1. Dino
1
DINO
Now
There’s a heartbeat of terror when I watch her fall. One moment when I feel helpless, like I can’t do anything.
Then, my body responds. I rush forward, and something in my heart clicks…
When Marisol is in my arms.
She's covered in cuts and bruises. Her beautiful hair is still long but chopped short on her forehead for bangs, and it's uneven, like she did it herself and in a hurry.
And I am one selfish fucking bastard because despite all of that, I'm happy that she's in my arms, and I fucking hate myself for it.
There are people moving around me. Yelling. I can hear Sal and Gia, and Elio barking instructions.
None of that matters, though, because I have Marisol .
I cradle her closer. Fuck, she still smells the same. It's been eight years and I haven't forgotten how she smells.
I want to kiss her. To scream in frustration. To...
"Dino," I hear Caterina say softly. "We need to get her to a doctor."
There's this insane urge to hold her close and like... hiss at my sister. I feel like I can't let Marisol out of my sight, because if I do...
If I let her go right now, I'll never see her again.
"You can come," Caterina murmurs, seemingly reading my mind. "You can come with, but we have to get her to Doctor Cutrali."
At that, I nod.
Reluctantly.
“He will be here in ten,” Elio says gruffly. “Dino, what do you wish for us to do with these children?”
“I’ve got them,” Caterina says quickly.
Children.
My children.
Holy fuck.
“I don’t think they know,” Gia whispers softly in my ear. “We’ve got them. Prioritize Marisol.”
I give her the sharpest nod. I’m routinely terrified of Gia, but the fact that she’s shepherding my two dark-haired children right now …
I tighten my grip on Marisol.
“Dino. This way,” Elio barks.
Blindly, I follow him.
Everything except Marisol is a blur.
Thank God Elio’s house is so fucking big. He has a whole room that he’s kind of repurposed as a makeshift hospital room. It has a bed in it, various medical supplies, and a cabinet full of shit to patch people up long enough to either get to a real doctor… or to get better.
It’s where Elio left me after he tortured me. Nice of him, I guess, but at the time I think we both were thinking he was just doing it to rip me apart again.
I’m the only one, I think, who knows exactly how sadistic Elio can be.
Well. I’m the only one who’s lived to tell the tale.
But I’d do the same or worse to anyone who tried to hurt what’s mine too. Fuck I’d kill me. So I don’t blame him. I had no choice but to rat out Luna’s location to the Irish Mafia in order to protect my girls.
I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t know Elio’s power and reach. With my siblings' help I had no doubt he’d get to his little girl before anything happened to her. It’s fucking sick that I had to place my niece’s life in danger to save my girls and my woman, but that’s the savage hand I’m dealt with.
Gently, I put Marisol down on the bed. Her beautiful light brown skin looks so ashy and pale, and it makes me feel like I’m the worst fucking person on earth .
I have zero doubt in my mind that whatever happened to her, happened because of me.
I’m not just bad luck. I’m a fucking curse.
And my heart sinks as I realize that I must have brought Marisol down with me.
“How long until the doctor’s here?” I hear Caterina’s voice float over my shoulder.
“He’s pulling up the drive,” Elio rumbles.
I nod. I feel useless. Unsure of what to do now. My hand slides down Marisol’s arm, then hovers above her fingertips.
I wish I could just hold her hand.
Studying her in the bed, it’s like seeing a ghost. I can see the beautiful girl that I fell for all those years ago, but more than that, I can see the stunning woman that she’s become.
Her face has lost all traces of the roundness from when I first met her. She’s still got gorgeous hair, so dark brown that it’s almost black, and it hangs just past her shoulders. There are new freckles across the bridge of her nose, though, and a scar that crosses one of her perfectly groomed eyebrows.
That little fucking scar makes my chest hurt with anger.
“Dino,” Caterina says quietly. “I need you to step back.”
No.
I fight down my compulsion to snarl at my sister. “I’ll step back when the doctor gets here.”
“He’s here,” she adds softly.
I look up to see an older gentleman standing in the door. I don’t recognize him, but the little twitch of his eyebrow when he looks at me tells me that he recognizes me.
With a sharp jerk of my head, I narrow my eyes at him. “You know me?”
“It’s nice to see your neck healed so well,” he says in a heavily accented voice.
That’s one fucking way to put it.
Elio did a number on me. My vocal cords are still shot, and the way he sliced my stomach open?
I held my fucking guts in my hands.
“Thanks for the scars, doc,” I snarl. I look at Marisol then back at him. “Do the same hack job on her and I’ll put a fucking bullet between your eyes.”
“Dino!” Caterina cries. She spins and turns to Doctor Cutrali, who looks completely unruffled. “I’m so sorry, he’s just…”
“I know what he is,” the doctor waves her off. “I have been treating mafiosos for years, no? All of you bark, some of you bite, but when you’re lying on my table, you all beg.”
“Not one fucking scar,” I snap at him.
He raises one of his bushy white eyebrows. “Maybe you should threaten me less so my hands do not shake as I examine the young lady, yes?”
The thought of him putting his hands on her…
“That is enough, Bernadino,” Elio says sharply.
Fuck him. He doesn’t get to use my fucking name like that. “I fucking mean it,” I growl .
“If you threaten my doctor again, Dino, I won’t let him stitch you up after what I do to you.”
Elio and I glare at each other. I size him up, taking in the stance of his shoulders and the tension in his jaw.
He’s gotten a little soft. I know he knows how to fight, but with the babies…
“Dino, I literally will use this stun gun on you without a single heartbeat of hesitation,” I hear Gia call from the doorway behind me.
Fuck.
If it’s Gia, it’s serious.
Slowly, I turn. Sure enough, she has a Taser pointed right at me.
I glare at her, and she smiles. “I’ll do it and you know I will,” she says cheerfully.
Sal, holding their baby, gives me a nod. “Leave the room, brother.”
Fuck.
If your baby brother is telling you to fuck off, it might be time to fuck off.
I storm out, pushing past Gia gently, and avoiding Sal and the baby entirely. I walk down the hall to my bedroom, which isn’t so much my space as it is somewhere for me to sleep sometimes.
Once inside, I slam the door and sit down on my bed.
Only then do I put my head in my hands and grit my teeth against the shame that’s swirling through me in a torrent of emotion.
How the fuck did I even get here?
Marisol is… well.
She’s a dream.
One that I’ve had every night for the past five years. One that I’ve fantasized about, especially after I found out about the twins. The day that I discovered her, and my kids?
Fuck.
I need to take a shower. I’m fucking… I just need to.
Heading in to the attached bathroom, I strip and turn the water on ice cold. I get in, hoping the shockingly icy water will keep me from thinking about her but….
I shut my eyes, remembering it.
5 years ago
I found her.
I thought that Marisol, my dream girl, was lost. After I woke up and never saw her again, it seemed like something that was a complete non-starter. She wasn’t with me. I didn’t know her last name. I didn’t know shit.
Until a letter appeared at my doorstep, with a picture of her.
And two kids who look like me.
There’s no fucking way it’s her. But here I am, in Fort Lauderdale, looking for her.
Because if she is who I think she is?
I’m in a whole fucking mess of trouble.
I’m outside of the shop that they just went into. The person who sent me the letter told me that if I don’t pay, they’ll come after her. After all three of them.
And they’ll make it seem like it was our family who did it.
Marisol’s father will wipe my family from the face of the fucking earth if that’s the case. He’s so much bigger than we are.
And so much worse.
The little bell on the door rings, and I duck, trying to stay out of their way. Sure enough, Marisol and two kids, twin girls, come out. They chat animatedly in Portuguese, and I regret ever failing out of Portuguese in high school.
Fuck.
There’s no denying the kids are mine. I grab my phone and type out a number. There’s only one person I know I can count on right now.
“Dino?” my brother rumbles.
I suck in a breath.
And I tell Marco four words that I never thought I’d say.
“I need your help…”
A knock on the door jars me from my memories. My eyes snap open and I shut off the water, grabbing a towel and opening the bathroom. I march to the door of my bedroom, wrapping a towel around my waist.
I open it.
It’s Sal.
“Brother,” he says simply.
I ignore him, turning to rummage through a drawer. I produce a pair of basketball shorts, then step inside the bathroom, tugging them on without any regard for Sal’s presence.
When I emerge, I glare at Sal. “The fuck do you want.”
“My wife almost tased you.”
I nod. “I have a feeling she would do that a lot if she could.”
Sal nods. “You’re not wrong. But you can’t deny that it’s kind of warranted.”
“The fuck does that mean?”
He sighs heavily, and sits on my bed. “Dino…”
“What?”
“The attitude, man. It’s terrible.”
I don’t reply.
“I got it when you were a kid. Marco isn’t… following Marco isn’t a fun place to be,” Sal says quietly. “But you’re grown. It’s time to back off. We’re a family, you know. Us and the Rossi’s. We’re on each other’s teams.”
Yeah. Fucking. Right.
“So my teammates would fucking tase me if they could?”
Sal looks up sharply. “Dino… “
“Elio and Gia might be on your fucking team, Sal,” I snarl. With my damaged vocal cords, the words are barely a whisper, and they hurt as they rasp over my throat. “You and Caterina might get along like a house on fucking fire with them. But I’m not you. I have never been one of you,” I hiss.
The last word seems to linger in the air.
Sal’s eyes drift over my torso and neck. Both he and Marco are built like our grandfather. Big, with big shoulders, muscles that pile up into pretty shapes.
If they’re built like an ox, I’m built like a fucking wolf.
I’m faster than they are. Strong, but more wiry. Both Marco and Sal look like linebackers, and I’m more…
Soccer. My body is suited to a different sport entirely.
That’s not what he’s looking at, though. He’s my brother, he’s seen me naked more than once. I also know that he’s not interested in the tattoos that cover me so thickly, there’s barely any skin showing through the dark patterns of ink on my body.
He’s looking at the scars.
I turn and snatch a shirt up and tug it over my torso. “Yeah. I know you know what the fuck I’m talking about, Sal,” I snap. “Elio is your fucking brother-in-law. Gia is your fucking wife. They’re my bosses.”
More than that, I’m alive literally because Elio decided not to kill me out of his devotion to Caterina. If he had his way, I’d be buried in the fucking lake, cement brick around my feet, my corpse a vibrant habitat for some fucking fish or shit like that.
No, Elio and Gia do not like me. They have clearly pointed out that I’m alive because they love Caterina and Sal.
And they never once let me forget it.
Sal looks at me, his lips curling into a frown that makes my gut twist. “You could fix that.”
“Yeah, fuck off.”
“The attitude, Dino…”
“If you don’t like my fucking attitude, then fuck you,” I bark.
Sal heaves a sigh. The little muscle in his jaw ticks as he stares at me. “Fine. Whatever. Your kids are in the house, man. If they see you like this…”
“They won’t,” I respond quickly.
I’m not a fucking idiot.
And, they won’t see me at all. Marisol kept them hidden from me. She kept them hidden from everyone, and for all I know, they have no fucking clue who their daddy is.
Unless she tells me otherwise, I’m going to keep it that way.
I spent so much time trying to protect Marisol and the twins from afar. Marco went into fucking witness protection to help me.
And now they’re here.
In this house.
What the fuck do I do now ?
Sal stands up. “I’ll let you know when the doctor has a verdict.”
“I’ll be there.”
“I think it’s probably best if you stay here, Dino,” he says gently.
I grunt. Part of me wants to fight him on it.
Part of me, however, doesn’t care.
“Ok. Stay here,” Sal says. He shuts the door to my room, and I sit right back down on the bed.