Page 4 of Worth of Waste

Her situation was looking bleaker every single day.

You could go home, her mind pressed.

Karen didn’t even want to entertain the idea of returning to California where her parents lived, if only because the shame would eat her alive. Not only would she be forced to admit to her parents that Chicago had turned out to be a massive failure on her part, she would also be left explaining her pregnancy and just how all that came about.

She was an adult, for Christ’s sake.

She could and would figure this out on her own.

Somehow.

After finishing in the bathroom and putting the mouthwash to good use for the third time that morning, Karen went back to her tea in the living room, though she didn’t bother to drink it. Instead, she took it to the kitchen and dumped the contents out, as her thirst and appetite was entirely gone.

Leaning back against the cupboards, she massaged her temples with the pads of her fingers, hoping to relieve some of the tension there.

It didn’t help all that much.

From the other side of the apartment, the manila envelope with its cash spilling out caught her attention again.

Goddammit.

She had resolved herself not to entertain the idea.

Not to touch the money.

Life probably wasn’t going to give her much of a choice.

The baby was the most important thing, Karen knew.

First, though, she had to talk to Dino.

Those last few words on the note haunted her for reasons she wasn’t willing to face.

She needed to know why.

He was the only one who could tell her.

Dino

A LOUD clanging from outside the cell woke the man in the bunk under Dino DeLuca’s bed. Probably a prisoner from one of the neighboring cells, attempting to annoy the guards and start an issue.

When the inmates got bored, things like this happened.

He listened to his cellmate curse a blue streak, roll off the bed onto the hard cement floor, and then slowly came to the realization of where he was again. The young man—his cellmate, Todd—was only twenty-three years old and looking at ten to fifteen years for a sentence on drug trafficking. The guy’s almost-boyish appearance, with his blue eyes and blond hair that stuck up in every direction, made the charges hard to believe. Todd was lucky if he weighed one-fifty, soaking wet, and he spoke quietly, rarely looking anyone in the eye when he did talk to them.

But here the kid was, with a Mafioso for a cellmate, with a heavy sentence and drug charges on his record.

Todd didn’t talk to Dino about how or why he’d found himself in the prison beyond the information on the charges and sentence he faced, and Dino didn’t ask for more than the kid gave. However, each morning the kid woke up, it was as though he was only realizing in that moment that he wasn’t waking up in his own bed, but rather, a small eight-by-eight, cement room with one wall of bars, and a very small window that was too high to see out of—and too small to climb out of it, should one of them actually reach it.

It happened every day with no sign of changing.

“Careful, Todd,” Dino said, his attention focused on the crossword in his hands.

Todd took a heavy gulp of air, sitting up on the floor as his gaze focused in on Dino for the first time that morning.

Strangely, Dino often found himself grateful that he’d ended up with a cellmate like Todd. He could have ended up with a bastard, or worse … Instead, he got a kid that almost reminded him of his younger brother. That was, if Theo DeLuca were stripped of his demeanor and behavior.

So, maybe not entirely like his brother, but Dino looked out for Todd, when he could, outside of their cell. He was too small, too young, and the other inmates—or some—would not think twice about using Todd’s weaknesses to their advantage for whatever fucking horrible thing they wanted.