8. Dino
8
DINO
You are not our father’s son.
I’ve been through a lot of shit in my life. Lots of bad shit. A lot of shit that I’m not proud of, but I got through.
This?
I feel like the center just fell out of my world, and I don’t have a fucking clue what to do with the hole that it left.
My ears are ringing. Marco’s mouth is moving, and I have no fucking clue what he’s saying.
All I hear is the same thing, over and over again.
You are not our father’s son.
“Dino,” I finally hear, the sound distant. “Bernadino,” Marco says, louder this time.
I look at him, but I have absolutely no idea what to say.
How could I?
How is there any possible response to what he just told me that doesn’t include me melting my brain from the inside fucking out?
You are not our father’s son.
“Breathe, Dino,” Marco says.
I glare at him.
“I promise, it will be better if you breathe.”
“Fuck you,” I snap. “There’s no fucking way this could be better, Marco.”
He raises his eyebrows.
I feel the rage boiling inside of me, a lava flow of darkness that’s pounding at my skin. I want to stand and punch him in his smug fucking face.
If he can’t talk because his jaw is broken, then he can’t say stupid shit like…
“I understand that this is a lot. But it’s true.”
If I had claws, I’d rip into him with them, right now.
“The. Fuck. Are. You. Saying,” I manage to grit out from between my teeth. My jaws are clenched so hard that I’m pretty sure one of my teeth just cracked.
I could just rearrange Marco’s face…
“No one knows, except Mom and I,” he says quietly.
I freeze.
Marco takes my sudden stillness as a sign to continue. “Dad wasn’t mom’s first choice for a husband. Right before she was supposed to get married, she went on a vacation to Greece with Zia Priscilla, and she met someone there. ”
“How. The fuck. Do you…”
He holds up a hand. “Let me finish. She met someone there. I don’t think it started out as anything but a friend to talk to. She married dad. Then, after I was born, she ran away for a while.”
“What’s a while?”
Marco shrugs. “Long enough that she came back, and I had a baby brother before I was two years old.”
Oh.
“How the fuck do you know this?”
“Apparently you look like him,” Marco says softly. “She wrote about it in her journals. I read them all, after she died. I was cleaning out their stuff and I found every single one, and I read them.”
Jesus fucking Christ. The amount of pain in Marco’s expression makes my chest ache. “Fuck, Marco,” I spit.
“She thinks Dad probably knew, but never said anything.”
“And she just… wrote this down.”
Marco shrugs. “Mom liked to journal.”
“What the fuck else did she write about?”
His face drops, and his eyes look kind of hollow and distant. “You don’t want to know.”
I’m still so stunned, I have no fucking clue why we’re even discussing this.
Until I remember.
“How the hell is this supposed to help me get Marisol back? ”
Marco nods. “There aren’t that many families who she would have known when she was there.”
I shudder at the word known , which feels pretty fucking biblical in this sense. “You’re talking about my… biological family,” I spit at him.
“Don’t fucking say it like that.”
I glance at him, surprised. Marco leans forward, his eyes on mine as he intensely stares me down. “Don’t ever fucking think that, Dino. I don’t give a fuck who your dad is. I don’t give a shit about what happened back then. You’re my fucking brother, you understand? You’re my family. Biologically. In every fucking way that counts.”
“Half-brother,” I whisper.
God, it’s so fucking weird to say. The words are almost bitter on my tongue, and I feel like I’m swallowing thorns when I shut my mouth.
How the fuck did this happen? My whole fucking life.
A lie.
Marco leans back. “You’re my brother, Dino,” he says fiercely. “No matter what anyone says, you’re my fucking brother.”
I don’t have anything to say to him. I just stare, noting the twitch in Marco’s jaw and the way his hands flex on the table.
For years, my big brother has been the only person who seemed to give a shit about me. Even then, I haven’t always liked the type of protection that Marco offers.
He’s been a dick. He’s been a controlling asshole. He tells about a quarter of the truth every time he speaks, and the rest he keeps to himself .
But he does always have a fucking plan.
I jerk my chin down in a nod.
Marco studies me for another minute, then continues. “Like I said, there are a select few families that she would have aligned with. I believe that I know which one. You can compete for Marisol’s hand as their heir,” he says.
I raise an eyebrow at him. “And they’d be fine with that? Some fucking kid from the states, pretending to be their previous fucking son?”
“Let me handle that,” Marco says smoothly.
I roll my eyes. “Come the fuck on, Marco. Ain’t no fuckin’ way that some group of people I’ve never fuckin’ met is going to play along with this bullshit.”
“I said I’d handle it,” Marco repeats, his voice low. “It’s not like you can make the necessary arrangements or requests, and it’s not like he’ll look. The family that I think we’re dealing with is old, and they are not active any longer, but it’s a name that Benicio Souza will not walk away from.”
I narrow my eyes. “This is fucking stupid.”
“It’s your only chance, Dino.”
The sincerity of his statement hits me like a ton of bricks.
He’s right.
He’s absolutely fucking right.
This is my only chance at getting Marisol back. At making sure the girls are safe, and cared for, and…
“The only other question is, do you want your girls to know who you are? ”
I look over at Marco.
He’s staring at me, and the way his eyes are digging into my skin, I feel…
Exposed.
I look away. “They don’t know I’m their fucking dad,” I mutter.
“Yes.”
It’s just one word, but it feels like a bomb in my mind.
I shut my eyes. “Marisol didn’t want to tell them about me.”
“Perhaps.”
“Why the fuck would I go against what she said, and why the fuck do I want them to know who I am?”
“So they can know who’s going to save their mother.”
My eyes snap open and I stare at my brother. For a minute, all I can do is look at him.
What if I fuck it up?
The thought is too fucking scary to say out loud. I can’t. I don’t want to.
I don’t want the girls to rely on me when I don’t even know if I can fucking pull it off.
Disappointing them…
“You’re going to save her,” Marco says softly. “I know it, Dino.”
“I don’t.”
He sighs. “You’ve always believed so little of yourself. ”
“The fuck?”
Marco looks me dead in the eye. “You’ve always thought poorly of yourself, Dino. Always had a chip on your shoulder that worked against your own fucking point. You’re a good man. You’ll be a good father. You’ll be a good husband. But you can’t do any of that shit without a wife, and you certainly can’t be the father to your children without her either. It would fucking kill you and you know it.”
“I…” my jaw snaps shut.
He has a point.
“I know that you’re sitting there listing all the ways you think you’re going to fuck this up. But Dino, I promise you that you won’t. You’re a much better man than you think you are, and while you don’t always have the best way of going about something, I know you. I know that when push comes to shove, you’re not going to shove wrong. You’re going to save her, if it’s the last thing you do.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “When did you become some fucking expert in me?”
“I’ve been your brother for your entire life, asshole. You think I haven’t spent enough time watching you be fully capable of all kinds of shit, then backing off of it because you thought you couldn’t do it?”
“You spent most of our lives trying to clean up my fucking messes,” I growl.
“Sure. You had a lot of them. But every single one of them, you could have fixed on your own.”
I glare at him, and he stands. “Enter the contest. I’ll give you a name. Promise your kids you’ll get their mom back. ”
“No.”
“Then lose her forever,” he shrugs. “But you said you were going to get her.”
I seethe, staring at him. I don’t want to do what he’s saying, but deep inside me, I recognize why.
I am afraid to fuck it up.
I am afraid to promise my daughters that I’m going to get their mom back, and then fail at that.
I’m afraid that once I show up, Marisol won’t want me.
Or, even worse…
That I’ll show up, and she will.
And I’ll fuck it up and lose her again.
“It’s a leap of faith, Dino. No one can predict the future. But I sure as hell know that you won’t get what you want sitting on your ass here,” Marco says.
He leaves the room.
I stare at the kitchen table. It’s dark, and I can hear Elio’s people moving softly around the house. Idly, I wonder if the girls are asleep.
I shouldn’t wake them up. Right?
I have no fucking clue how to be a dad. Clearly, my own role model thought I wasn’t even his kid, and put exactly zero effort into fucking helping me become someone.
Slowly, I put my elbows on the table and let my head sink into my hands.
Do I even call him dad anymore ?
I snort. Even as a kid, I knew something was fucking off. Dad always fucking had it out for me. I couldn’t so much as walk by without him finding something wrong with me, and then he would send Marco to hammer down on whatever the fuck it was that he took an issue with that day.
Dad never thought I would amount to shit.
Mom…
I squeeze my eyes shut.
Mom did.
She was always on my side. Always in my fucking corner. Always making sure that Dad and Marco didn’t make me too miserable.
I miss her.
It’s been years since their death. When they died after Caterina’s engagement party, every part of me wanted to find Elio Rossi and beat him to death. It was obvious, after all, that he’d organized a hit on my parents, and somehow had fucked it up to kill his own in the process.
The years, and Caterina’s reassurance that it wasn’t Elio, haven’t really done much to dull that pain. Working with Elio has been… calculated. A necessary risk, something that I’ve been angry about for a long time.
I don’t fucking like Elio.
I don’t fucking like Marco all the time, if I’m being honest.
Sal and Gia have their own thing now. Caterina and Elio do too. Marco is… Marco.
And I’m alone .
Always.
My tongue tastes bitter again.
If I’m being honest, I want what they have. I want someone to fucking belong to. Someone to come home to at night. Someone that I don’t feel like a fucking outcast around.
Right now, I am an outcast. I’m a stranger to my own children, and Marisol, the love of my fucking life…
I look up.
Marco’s right.
I have to do something about this, about her. I have to fucking make a choice.
I might not be my father’s son. I might not be my siblings’ brother.
But I’m their fucking dad.
And I’m going to get Marisol back. I belong one place in this world.
With her.
So I need to fucking make it happen.