“Not everything is so black and white, Elena,” I murmured as I slid a lock of her deep red hair between my fingers. “Between the hero and the villain, there is the anti-hero. A person who may do evil deeds and seem unscrupulous, but who, within their own set of morals, possesses a big heart and the willingness to protect that which they know to be good. I know you well enough now that whatever cruelty you gave those two stemmed from the fact that they didn’t love you enough to treat you with kindness.”
Her sigh was accompanied by a shudder. “You can’t know that, for sure. But…I like that you give me the benefit of the doubt.” She tipped her head to the ceiling as if to confess to God. “It’s you that’s made me happy today. A man I thought I’d hate is now one of the men I most admire. I just don’t know what that means.”
Her admiration felt like an anointment from God.
“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” I assured her. “Happiness is the point.”
She pursed her lips around her knee-jerk reaction to argue with me, then sighed. “You make everything sound so simple when it’s not.”
She was right; it wasn’t. But lying there naked and cooling after some of the most intense sex I’d ever had, I couldn’t help but wonder if it could be.
If there was a way to ensure we could be happy together for longer.
Maybe even forever.
ELENA
It snowed the day we finally heard when Dante’s case would go to trial.
April 17th.
That unlucky number.
The number of death.
I sat at the table staring blindly out the window after Yara passed on the news. I should have been working, filing some of the cases a senior partner had given me to work on, or putting my plan for the bookie who had rolled on Dante into action.
But I just sat there and stared out the glass as the first December snow fell on Manhattan and turned the calamitous, colorful city into a muffled world of white.
I officially had an end date for the risk I was taking that could make my career or destroy it.
An end date for my assignation with the capo.
So why did I feel so…out of sorts? Gloomier than I had in months, since well before I’d moved into Dante’s vivacious home.
Maybe that was it. I would just miss his company. I would miss his crew and our routine. I would miss Rora’s precocious chatter and inability to cook without making a mess. I’d miss Bambi’s sweet laughter and gentle presence. I’d even miss Tore, in a way, though we never conversed very much. I’d miss him because I liked to see the way he made Dante smile.
I groaned, dropping my head to the conference room desk.
This was not good.
In the week since the car chase that had culminated in our tryst on his Ferrari, Dante and I had found time and reason to touch every day. He’d fucked me on the piano, in that colossal shower of his, and in his office pinned to the same bookshelf where he’d pressed that searing, significant little kiss to my neck weeks before. We came together explosively every single time.
I knew logically it was because Monica’s procedure had worked. The painful, stunting cysts on my ovaries that had kept me from feeling anything more than lukewarm pleasure were gone. After nearly two years of intense therapy, I was finally in a good place with my body and my past.
It could have been any man after that to make me orgasm.
But it wasn’t just any man.
It was Dante Salvatore, the black-eyed capo.
How could I have allowed this to happen?
I was in no way objective about him as a client anymore.
In fact, I was in danger of losing my blind respect for the law and completely compromising my previous hardline views of morality because the truth was, they were not always properly aligned.
Dante was one of the best men I knew, and I could admit that now.
But he was also, without any doubt, a criminal of the highest order.
The old Elena would have wanted him behind bars for life.
The new Elena couldn’t imagine even a single day without him.
It was a complete mess.
Worse, I was worried about him.
Worried that April 17th would come and Yara, the legal team, and I would fail to defend him properly. That the most vital man I’d ever known would be forced to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
I simply couldn’t fathom that, and I didn’t want to.
So I found myself doing something incredibly stupid.
I collected my purse and coat and left the office just after noon. A cab took me deep into the Bronx, to a heavily Irish neighborhood with a local watering hole called Father Patrick’s.
I’d overheard Dante’s crew mention it in conjunction with Thomas Kelly, the Irish mobster.