Page 5 of Waste of Worth

A nice gesture between an uncle and a nephew.

It only made Dino sick.

“What is it?” Dino asked.

Ben released his hold, but patted Dino’s shoulder. “Happy birthday. I nearly forgot—Carmela reminded me. You should celebrate tonight, but not too much, Dino. Business first, my boy. Business always comes first.”

Dino didn’t thank Ben for the well wishes, but his uncle was already walking away, heading back for his own pew where his wife was sitting with a bible open in her hands.

It was a little strange. Maybe even sad.

He hadn’t necessarily forgotten his birthday, but he didn’t care to remember it, either. It was just another year of life—twenty-nine all together.

Dino didn’t understand why he should celebrate his life when he was barely fucking living it.

EVERYONE had choices to make that would eventually lead their lives down one path or another. And sometimes, making one choice could lead to a separate set of roadblocks that would then lead them into yet another set of choices, often more difficult ones.

Dino understood this better than most.

At thirteen years old, he’d make a choice to get involved with a group of boys that liked nothing more than to cause a little trouble. He was accustomed to trouble, liked it even. He’d grown up seeing his father making money by the trouble he caused, and so it only seemed like the next logical step for Dino to follow in those footsteps.

Joseph DeLuca had, of course, denied his son.

Dino had decided, all those years ago, that he really didn’t need his father’s permission to do what he wanted to do, and so the group of boys came into play.

That was his first choice.

It led him into a world of thieves and ground-runners.

Thugs stealing whatever was available and then selling it for cheap on the streets. Others ran for the drug dealers, doing errands or making drop-offs when they were needed for some extra cash, on the hope that it would lead to a better position in the crew.

God knew Dino hadn’t needed to dabble in any of those things—there was more than enough of it inside his own family, for Christ’s sake. His father had been an Outfit Capo, right alongside his uncle.

The drugs Dino was helping the dealers to drop?

It came from his family.

Eventually, his uncle Ben had urged him toward the mafia more than the streets, much to his father’s chagrin and protest. He started learning about that world, that crazy, private, suffocating world that surrounded his family in secrecy, rules, and demands.

By the time he was sixteen, Dino knew exactly what he wanted to be.

A made man.

It was such a strange thing, he knew, how the very same choices he had made eventually shaped him, were the same ones his father had been faced with growing up, but they had led Joseph down an entirely different path.

One that included eventual death.

Dino remembered the day he’d moved out of his parents’ Melrose Park home like it was yesterday. His mother had kept her back turned to him the whole time. Not out of anger or disgust, but because she was crying and she didn’t want him to see it. Valerie DeLuca loved all three of her children, no matter their choices or mistakes, but she sided with her husband on the off-chance that Dino would stay.

He hadn’t.

His father packed his bags.

Go back to school, drop this Outfit nonsense, and you can come home, his father had told him at the door.

The only thing that made Dino pause was his sister Lily and his brother Theo. He looked after them, because despite how hypocritical his father was with his demands for Dino to live a clean life while he was busy making dirty money, he cared for his siblings.

But little Lily had Theo.