When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

I’d lost my virginity that weekend and returned feeling worldly both for my travels and my carnal experience. It wasn’t until later, when Christopher grew cruel, but more, when Cosima finally got us out of Napoli and away from him, that I realized what a nightmare that pretty place of Sorrento had symbolized for me.

Sorrow warped my throat into a misshapen swollen mess, air catching in the narrow channel until I felt I might choke.

I’d lost so much of myself before I’d ever truly known who I was.

It was strange to mourn for your own life, but as I sat at the piano and poured my overfull soul into the keys, the music sweet and aching in my ears, I said a little prayer that I might recover some of those precious fragments one day. That I might not go on so hollow and brittle, ready to crack into sharp pieces that might pierce anyone so brave as to pick them up.

As the final strains of the movement dissolved in the air, the staccato slap of clapping hands reverberated through the space.

“Bellisima, Elena,” Dante Salvatore commended over the hearty sound of his applause as he stood leaning against the doorframe between my living room and hallway. “Who knew you had such beauty at your fingertips?”

I blinked at him, prying my mind out of my dreamy introspection into the present, madly wondering what the condemned mafioso was doing in my house.

He took the time to smile; a long, slow pull of his full lips into a heart-stopping grin that carved creases into his cheeks and fine lines beside his big, dark eyes. It was the smile of a born charmer. He assumed it would work on me just as I was sure it had worked on countless women before.

Instead, it doused me in cold water, awakening me to full, alert outrage.

“What are you doing in my house?” I demanded coldly as I stood and walked to my kitchen to grab the landline. I raised the handle threateningly. “Do I need to call the police because there is an intruder in my home?”

“By all means,” he allowed agreeably, extending his massive hands with a shrug. Belatedly, I noticed the white plastic bag in his grip. “But I am an intruder bearing gifts, and I’ve never known an Italian woman to turn away a handsome man with food.”

I sniffed. “I don’t consider myself an Italian woman.”

“Ah,” he said irritatingly in the same tone my smug, know-it-all therapist used when I said something he found enlightening. “Just as I do not consider myself a Brit.”

“No matter what you chose to believe, you are the brother of a duke. I’d imagine that’s rather hard to ignore,” I quipped, determined to cut him to ribbons with my barbed tongue before tossing him out on his ear.

“You’d be surprised,” he said as he moved into my kitchen as if he had dined there a thousand times before. I watched, struck mute by his audacity, as he dropped the takeout bag on the marble counter and began to open cupboards in search of glasses. Once found, he produced a bottle of Italian Chianti from the bag with a flourish and continued to speak as if picking up the thread of a conversation we had already been having. “A little birdie told me Chianti is a favorite of yours. Typically, I would pair it with a good pasta, but that same birdie informed me you avoid Italian food. So…” He smiled again, that great big grin on his great big face. “I brought Sushi Yasaka.”

Pain lanced through me so intensely, I flinched then watched Dante’s smirk fall on the left side like a crookedly hung painting.

It was such a little thing, but I’d found it was the collection of small reminders that combined throughout the day to leave me aching and tired.

Sushi Yasaka had been our place, Daniel’s and mine.

I hadn’t eaten there in months as a result, but a small part of me yearned for the tuna sashimi Dante pulled from the bag.

“Bad memories?” he questioned so softly I found myself answering before I could stop myself.

“Old memories,” I allowed before shaking my head and fixing him with another glare. “Now, Edward Davenport, I’d like to know what you are doing in my house uninvited? It seems you have a habit of breaking in where you aren’t wanted.”

The first time I’d met Dante, it had been at the hospital bedside of my beloved Cosima. The sight of such a large Italian man looming over my prone sister had instilled a fresh terror in me that I hadn’t felt in years.

Needless to say, it hadn’t exactly been a successful first impression.

Dante, though, only chuckled in that way I’d learned he had when someone tried to make him face uncomfortable truths. “I was invited to her bedside. You just didn’t know it. And I am here, quite simply, Elena, to determine if you are fit to be one of my legal representatives.”