Deathless & Divided (The Chicago War #1) (3 page)

“Drink,” Dino ordered.

Damian tossed back the remainder of his coffee, still as silent and stoic as he’d been an hour ago when he entered Dino’s home. Dino sat across from Damian behind his large desk, drinking his own coffee. By the smell wafting from the drink, Dino had doused it with a good shot or two of whiskey.

“Why tell me?” Damian asked.

“About my uncle?”

What else was there?

“Yes.”

Dino shrugged. “I’ve got to get things in order around here before I can’t anymore.”

“Twenty years isn’t that long, Dino.”

“In a cell with bars for windows, cement walls for art, and God knows who for a bunkmate? It’s Hell.”

True enough.

“And I’m not planning on making it that far,” Dino said lower.

Damian passed a look Dino’s way. “I beg your pardon?”

Dino waved it off. “Nothing.”

“You still didn’t answer my question about why, man.”

“No, I suppose I didn’t.” Dino placed his cup to the desk before tapping one finger on the manila file he had with him earlier when Damian first arrived. “Family is important to me. Despite what the Outfit tries to project about
la famiglia
and all that bullshit, it means little to me. Because that’s all it is—bullshit. Every man in the Outfit is in it for him and he always has been. We’re greedy, we’re excessive, and we know it. Everybody is jealous of somebody else, Damian. You’re lucky you don’t give a damn enough to notice.”

Dino smirked, shaking his head as he added, “It wouldn’t take much at all for the Outfit to crumble in around itself, not with the way its run and all. My father, back when he was still alive, used to say the Outfit was better when they ran it with the old school rules.”

“Cosa Nostra rules, you mean.”

“Sure. Men didn’t steal from one another. Honor was held to a higher standard. Making money wasn’t the only important thing.”

Dino had a point. Even Damian had to admit the Outfit’s main focus was money, making it, and who had the most of it. But wasn’t that the mafia way?

“You can’t call something a family if we’re all enemies making nice at a dinner table,” Dino said.

Damian laughed. “Sounds exactly like my family.”

“Mine, too, as awful as that is. We put on a good show, of course, but we barely manage that.” Dino slid the file closer to Damian before he rested back in his chair and picked the cup again for another long swig. “Open it.”

Plucking the file off the desk, Damian flipped over the top and came face-to-face with the picture of a beautiful young blonde with brown eyes and a teasing smile. Underneath the picture rested papers filled with information on the smiling, carefree girl. Damian felt like he was intruding on the life of a woman he didn’t know, so instead of going through the rest of the documents, his attention was taken back to the picture on the top of the pile. The small photograph had been printed on what looked to be a postcard. Flipping it over, Damian read the words written in a messy scrawl on the back.

Wales, England.

The beer could be better. I’m loving the accents, though.

Checking in a different way this time.

Miss you, D.

Love,

Lily.

Damian took note of the full date written in the left hand corner under Lily’s name.

“Pretty, isn’t she?” Dino asked.

The question seemed innocent enough.

It rarely ever was where Dino was concerned.

“Sure,” Damian admitted.

Lily was beautiful. Wide, clear brown eyes with flecks of green and gold in her irises. Pretty pink lips curved high with her genuine happiness. Her blonde hair, waved and long, framed her features.

Damian looked away from the picture.

“She looks like our mother. Especially in that one there. Like nothing in the world could ever hurt her as long as she smiled back. I always remember that first about my mother. I’m glad Lily was able to carry it on even if she doesn’t talk much to me anymore.”

“Was this when she first started backpacking?” Damian asked.

“A couple of months into it,” Dino answered. “That is the only full-frontal picture I have of her that could be considered even remotely recent. She sent a few more after that one, but someone else was always in the picture and you couldn’t see all of her features. I wanted you to see who she was. She doesn’t look all that different, really, but I didn’t think asking her if I could take a picture after I forced her home would do me much good. She’s pissed off enough as it is.”

Wait, what?

“You asked Lily to come home?”

“Demanded, actually,” Dino replied. “Then, when she refused, I threatened to send someone after her. She chose not to challenge me, thankfully. I wanted her to make the choice.”

Damian snorted. “Doesn’t sound like much of a choice, Dino.”

“Lily’s twenty-one. I’ve let her have her fun. She’s gone and done all the exploring and learning she felt she needed to do before life came around to kick her in the ass and settle her down. I didn’t hold her back. At first, she’d call me once a week and send me a postcard whenever she hit a new place. I figured her doing the traveling thing, learning how to live off what she made by working small jobs and the goodness of other people was a good life lesson. Something to better her.”

Damian didn’t see anything wrong with Dino’s reasoning. “I get that.”

Hell, he would have killed to do something like that. Instead, he’d only left the state of Illinois a handful of times and always for business.

“It was more than Theo and I ever got,” Dino said, a hint of bitterness twisting his words dark. “Ben made sure my brother and I knew exactly what we were headed for. The Outfit was our destiny—in our blood, don’t you know?”

Damian wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so he stayed quiet.

Dino didn’t seem to mind. “My father wanted out. Did you know that?”

“No. I thought he was forced into working with the officials, not that he wanted to.”

“Yeah, he wanted out and he tried. Worked with the officials on the low for a while, recorded some things for them with a wire, and got caught in the process. Ben found out my father was working with the FBI and took both my parents out. Anyway,” Dino muttered, rapping his fingers to the desk. “I never could figure out why Ben killed my mother, but the older I got, the more sense it made. She would have taken us kids and ran, I bet. Ben couldn’t have that.”

“He doesn’t have any of his own, yeah?”

“None. Good thing, because he’d probably sell off every daughter his wife gave him and manipulate his sons right into a grave.” Dino made a dismissive sound under his breath, but it felt laced with something Damian couldn’t understand. “Look at how well he’s separated my brother and me. We let him do it, too, not even realizing it.”

Damian was learning a lot of things he hadn’t known before. “It might not be too late to fix that, Dino.”

“Trust me, those bridges are good and burned. Nonetheless, I was old enough to be the one who looked out for my sister. Ben always tried stepping in at times. He wanted her in schools he picked; I let her choose her own. He wanted her back in Chicago the moment she graduated; I let her go on to do whatever the hell she wanted.”

That didn’t sound like a bad thing, necessarily.

“I had to keep my distance, though,” Dino continued, rubbing at his forehead. “Ben’s a nasty fucker when he wants to be. I let him believe my choices with Lily were about controlling my family how I saw fit. That, when I was ready, I would bring my sister home and do what he deemed appropriate for a girl of her status and name.”

“Which is what?”

“Marry her off to get her and us higher,” Dino said.

Damian wished he could be surprised. It wouldn’t be the first time the daughter of a made man was forced into a marriage she didn’t want because of her family’s ambitions.

“If Ben thought for one second I was letting her live the life she wanted because he took away everything else she had, my sister would have buried me, too,” Dino said. “When it comes to us DeLuca siblings, Theo’s the only smart one because he did everything Ben wanted and didn’t question it. I did, too, but I always had some underlying goal.”

It wasn’t like Dino to be open about his personal shit, but Damian was getting it from the man in the tenfold tonight.

“So?” Damian asked.

“Lily was the only one of us three with her head stuck in the clouds. I just yanked her back down to earth recently. Keep that in mind when you meet her.”

“Meet her?”

Dino grinned a wicked sight. “You owe me.”

Damian froze in the chair. For the majority of a decade, the non-monetary debt Damian owed Dino DeLuca hung over his head, ready to fall at any moment. As a younger man, Damian had been rash and reckless. He’d made more than one bad decision. A particularly stupid one where he took the life of a made man in the Outfit could have cost Damian his life.

Dino stepped in, gave an excuse to the boss, took the blame for the death, and then proceeded to make Damian an understudy of sorts. Mistakes like Damian had made were enough to put a man six feet under. It had, essentially, been Damian’s first real
in
to the Trentini crime family. Being close to Dino put Damian straight in Terrance Trentini’s path and got him noticed.

It also meant Damian was indebted to Dino for saving his life, even if that meant years of waiting to finally give his dues.

“You owe me,” Dino repeated as if he knew exactly what Damian was thinking.

“What do you expect me to do?”

Dino pointed at the folder. “Lily.”

“Lily,” Damian echoed, more uncertain than ever.

“I liked something about you back then, Damian. Time to pay up.”

“How?”

Dino smiled a cold sight. “I have to protect what is important to me, Damian. My sister and my brother, they’re important. Theo will do okay, no matter what. He’s fucking resilient like that—as long as he keeps his heart out of the game. Lily though, she’s not the same. She’s too stubborn for her own good and I don’t want to think about somebody taking that from her. When I’m not here, somebody else needs to be watching over her. And it can’t be Ben DeLuca.”

Christ. Dino made prison sound like a death sentence.

Maybe it was to the man. Damian didn’t know.

“And I come into this how?” Damian asked.

“You’re going to marry my sister.”

Damian’s thought process dropped off the radar.

Surely he was too tired and hadn’t heard Dino correctly.

Right?

Damian’s jaw fell slack. “What?”

“A life for a life, D. That’s how it works in this life. Besides, this’ll work out to your favor, too. We both know you’re a happy little fucker in your spot doing what you do, Damian. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“I don’t understand,” Damian muttered.

Well, he got the marriage deal.

Yeah, he fucking got that shit.

Dino just smiled. “Like I said, you’re going to marry my sister. Sounds pretty simple to me.”

CHAPTER TWO

“L
ily, get a move on! We’re late as it is!”

“Go to hell, Dino.”

Lily refused to move the blanket covering her head. It was far too early on a Sunday morning for Dino to be going on like he was.

“I’m serious, Lily. Get up.”

“No.”

“Lily.”

“Dino,” she mocked, knowing damn well she sounded contrite and childish.

Lily couldn’t even bring herself to care.

Lily DeLuca liked to be on the move. She was the kind of girl who didn’t like to stop. Maybe that was why traveling appealed to her more than settling down into a stable life did. Now that her oldest brother forced her back from Europe, the only thing Lily seemed to want to do was nothing. Drag her feet, sleep in until noon, and ignore the world she would rather be seeing.

Chicago was pain to Lily.

She was nearly six when her parents were killed but she still remembered them. In her mind, their memories were vivid. The dreams she had of them were even more so. She despised how everyone else around them, including her brothers, acted as if the people who gave them life didn’t exist; as if the people they called family didn’t take them away.

She spent more time than she wanted to admit running from life and reality just so she didn’t have to feel pain. Chicago had been the last thing on Lily’s mind. If she could’ve helped it, she wouldn’t have ever came back.

Dino didn’t give her a choice.

“All right, this is fucking ridiculous,” Dino grumbled.

Lily felt the blanket yanked from her body before a good cupful of cold water rained down on her face. It might as well have been ice. She spluttered and screeched, throwing her arms up to dodge the attack. It was pointless.

Dino just laughed above her. “Get up, I said.”

“I hate you,” Lily spat, soaking wet and sad in her heart.

“Time to make face at church, little one.”

Lily scowled. “Don’t call me that.”

For a brief second, Dino’s face darkened. “What happened to us, huh? We used to be close, Lily.”