When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

I looked down at his tanned hand in my own, tracing the lines on his palm the way I’d done when we were children. He and Cosima both had the same long emotion line bisecting their upper palm. They’d always been more emotionally intelligent than Giselle and me, always ready with the right words and the right kinds of hugs.

“I have a therapist now,” I explained, still avoiding his eyes.

“You’ve always had a brother,” he offered. “Some people say I’m wise beyond my years.”

I laughed. “It doesn’t count when you say it to yourself in the mirror, Seb.”

“Hey, self-validation is important too,” he quipped easily before sobering and enfolding my hand in his. “I used to think we were such a close family. It took me a long time to realize that we are a collection of strangers pretending to be family. We’ll never know each other well enough to love each other properly if we keep secrets the way we have.”

I winced slightly as his words hit the bull’s-eye. “Ouch, Seb, take care, will you? The drugs aren’t that strong.”

“I am,” he countered, not to be deterred, that famous Lombardi tenacity setting his face to stone. “If you want to share with me.”

Gingerly, feeling the sharp pangs in my abdomen, I leaned back against the tower of pillows to stare at the elaborate molding on the ceiling and blew a burst of air between my lips. “How long do you have?”

In response, Seb stood up, kicked off his leather boots, and crossed to the other side of the bed so he could lever himself on top of the covers beside me. Once he arranged the pillows to his liking and propped a hand behind his head, he turned to face me with an expectant eyebrow raised.

For some reason, I was sick with nerves even though I knew rationally Sebastian wasn’t going to ridicule me for the myriad of fears that kept me up at night and made sleep nearly impossible.

He was my brother.

That should mean something.

Only Giselle had taught me, and maybe I’d taught her, that it didn’t mean much.

It hadn’t always been like that, though.

When I was very young, I had many friends in our neighborhood, clusters of boisterous children whose mamas grouped together as they did in the open doorways of houses chattering as they hung laundry from the line and occasionally tended to various pots on the stove. This was when I was too young for true memory, so I’d often wondered how much of these hazy images I made up to soothe myself when I got older.

By the time Giselle was born, Mama and I were no longer part of that tight-knit community of Italian mothers and their babies. They knew us for what Seamus had made us.

Outsiders not to be trusted; a family whose words were no good.

In a place like Napoli, where almost everyone was poor and the Camorra ruled, your word was the only currency that really mattered.

And Seamus had robbed us of it.

So when Giselle was born, red-headed like me in a sea of dark-haired youth with little freckles on her cheeks she’d taken from our Irish father, I loved her instantly. I felt profoundly, or as profoundly as a four-year-old can, that Giselle was my gift from God. I constantly badgered Mama to hold her, feed her, brush the fragile, silken tangle of her curling flame-colored hair. I cooed to her in Italian, sweet little rhymes I made up and stories about foreign sister princesses who might one day be queens.

It was so long ago, yet even now, sitting in Dante’s apartment with Sebastian at my side, a lawyer at a top-five firm with a gorgeous house of my own in Gramercy Park, almost as far removed from the past as I could possibly be, I felt the ache of those emotions like a latent echo in my chest.

I’d always wanted to love Giselle, but life had conspired against me, as it often did, to ruin whatever good there was between us.

I wondered if there was any wedge more destructive to the bond between two sisters as the love of a shared man.

No wonder the love and attention of two was our utter demise.

My mind was on her, on our family, so I started there.

“Do you remember me when we were young?” I asked him, reaching over to grab his hand because suddenly I needed comfort, and touching him was the only way I could find it. He wrapped his fingers around mine and squeezed. “Tell me about the Elena you remember.”

Sebastian didn’t laugh or tease the way he usually might have. Instead, he considered me. “You were like our second parent. Seamus was never around, and Mama was working in the restaurant in town, or depressed, lying in her room, or out looking for Dad. You were always bossing us around, getting us ready for school, making sure we were clean and doing our homework and in bed before nine.” He shook his head. “It was annoying then, but Cosima and I have talked about it a lot since. How grateful and lucky we are to have had you keeping our noses clean.”