When Villains Rise (Anti-Heroes in Love 2)

Jerkily, I nodded. “It’s not you I’m afraid of really. I don’t…trust myself with how much I want you.”

He cocked his head, confusion creasing his broad forehead. I couldn’t curb the impulse to hesitantly reach out to run a finger over the indentation there. “I wonder if you trust yourself at all sometimes. Non ti preoccupare, do not worry, I will teach you to trust yourself as I trust you.”

“You want to get a concussion before we even land?” Frankie called as the plane noticeably swooped lower in descent. “Sit your big ass down, Boss.”

Dante shot him a look over his shoulder. When he looked back at me, his eyes were hot and solemn. “In New York, you were my champion, hmm? My lawyer and my advocate striving to keep me safe. Well, Napoli is my courtroom. Put down your weapons, relax your shields. For once in your life you do not have to fight all your own battles. I will fight for you. Here and now, I will be your champion. Do you trust me?”

Was trust the same thing as love?

Because I loved him.

Lord knew I loved this man with the olive-black eyes and golden heart better than I’d loved anything else in my life.

But trust? I hadn’t trusted anyone new in so long I wondered if I even had the capacity for it anymore.

I sucked in a deep breath through my teeth and nodded slowly. “I trust you. Io sono con te.”

I am with you, I said, echoing the words he’d spoken to me during that horrific car chase on Staten Island. And I was. For better or worse, I was with Dante Salvatore, mafioso and wanted fugitive.

Now, I just had to discover what that made me.

“Bene.” His face broke into that broad, magnificent grin that stole the breath from my lungs.

Satisfied, he got back into his seat, attached his seat belt, and turned to speak in low Italian with Frankie.

I tuned them out, staring down at my thighs where the strap of the holster was barely discernable through the fabric. The cold metal of the gun was warming slightly against my flesh. It should have made me nervous to have a concealed weapon on my person. It was illegal in the States and I’d never in my life had a weapon stronger than pepper spray on my person.

But the weight of it felt good.

I was heading into the lion’s den and I needed all the weapons I could get. Not just to defend me, but to defend Dante, even to defend Frankie and the rest of the ragtag team of criminals in Dante’s crew who had become something like family to me over the past few months.

Dante’s love had razed me to the very ground of my soul, demolishing all my preconceived notions of right and wrong, even of my own identity and desires. I was going to step off this plane a new woman and for the first time in my life, I was excited by my lack of foresight and structure.

So, when the plane landed smoothly a private runaway outside of Naples, I took Dante’s offered hand with a wide smile that made him blink.

I was still smiling when the attendant opened the door and I stepped into the blinding sun of a mid-morning winter’s day in my hometown. It was that very same sun that blinded me for just a moment.

In that moment, I heard a series of mechanic clicks like locks sliding into place.

I frowned as I blinked away the sunspots, but Dante was already pulled me hard back into his chest then slightly behind his body.

Finally, I understood why.

The clicks weren’t a series of locks turning.

But a series of guns loading.

“Ciao, Don Salvatore!” Someone called warmly in Italian, a man who stepped out from the congregation of armed soldati to stalk toward the stairs leading up to the plane.

Dante didn’t move a muscle as the short, portly man with diamonds in both ears lumbered up the stairs and came to a stop before us. He had small dark eyes, wet black like an oil slick and just a greasy. With a jovial grin, he lifted a massive handgun in his left hand and pressed it as high as he could reach on Dante, right on the soft underside of his chin.

“Benvenuto a Napoli.”

Welcome home.

Three

Dante

Rocco Abruzzi was a typical Made Men. In it for the cash, the girls, and the power. He had two ex-wives and a current one, each younger than the last, as well as two mistresses he kept housed on opposite sides of town. One was classy, the other trashy, a staple of Piazza Garibaldi where the seedy side of the city thrived. He’d grown up in deep poverty the way many Camorra soldati did, but the reason he thrived and rose in the ranks when so many didn’t was because Rocco had a mean streak a mile wide. He loved to hit his wives, see out his own hits even though Dons never carried out their own kill orders as a rule, and he was known as ‘Rocky Rocco’ by his street thugs because he’d been known to beat a man just for looking at him wrong.