Page 30 of Worth of Waste

Dino might have been surprised to see his uncle sitting there requesting a visitation with him, but he wasn’t. Not at all.

It’d been only a week since Mike had been killed, and in that time, Dino had lots of quiet moments to think everything through and put more than enough together to prepare for this. Because he had known it would come.

With Ben, things like this always came.

Ben waved at the phone, and though the last thing he wanted to do was have any sort of conversation with Ben DeLuca, Dino grabbed his phone and put it to his head. The sound of his uncle’s breaths crackling through the speakers just pissed him off.

He had no doubt Ben had been the one to kill Mike.

He didn’t know why, but he figured that information would come in due time.

So, yeah, it pissed him off to hear the breaths of a man who wasn’t worthy enough to shine the shoes of the man he’d killed, no matter the reason.

“You look well,” his uncle said into the phone.

Dino shrugged, refusing to give his uncle any hint to his anger or even the fear he felt that Ben might know something about Karen or his son. “It’s prison—all we can do is eat, work out, and sleep. It’s good for the soul, you know.”

Ben chuckled drily. “I’m sure.”

“What do you want, Ben? You haven’t come to visit me since that day in the jail. Say what you’ve come to say and leave me alone to finish this sentence out.”

“Punishment,” his uncle corrected swiftly. “Your punishment.”

No, Dino wasn’t going to play that game with his uncle.

He’d worry about that when he was out of his current hell.

“Quite a little friend you made in that lawyer, hmm?” Ben asked.

Dino didn’t blink.

He kept his expression unreadable, cold like his uncle’s.

Ben had done this to him, after all.

He’d wanted this for a nephew, not one that cared.

“You know you can’t have outsiders doing business for you,” Ben went on, seemingly unbothered by Dino’s lack of silence. “Playing in your accounts and seeing things they shouldn’t be seeing. It’s unacceptable.”

“Or was it the fact I was doing something without you getting to dig all through it?” Dino asked coolly.

Ben smiled again, cruel and violet in a flash. “Same thing, isn’t it?”

“I had him buy me a house and sell another.”

“But why not use someone we both know and trust? You didn’t want me to know you were doing it, you’re still under some sort of impression that you’re free to do whatever you want to do,” Ben said, glancing down at his watch. “This was a reminder, Dino, and nothing more, just in case you needed one, and it certainly seemed like you did.”

“A reminder of what?”

“I am always watching. Remember that.”

How was he supposed to forget it?

Every one of his monsters was sitting just two feet away behind a Plexiglas window wearing a pleased smile and a three-thousand-dollar suit.

Dino wasn’t about to forget any of that.

Ben, however, hadn’t mentioned a thing about Karen or Dino’s son. He acted like he didn’t know about them. Dino would take that as a battle won. He was sorry that Mike had needed to die for it, though.