When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

“He sounds like a complicated man,” Beau said gently. “Fitting for a complicated woman.”

I nodded, rolling my teeth under my lips to keep from sobbing. “He tells me to be brave.”

“And do you feel that way with him?”

Another nod, my lips wobbling.

“Then what happened? Why can’t you be with him?”

“He’s leaving,” I murmured. “He has to leave now because of me. He’s going, and I don’t know where or for how long, but I probably won’t ever see him again. And I love him.”

The tears were burning up as my skin heated with something like anger, something with bite. Suddenly, I was furious at the world for doing this to me, for giving me this beautiful man in this wretched situation and then for making it impossible for me to be with him.

“I can’t explain what’s happened inside me,” I cried, clutching at my heart through my chest like I could pry it from between my ribs and show him how it had been altered. “But I’m not the same anymore. I used to think I knew who I was, but I never felt like this before.”

“Like what?”

“So alive I burn.”

Beau blinked at me as I leaned over him, panting with the force of the turmoil coursing through me. “Elena, why can’t you go with him?” he finally said.

“Because, because I just told you! I have no idea where he is going or for how long or with who. I have a job here and a life, and I can’t just leave that for…for a giant question mark.”

“You’re not leaving it for a giant question mark,” he reminded me gently. “You’re leaving it for him.”

“He didn’t ask me to go with him.” It burned in me, but it was the truth. He’d never asked. He’d only told me I couldn’t. That I had to stay.

“Are you so sure he didn’t ask because he didn’t want to ask you to give up your entire life for him?”

“No,” I admitted. “That’s basically what he said.”

“Then you have a choice, Elena, and I don’t envy it,” Beau said. “But I think you should consider it hard. I’ve never seen you like this.”

“A mess?” I said with a snotty laugh.

“So alive you burn,” he repeated my words back to me softly. “I’ll be right back, okay?”

I barely noticed him leaving. I just flipped to my back and stared at the ceiling.

I’d shot my dad.

Together, Dante and I had killed him.

I knew it wasn’t something I was going to get over anytime soon. I knew I’d need endless rounds of therapy to even begin to make sense of the tangle of relief, justification, anger, and despair I felt about the act.

But I didn’t regret it for one second.

He’d threatened Mama, Giselle, and Genevieve.

He’d destroyed our lives in Naples and sold Cosima into sexual slavery.

He’d nearly killed Dante.

And even if none of the other things had happened, I knew in my heart that would have been enough reason for me to kill him.

I couldn’t bear the thought of knowing I existed in world where Dante didn’t.

And he had done the same for me.

I’d always known Dante was a killer.

You only had to look at those massive hands quilted with muscle, ribboned with tendons and veins that popped beneath his deeply tan skin to know that there was sheer murderous power there.

But this was different.

Knowing that Dante had killed for me, that he had risked his freedom to search for me and helped end the life of a man who had made me suffer the entire length of mine, resonated somewhere deep inside.

It was the same place that burned when he touched me, when he taught me what to do with his body and what to do with mine. It was the same place that stirred whenever my family had been threatened in Naples and I’d stood up to protect them.

Because they were mine to protect.

Just as it seemed, now I was Dante’s to protect.

It was a place of instinct, a primal impulse in my gut that transcended thought and even feeling.

Dante was mine.

How could I just let him go?

I jumped to my feet and froze in my living room, gazing at the furniture and art I’d collected from another life with another man. It seemed ridiculous to me now that I’d held on to it for so long.

I’d stopped grieving Daniel a long time ago. The truth was, I never loved him the way I should have, and obviously, he’d felt the same way about me. What I’d mourned from that loss for years wasn’t the man, but the woman I’d thought I had been with him. No, more than that, I lamented those last shreds of hope I’d retained then lost when he left me for Giselle.

I missed my capacity to love, my propensity to have faith in people and mostly, in myself.