When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

It reinforced what I already knew.

I was an island, and I was okay that way.

I didn’t need anyone to look out for me. I didn’t need to be coddled or protected the way the entire family had done to Giselle for her whole life.

I didn’t need anyone for anything.

By the time I reached my brownstone, my shoulders were pinned back, my chin high, my lips compressed around my righteous anger.

I didn’t have to cave in to this bullshit.

Yara was only acting on Dante’s behalf, and he was only acting like the capo he’d been for years.

But I wasn’t his soldier, and I didn’t have to go down without a fight.

There was a kernel of smug satisfaction in my heart as I walked up the stairs and unlocked my front door.

“I’ll wait here for you to collect your things,” a voice said as darkness separated from itself on the corner of my landing, and a man solidified from the shadows.

My heart slammed against my ribs, desperate to flee from the threat, but a small part of me recognized the voice.

“Frankie,” I greeted coldly. “Do you make it a habit of scaring women half to death?”

His smile was a flash of white in the darkness. “You’d be surprised.”

“I doubt that.”

Ignoring him, I pushed into my house and closed the door.

He could wait there all night.

I wasn’t going anywhere.

Twenty minutes later, I was drinking a glass of wine in the kitchen eating leftover noodles from the Thai place around the corner when the phone rang.

I answered by saying, “You might want to get Frankie’s address changed. If he insists on waiting for me to go with him, he’ll be living on my porch for the foreseeable future.”

And then I hung up.

When the phone rang again minutes later, I found my hunger had fled and tipped the rest of my dinner in the garbage before topping off my wine and moving into the living room to watch the latest episode of The Bachelor.

I almost didn’t hear the sound when it started up ten minutes after that, a faint whirring like a dentist’s drill, and then it took me too long to process why that sound would be emanating from my front stoop.

Moments later, there was a slight thud and then the sound of hard-heeled shoes against the wood floors in my hallway.

Frankie appeared in the doorway flanked by two men I recognized from the night of the San Gennaro party, a short, bearded man and a mammoth man with a face like a poorly chiseled block of granite. The tiny one held a drill in one hand, and Frankie tossed a small metallic object I recognized as a screw in his.

The bastards had taken my goddamn door off its hinges.

I gaped at them furiously, then exploded to my feet and stalked toward them with a finger pointed at them like a loaded gun. “Are you kidding me? You better put that door back exactly where you found it, and if there is any damage, your stronzo capo is paying for it, do you understand me?”

Frankie nodded solemnly, but there was a wicked gleam in his dark eyes that had me stopping in my tracks a few feet from him. “Whatever you say, Donna Elena.”

The big thug took a step toward me. Panic sizzled through me, an electric shock that faintly excited me even as it terrified me. I held my hands up and backed away, but he continued forward with zero expression on his craggy face.

“Do not touch me,” I ordered him imperiously.

He didn’t stop advancing.

I looked over his shoulder at Frankie, who had lost the battle with his smile and was grinning madly at me.

“If he puts one hand on me, I swear to God, I’ll cut it off,” I promised them both.

The short wise guy laughed, then covered it with a cough.

“This is kidnapping!” I snapped as the big guy reached for me, and I realized I was running out of living room and was almost up against the kitchen counter.

Frankie shrugged one shoulder. “I gave you a choice. You just made the wrong decision.”

“You don’t want me anywhere near your precious capo,” I swore darkly. “I’ll kill him for putting my career at risk. I’m serious.”

“I have no doubt you are,” he agreed easily, almost jauntily, enjoying the entire situation way too much. “I’d actually love to see you try.”

Clearly, there was no reasoning with these mindless savages.

So, when the man with the face of a mobster from a classic Hollywood film reached for my wrist, I resorted to the only thing I had left.

My self-defense training.

I brought my captured wrist up as if I was holding a mirror in my palm, which twisted the man’s arm upside down. Then I grabbed his wrist with my opposite hand and wrenched it hard until a bone popped beneath the skin, and his grip loosened as he grunted in pain.