Page 75 of Worth of Waste

Someone who wouldn’t be picked up on Ben’s radar.

Because yeah, Dino still needed to worry about his bastard of an uncle, too.

He was always on the back of his mind somewhere.

Dino read through the pages of his Will, taking in what he had asked to be done and who should be the one to do it. It was all simple enough, as it should be. He didn’t think his death would be on the table, but shit happened.

An unprepared man was one who left behind a mess.

He wasn’t preparing to die.

However, he was preparing for anything.

Think, Dino.

His internal voice wouldn’t shut up lately.

Get your head in the game—plan, plan, plan!

That would be a hell of a lot easier to do once he knew exactly what he was planning for.

“Dinner, tonight?” Karen asked on the other end of the call.

Dino smiled, happy that he could actually say yes. It had been a long week, one that kept him on the other side of Chicago and away from Karen and his son. He knew she was missing him, and fuck if he didn’t miss them, too.

“Of course,” Dino said. “I have one thing to pick up, and I’ll be over.”

Actually, he had a racket payment to pick up from a construction company, but he figured the little details were unimportant, and sometimes, the less Karen knew, the better. Plausible deniability, after all.

“Do you want me to grab something?” Dino asked.

“No, I’ve got—Junior, get off the table right now!”

Somehow, Dino managed to keep himself from laughing. Junior had taken to climbing on things over the last couple of months. The seventeen-month-old toddler kept his mother constantly moving, and the higher he could go, the better.

One morning, Karen told Dino she had come out of the bedroom to find Junior had used the cupboards as stairs to get up onto the counter, and then proceeded to pile things against the fridge so he could climb on top of that, too. He only cried out for his mother to come help him because he couldn’t get down.

As amusing as it was, it was also terrifying to Karen.

Dino tried to understand—sympathize, even.

Junior was a boy; he had the DeLuca blood running all through his veins. He was going to climb. He was going to explore. He was going to get himself in all sorts of shit that would turn his mother gray long before her time.

It was just a fact of life.

Still, Dino knew, the boy would be fine. He’d come out of every incident unscathed, much like how his father had, and the men that came before him. It was just their way.

Dino couldn’t exactly explain all of that to Karen without pissing her off, so he didn’t bother. She would learn, and she would grow to like it—or tolerate it as much as she possibly could.

His mother had.

“I hear you chuckling,” Karen muttered to Dino.

He could hear Junior in the background, repeatedly shouting “No” at his mother as she pulled him off the table and set him back to the floor.

“I’m not going to apologize,” Dino replied. “Better to let him go—it tires him out.”

“Easy for you to say, Dino.”