Page 10 of Worth of Waste

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.

Those same questions she had been asking herself for a good month and a half fought their way out, demanding to be spoken aloud so that maybe … God, maybe, she would finally be able to sleep at night.

“I don’t know who you are,” Karen told him, hoping he could read her lips enough to understand what she had said.

She loved the man she thought she knew.

She cared for the person who let her chase his nightmares away.

She wanted to hold the man who made her feel like she was the most important thing in his world.

But the man standing behind the glass, the one with a last name that she now knew should frighten her, and affiliations that labeled him one of the worst kinds of criminals …

No, Karen didn’t know that man at all.

But she wanted to.