When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

His eyes were closed, breath feathering faintly through his mouth. I looked up at Frankie frantically, but he ignored me as he cut open Dante’s black sweater and revealed the Teflon beneath.

Two bullets were grouped in the center of his chest, flat as disks.

Frankie removed the Velcro straps and lifted the vest from his chest.

A second later, Dante sucked in a deep breath and opened his eyes.

“Oh my god.” I didn’t think I’d ever cried so much in my life. “Dante, you idiot. What are you doing here saving me?”

Dante blinked up at me, then looked at Frankie for a second before laughing, wincing at the pain in his ribs as he did. “Only you would be mad at me for saving you, my fighter,” he teased, the nickname my father had used somehow poetry from Dante’s lips.

And then his hand fisted in my hair, and he pulled me down to kiss me.

Hauling me halfway over his body even though it had to hurt, he kissed me like he hadn’t taken a breath since the last time he saw me, and he was dying for fresh air.

I kissed him right back, pouring every single inch of me into that embrace. There were no words for the relief and gratitude and love flowing through me, so I fed them to him with my lips.

“We gotta go,” Frankie grunted from beside us. “You can do that in the car.”

I pulled away and reached out to squeeze his arm. “Thank you, Frankie.”

His smile was tight but genuine. “Jaco said the police scanner picked up the disturbance. They’ll be here in minutes.”

Dante nodded, grimacing again as he got to his feet, reaching for me the second he did. He untangled me from his side and took his gun from Frankie before stalking over to Seamus. I didn’t know if he was dead. Honestly, I hadn’t cared.

The only thing I needed was for Dante to be okay.

Still, I gasped as Dante stared down at my father and shot off three rounds into his skull. When he looked at me, his eyes glistened like an oil slick.

I didn’t ask him if Seamus had already been dead or if he’d killed him.

I understand that was part of the reason he’d done that.

To show him I understood, I extended my hand to him and watched as relief moved over his face. He stepped away from the body and tucked me under his chin as he ordered Frankie, “Clean up and burn it down. Leave the bodies.”

“You’re bleeding,” I whispered as he tugged me into his body, and I caught sight of the bubbling wound to his left shoulder, just beneath his collarbone.

“I’m fine,” he assured, punctuating the words with another savage kiss I felt in my numb toes. “Andiamo, lottatrice mia. It seems I have to thank you for saving my life.”

“I think it was a team effort,” I said on a giddy, mindless laugh as my adrenaline started to fade.

Dante held me to his side as we climbed the stairs, walking over the odd dead Irishman as we left the house. Frankie stayed behind downstairs, and I caught sight of Marco with a canister of gas in the living room on the main level.

By the time we made it to the car at the curb, flames were already flickering from inside the house.

There were no neighbors in the streets. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood with park committees and neighborhood watch.

Chen was in the driver’s seat when we got in the black SUV, and he tipped his chin up at me in the rearview. “Sorry it took a minute.”

Another reckless laugh galloped from me. “That’s okay. I knew you’d come.”

A minute later, after two figures ran from the house into another waiting car, we took off, and I finally took a breath.

And then another.

Each inhale bringing more panic than it had before.

Dante held me against him, turning despite the pain in his shoulder so that he could face me head-on and cup my face in his hands.

“You’re okay,” he said in that British-Italian accent I’d once hated. “Io sono con te. I am with you now, si? You are safe, Elena.”

I blinked at him, falling into those night-dark eyes, finding solace in them when I used to find immorality. My hands moved over him, touching whatever I could just to reassure myself that things hadn’t ended differently in there. That he was alive and Seamus hadn’t succeeded in taking yet another thing from my life.

And I knew it then.

What it was to truly be in love with someone, body and soul, everything else be damned.

Because I’d known as I picked up the gun, heavier and hotter than I would have imagined, that I’d raze every single one of my morals and mandates to the ground if it meant keeping Dante alive and at my side.