When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

Yara’s nail dug into my skin painfully, and when I winced slightly, she smoothed the pad of her thumb over the hurt. “They held a beautiful funeral for him. The capo gave me a traditional black lace veil one of the wives had made herself, and I saw my Donni off the way he would have wanted to go, with his family surrounding him and the man who’d saved them from destitution beside us. Do you know who that man was, Elena?”

I knew.

My lips spoke the words before my mind could even compute them. “Amadeo Salvatore.”

“Yes,” she almost hissed, and I finally recognized where that manic intensity vibrating from her entire body stemmed from. Loyalty. “Amadeo Salvatore did right by a man he barely knew. He took care of an entire family just because a young boy who worked for him died. When Signore Carozza died, Tore paid for his funeral. When Donni’s sister wanted to go to school, he sent her to the Universita di Bologna.” She paused to smile, all teeth. “When I needed a job after returning heartbroken to America, Tore found me one, and when he moved here five years ago, I was finally in a place to return his loyalty.”

My mouth was dry, my tongue coated with the bitterness of coffee. I had difficulty swallowing, maybe because I didn’t want to ingest Yara’s tale. I didn’t want to hear stories about the mafia being the good guys.

I’d already had to rethink so many fundamental beliefs since Daniel left me. I wasn’t ready to empathize with the villains who’d haunted me and mine my entire life.

Yara seemed to sense my recalcitrance, her mouth twisting tight over the carbonate anger I could see bubbling inside her. “A poor lawyer follows the law to the exact letter; the best lawyer makes the law work for them. Law and morality can’t always coexist, Elena, and sometimes, the difference between the two is loyalty.”

“What are you asking of me?” I demanded, tugging my hand free from her damp grip to reclaim my cold coffee. “I’m already on the case.”

“Are you?” she asked, one brow arched high like a question mark. “I was of the impression Elena Lombardi didn’t half-ass anything.”

“I don’t,” I countered immediately, unthinkingly.

“Good,” she said, her smile smug as the cat who ate the canary. “Then you’ll be willing to do anything to win this case.”

I glared at her truculently, unwilling to answer.

“I know you don’t want your sister’s best friend to come to any harm.” Her voice was warm again, cajoling. “You saw what this trial is doing to Dante. That won’t be the first attempt on his life if he can’t shake a conviction. His other…associates don’t trust a man on trial anymore. Rats are too common in the sewers of the underworld since Tomasso Bruschetta and Reno Maglione turned in the 80s.”

“I don’t want him to die,” I agreed because I’d found it was true. The sight of that massive body sprawled and lax on the black leather couch, broad face sheened with clammy sweat, all vitality lost, still made my stomach ache.

Yara leaned back in her seat, crossed her legs, and folded her hands in her lap. I recognized the pose because I’d often adapted that false coolness when I was about to go in for the kill.

My blood hummed beneath my skin in a way that felt like a pulled alarm, alerting me to leave at once.

I didn’t.

I should have.

But I sat there frozen in the amber of my curiosity and almost morbid desire to be included.

And Yara delivered her blow.

“In such an important case, where information is swift-moving, and I don’t have the time to communicate with Mr. Salvatore as regularly as he requires, we’ve come up with a solution.”

No.

I knew what she would say, heard it as if spoken by the devil in a voice of smoke and brimstone as she said the words I echoed in my mind.

“We need you as point person on this, Ms. Lombardi. We need you to move into Mr. Salvatore’s apartment.”

I’d always had a bad temper.

Irish and Italian blood didn’t exactly lend itself to serenity, and at my heart, I was deeply emotional, too sensitive for my own good. So, I often lashed out violently at anyone who wounded me, the instinct to inflict hurt on those who injured me almost animalistic.

I’d hurt Daniel, ridiculing him about his sexual deviancies because I was so ashamed I couldn’t get past my own sexual issues to even attempt to understand his kinky inclinations.

I’d hurt Giselle when I found out she was pregnant, wanting to eviscerate her with my words if I couldn’t with my hands. Wanting to destroy her as surely as she’d destroyed my dreams.

I’d hurt Christopher when he’d tried to assault Giselle at her gallery opening, not only for hurting me so long ago so irrevocably but also for hurting my sister. In a perverse way, only I was allowed to do that, and only then because I felt I’d earned the right.