When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

No matter what happened between us, there was no way in any world I could let someone hurt Giselle and her baby.

Absolutely no way.

Even though tears burned the backs of my eyes because I honestly didn’t see how I would get out of this situation intact, I shouldered my purse, swung on my coat, and left the office.

Adriano wasn’t waiting for me outside like he usually was even though I’d texted him fifteen minutes ago to tell him I was ready to leave. Worry twined with my panic and made me want to puke.

Before I left the security area, I did the one thing I could to ensure the best chance of this working out.

I texted Dante.

And then I strode across the lobby, pushed through the glass doors, and held my head high as I moved toward the black sedan idling at the curb.

Once, Dante had lectured me about sacrifice, but I didn’t truly understand until I opened the door and slid into the interior of that car.

“Hello,” Thomas Kelly said with a wide grin, and a moment later, he was on me.

DANTE

I was sitting at my desk listening to Roberto Brambilla detail his plan to use a local motorcycle gang to mule the drugs we brought in from the Basante family when a shudder seized my shoulders and wrenched at my spine painfully. My whole body seized with the sensation, then left in its wake a horrifying certainty.

Something monumentally wrong had happened.

My first thought was of Cosima and Alexander, so far away in England. My mind raced through theories, a bitter old member of the defunct Order of Dionysus who had escaped the judicial noose returning to kill them, an associate of Noel’s bent on revenge, to the more innocuous, a fall from Cosima’s Golden Akhal-Teke horse, Alexander in a motor accident.

Tore was at his house in upstate New York for the week, and even though I’d just gotten off the phone with him, I sent him a text coded to ask if anything was amiss.

I didn’t think of Elena until I was already calming down, having convinced myself premonitions didn’t exist, it was just a passing chill.

The moment her name sounded in my mind, I knew with bone-deep certainty, something had happened to her.

“Call Adriano,” I barked out to Marco, who was in the room with Roberto and me. “I want to know where Elena Lombardi is right fucking now.”

The claws eviscerating my gut, reducing my insides to ground meat, told me they wouldn’t find her. I ignored the men in our meeting, opening the door in my desk to reach for my two cell phones.

I had a text from Elena on one of them.

Seamus was going to take Giselle and Genevieve, maybe Mama, too. I had to go with them. I know you’ll find me, capo.

Xx,

E

Fury like I hadn’t known in years boiled my blood, eviscerating everything else in its path until I was a pure flame locked in human flesh.

A moment later, Chen appeared in my office doorway, his skin whitewashed with panic and his mouth tight, that stretched leash on my control snapped, and I exploded.

“Where the fuck is she?” I roared as I swept everything off my desk––computer, lamp, paperweight, stacks of money––and fisted my hands on the surface to lean over it into the men who filed into my office with their fucking tails between their legs. “Were you not supposed to keep an eye on her, motherfuckers?”

“Si, capo,” Chen said in flawless Italian, his jaw clenched so tight it was a wonder the words made it out of his mouth. “Adriano isn’t answering his phone either.”

“Figlio di puttana,” I cursed savagely as I ripped my hands through my hair. “Va bene, va bene, we are going to fix this. Get every motherfucking capo on the phone, Frankie. Marco, Chen, hit up Father Patrick’s. The bastardi Irishmen have taken Elena. Burn the fucking place to the ground if one of those assholes doesn’t give you answers. Jaco, you hit the streets. I want you talking to every goddamn person we know.”

Everyone nodded except Jaco, who worried his lip between his teeth as he lingered in the door.

“What’re you gonna do, Boss?”

I pinned him with an impatient glare. “You volunteering to take my mind off it? I could use a punching bag.”

His eyes widened slightly before he nodded and beat it out of my office.

Then, I did what I hadn’t done the history of my leadership of the family.

I called the Commission.

“Accardi,” I said when Orazio, the head of the Accardi family, answered the phone with a staccato grunt. “A woman’s been taken. I need to mobilize the families to find out any info they can get on who might have taken Elena Lombardi.”

There was a long pause filled with heavy, choking silence.

“Dante,” he finally said in his nasal voice, disrespecting me by addressing a Don by his first name. “You misplaced your hot figa of a lawyer, ugh?”