.”
Actually, he had a racket payment to pick up from a construction company, but he figured the little details were unimportant, and sometimes, the less Karen knew, the better. Plausible deniability, after all.
“Do you want me to grab something?” Dino asked.
“No, I’ve got—Junior, get off the table right now!”
Somehow, Dino managed to keep himself from laughing. Junior had taken to climbing on things over the last couple of months. The seventeen-month-old toddler kept his mother constantly moving, and the higher he could go, the better.
One morning, Karen told Dino she had come out of the bedroom to find Junior had used the cupboards as stairs to get up onto the counter, and then proceeded to pile things against the fridge so he could climb on top of that, too. He only cried out for his mother to come help him because he couldn’t get down.
As amusing as it was, it was also terrifying to Karen.
Dino tried to understand—sympathize, even.
Junior was a boy; he had the DeLuca blood running all through his veins. He was going to climb. He was going to explore. He was going to get himself in all sorts of shit that would turn his mother gray long before her time.
It was just a fact of life.
Still, Dino knew, the boy would be fine. He’d come out of every incident unscathed, much like how his father had, and the men that came before him. It was just their way.
Dino couldn’t exactly explain all of that to Karen without pissing her off, so he didn’t bother. She would learn, and she would grow to like it—or tolerate it as much as she possibly could.
His mother had.
“I hear you chuckling,” Karen muttered to Dino.
He could hear Junior in the background, repeatedly shouting “No” at his mother as she pulled him off the table and set him back to the floor.
“I’m not going to apologize,” Dino replied. “Better to let him go—it tires him out.”
“Easy for you to say, Dino.”
“I speak from experience.”
“Whatever,” Karen said, laughing but still managing to sound annoyed at the same time. “Say hello to Daddy, J.”
If it were possible, Dino’s smile grew impossibly wider
“Daddy, hi!”
Over the last few months, J had taken to calling Dino “Daddy” rather than the previous “Da” he had been using. His words were much clearer, mostly thanks to Karen and her constant need to teach the boy. While it made him sad to see some of the babyish expressions leave his son, it also excited him to watch Junior grow into a too-smart-for-his-own-good toddler.
It was a strange thing to feel both sad and happy about the same thing.
Dino supposed that was just a part of being a parent.
Something he had never thought he would be.
“Hey, little man,” Dino said, turning the corner at the same time.
His boy chatted away, and from the sound of the rushing noise in the speaker, he was running through the apartment at the same time. A ball of energy—that was how Dino would describe his son if he was ever asked to. The kid never slowed down for anything, except maybe a book and food.
Unfortunately, while his son talked and talked, Dino’s attention had been grabbed by something else. Or rather, two people. He would have much rather talked to his son, but he didn’t think he was going to be able to as he stared at the waiting men.
Standing next to his white Bentley, two men dressed in dark suits faced him as he approached. He didn’t worry much about who they were, because with just a single look, he already knew.
Cops. Detectives. Agents.
It didn’t matter—they all smelled the fucking same.
One of the two held a folded up piece of paper in his hands.
A warrant?
Probably.
“J?” Dino asked, never turning around as he spoke to his son.
“Yeah, Daddy?”
“I love you, okay? Tell Momma that I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
His son’s innocent question broke his heart, but Dino didn’t know how to truthfully answer it without also killing himself in the process. Karen would figure it out. She was smart like that.
And she was good to him, too.
Too good, even.
She would let him apologize when he was able.
She would forgive him.
Again.
Dino wished he was better at this whole relationship thing—better for her.
He hung up the phone on his son, who was still asking his father questions, though it was the very last thing he wanted to do.
“Dino DeLuca,” one of the two men said, stepping away from the car, “we’ve been waiting for you.”
As he came closer, Dino recognized the fools.
The same agents who had arrested him the first time—yeah, someone definitely had a hard-on for him.
“That a warrant for my arrest?” Dino asked, nodding to the paper in the other man’s hand.
“Good guess,” the agent replied.
Wonderful.
“You don’t seem surprised, DeLuca.”
“You’ve been digging through my businesses and questioning anyone I came in contact with for the last year,” Dino said. “You’ve pulled my tax records, any banking documents you could, and even managed to get one of my accounts frozen just last month. Do you think I’m fucking stupid? I knew what was coming.”
“Good, then let’s make this easy.”
Oh, he would.
For him.
Dino dropped his phone twenty feet from where the agents stood, knowing he’d have more than enough time to destroy it before they could get to it. On a rainy street, he crushed the burner phone under the heel of his boot, ruining it entirely.
Karen only called him from a burner phone he had provided to her.
It was just another failsafe.
He was never going back to prison.
But she’d never go there, either.
Not for him.
Tax evasion. Fraud. Money laundering.
Dino read over the charges, the list substantial.
Twenty-five to life.
That’s what all it would add up to. He knew it without needing to be told. It was every Mafioso’s greatest fear. A lot of made men didn’t fear being put in prison for something like murder, something at least all of them had committed once in their careers, but rather, the details.
After all, the devil was in the details.
No, men like him didn’t fear being caught for the bad, bad shit.
They feared being caught for the details of their lives—the byproducts of being criminals, making money illegally, and hiding it how they needed to in order to be able to actually fucking use it without questions being asked.
Wiring money between countries. Funneling money into businesses that mostly made profits by cash-only. Lying on tax returns because cheating the government was better than paying taxes on dirty money.
Those were the details that almost always put men like Dino away for life.
The charges racked up one after another.
He read down the list again.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
He could almost hear the prison cell closing on him again; the sounds of the chatting inmates so late at night that his fucking ears rang. He could smell the cinderblock walls and barred windows.
No, he wasn’t going back there.
“We can talk about this,” the agent said across from him, “all of these charges—”
Nope, he wasn’t playing that game, either.
“Get my lawyer.”
It was his mantra.
Dino was sticking to it.
“You’re going to take twenty-five years—probably more—for what?”
Loyalty.
Honor.
Respect.
He’d take it for a lot of things because that was just what made men did.
Except he wasn’t going to take it at all because he had his whole life waiting for him across the city. It had just taken him a long damn time to find her.
“I’ll wait in a holding cell until my lawyer gets here,” Dino said.
The agent scowled.
That was that.
Karen
THE soft knock on the studio door had Karen turning away from the toddler dressed up in her very best dress. The girl’s mother went to distract the child as Karen asked for a minute of privacy, and excused herself from the room.
Her boss waited as Karen put her camera safely away and came out to join her in the hallway. Unfortunately, the woman wasn’t wearing her usual smile. It was the first obvious sign that something wasn’t right.
“What’s up?” Karen asked. “Something wrong?”
She liked her job, for the most part. Photography was her thing—she took a great deal of pride in it. She didn’t get to freelance as much as she used to, but frankly, it didn’t make her as much money as the standard family shoots that the studio provided did.
She was still holding a camera, though.
She was still taking pictures.
Karen figured that was the most important part.
“I don’t know, maybe you could tell me if there’s something wrong,” her boss said.
Karen’s brow furrowed. “I’m not sure what you mean. I’ve been working this session for a half an hour now. The mother wanted the nature backdrops.”
“No, not that. You have a visitor.” Then, her boss frowned, her voice lowering as she added, “If you’re in some kind of trouble, Karen, I need to know.”
What?
The confusion on her face must have been enough of an answer for her boss, because the woman only nodded.
“I’ll finish the session—the detective is waiting in the main room.”
Oh, fuck.
Somehow, Karen managed to keep her composure, but barely. As her boss said, the detective—the same one that had approached her months earlier—was sitting on the leather couch, sipping from a cup of to-go coffee.
She didn’t bother to sit beside the guy.
“Detective Rubins, right?” Karen asked.
The detective nodded, smiling as he set his cup down. “Sorry to bother you at work, Miss Martin.”
“Are you? Because with no context, my boss seems to think she had to worry about employing me. If your goal is to pressure me into something, this is not the best way to go about that, I assure you.”
“No, of course not. Sit, I want to chat for a moment. I have some developments I’ve been asked to share with those who might be able to help our investigation, even if it is by proxy.”
Karen still didn’t sit. “I thought I made my position clear the last time?”
“You—”
“Didn’t know Dino DeLuca well, I worked for him at a restaurant to keep his books managed, and quit when I found something better.”
The detective nodded, letting her finish completely before he spoke again. “That’s all true, and from what we know, it’s also accurate. But we have reason to believe you, like a few other of Dino DeLuca’s previous and current employees, possibly have more information to share or help explain certain things, but you likely need a safe way to do so. Seems a great deal of people around Mr. DeLuca know of his involvement with a criminal organization here in Chicago, and that sometimes leads people to think speaking up wouldn’t be a safe option.”
“Is there a point here that I’m missing?” Karen asked quietly.
“We arrested Dino yesterday.”
Karen’s heart broke all over again.
She had already known because when Dino hadn’t shown up for supper, she’d gone looking for any sort of explanation as to why. Calling his phone hadn’t worked. But a quick check of the local news told he
r an arrest had happened involving an Outfit figure, and more information was to come.
It didn’t take a genius to figure it out.
Karen wasn’t fucking stupid.
“Again, the point?” Karen asked.
How she managed to keep her tone calm, Karen didn’t know.
“Our case is solid, for the most part,” the detective explained, “but we have areas we would like a better footing on. We’ve been going back over our list of people we questioned previously, and you happened to be on there. We’re hoping that some people might feel more comfortable coming forward now that one of the major issues has been taken off the table, or rather, off the streets.”
Taken off the streets.
Karen swore she could taste bile on the back of her tongue.
This man—this detective—was just doing his job. She understood that all too well. But what he didn’t know, and what she could never properly explain to him, was that the same issue he had removed was the very person Karen loved. Someone her son adored with his entire little being. She might have made up the heart in her small world of people she cared for, but Dino was the soul to it.
She could live without a soul, but she didn’t want to.
“My statement hasn’t changed, and neither has my position,” Karen said firmly. “I don’t have anything to offer.”
The detective nodded, but he didn’t look entirely convinced. “I expected you would say that. I do want to make you aware, however, that should information on your involvement with any of Mr. DeLucas illegal activities regarding his restaurant become more apparent, you will be seeing me again.”
“So be it, but there’s nothing to find.”
She sounded strong.
She sounded honest.
She felt anything but those things.
Karen had waffled on her warring thoughts for two days since getting confirmation of Dino’s arrest. A huge part of her knew what he would want her to do—stay quiet, hidden, and don’t draw any sort of attention to the fact she was involved with him in any way.
A smaller part of herself—one that was much louder than the bigger part—didn’t care for sensible, smart things.
Perhaps that was why, after dropping her son off at daycare for the day, she had called into work sick, lying that some awful stomach bug had crept up on her overnight. Then, she waffled again. Two hours of going back and forth, of walking down the same Chicago city block, drinking a cold coffee and staring at nothing but the bricks beneath her shoes.
