Page 33 of Waste of Worth

Where are you?

Is everything okay?

You could answer me back, Dino.

Are you ignoring me now?

Each one became progressively more annoyed, and also worried. He could feel her concern, but also her anger, bleeding from every word.

Then, the final one came.

She didn’t send another after that last one.

Fine. Whatever.

Dino didn’t answer a single one back. He knew, for Karen’s safety and to keep Ben from figuring out exactly where Dino’s distractions were lately, he would need to stay away for a while.

That wouldn’t bode well for him … or the relationship he had with Karen. She wouldn’t understand why he was ignoring her. It wasn’t really her fault, though. How could he expect her to understand?

He wouldn’t be able to explain.

“THIS is the biggest load of shit I have ever seen,” Theo snarled.

Each and every word was thrown like daggers in Dino’s direction. He was well aware that Theo was not pleased to be given yet another load of work, but it was what it was. Theo wouldn’t care, nor would he understand, that his brother was keeping him busy in order to keep Ben’s opinions of his personal business at a more pleasant level.

No, all Theo understood was Dino was unloading more responsibility onto his brother.

Including running the strip club.

Managing three more young guys in the crew.

Collecting payments on a schedule instead of having guys come to them.

They were little things, to be sure. It would all still add up and keep Theo working constantly on their side of Chicago. Damian, on the other hand, would be busy on his side of Chicago doing whatever his cousin and uncle needed of him for their family. It was a shitty way of going about it, but it would keep Ben from picking at Theo, or worse, really putting his hands into the friendship between the two young men to put a stop to it.

Of course, all Theo could see was Dino taking his own workload as a Capo, and tossing it onto his shoulders.

That was fine.

Dino could take Theo’s anger. He could even roll with whatever idea Theo had about why Dino was doing all this so that his brother didn’t know how truly awful their uncle was, and that Ben was up to his old tricks again.

Fact was, Theo, like Dino, still felt the aftereffects of growing up under Ben’s violent hand. So his brother did know how terrible Ben could be, but there were still some games their uncle played that Dino wanted to keep Theo safe from.

It was better for everyone not to bring those memories to the surface.

Over the period of two weeks, since that day of the meeting, Dino had been very carefully adding one thing at a time to Theo’s workload with their crew.

He had apparently met his limit.

“I’ve got a fucking life,” Theo barked.

“So do I,” Dino said absently, digging through the file cabinet.

He was missing paperwork, he was sure of it. Papers and information that came from offshore accounts, showing where his illegal funds were going and coming from. In order to know what he needed to hide, or rather, how much money he needed to hide, Dino needed those numbers.

He could always pull his records again, that wasn’t the problem.

The problem was that he was positive he had put the records away, but they weren’t where they should be.