When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

None of the other men in the station made a single move to stop me.

I brought Jaco’s face to mine so I could sneer softly, just for him. “You call Elena a bitch ever again, Jaco, I’ll carve the word into your forehead with my blade, capisci?”

I dropped him unceremoniously, turning my back to finish my inventory of the guns.

Behind me, he choked and sucked in breath. “What the fuck, Dante? I’m your cugino. We’re fucking blood. Yet you treat me like this for calling it like it is? You’ve gone mad.”

“You’ve gone mad if you think you can talk to me like this,” I informed him coldly as I replaced the lid on the trunk and turned to face him again. “You forget I am capo dei capi of this outfit. Not you. I’m open to hearing what you’ve got to say, Jaco, but only if you can say it like a man and not a whiny troia.”

“Vaffanlo,” he cursed, gesturing rudely with his hand as he told me to fuck myself. “I’m just trying to look out for you. For this family. It’s all I got left, and I want to protect it.”

I softened just slightly, stepping forward to clasp him a little too hard on the shoulder. “I get it, cugino. You just have to remember, all I do, I do for this family.”

He deflated a fraction, but a petulant frown still dented his brow. “Not her.”

“No,” I agreed because that was true. “Elena is just for me.”

“’S stupid, D,” he argued again, but he knew he’d lost the fight.

“Forse,” I allowed that maybe it was. “But our biggest successes have come from my most daring gambles. I’m willing to stake a lot on this one.”

“You always said women ruin a man,” he reminded me perniciously. “They make them weak.”

I cocked my head, my hand squeezing his neck painfully. “Did I? I think you misunderstood. Maybe it was my accent, mm? What I said was that a man in love has one weakness, his woman. It’s his Achilles’ heel. But that same love makes the rest of him impenetrable, strong as a god.” I clapped my free hand to the other side of his throat and strangled his neck for one brief moment so he could feel my strength. “What do you think, Jaco? Do I seem weak?”

His pale brown eyes swarmed like the surface of a swamp with mixed emotions, his pride tangling with his love and loyalty. Finally, he reached up and planted his own hands on my shoulders in a show of brotherhood and dipped his head slightly. I bent forward to kiss his head and let go of my hold on him.

“Va bene,” I told him, dismissing both our argument and his presence. “Go pick up my niece and Bambi. Give them my love.”

He nodded almost to himself, then shot me a sheepish grin. “Grazie, D.”

I lifted my chin at him. “Vattene.”

He left.

I watched him go with my hands crossed over my chest, brain whirring. I wasn’t surprised when Frankie stepped up beside me and adopted the same pose.

“You think we got a problem with him?”

I sighed, scrubbing my hand over the sharp stubble at my jaw. I wanted to be upstairs with Elena, preferably inside her, discovering more of the ways I could make her come for me. Instead, I was deep underground dealing in the shadows I’d lived in my entire life.

“I find it hard to believe he’d risk a business he stood to inherit if something happened to me. He’s a man motivated by his family name and the success attached to that. We’re doing well despite the RICO case. As long as we bring in money, Jaco should be loyal beyond the ties Tore gave him. But after Mason, I’m not sure about anyone. Wouldn’t be sure of you if you didn’t owe me your goddamn life.”

Frankie nodded. “If I ever thought of leaving, Liliana would kill me.”

I laughed because that was the truth. His wife was not to be trifled with even though she was just a slip of a thing.

“Elena’s got it too,” he continued as if picking up the thread from a conversation we’d been having before.

“What?”

“What it takes to be donna.”

I blinked because even though Elena had been on my mind, in my fucking blood, for weeks, I hadn’t thought hard about our future. Maybe because I knew logically we couldn’t have one.

She was too proper, too upstanding and moral. Too disgusted with the details of work that made up my entire existence. There was no way we could ever have a…relationship beyond the walls of my apartment, beyond the scope of this case.

Yet the idea of giving her up made me mad. Crazed as a beast gone feral, foaming at the mouth.

I was the only man who had ever made her come.