Page 8 of Deathless & Divided

“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.”