When Villains Rise (Anti-Heroes in Love 2)

“No,” I murmured, staring at our twined fingers, Dante’s so thick and rough tipped.

Christopher’s had been long and pale, the knuckles knobby beneath the skin. I’d thought them elegant when I was younger, until they started to do cruel things to my body.

“Elena.” Dante hadn’t spoken to me in that tone before, sharp, almost alarmed. I looked over at him to find his eyes dark as pits. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing,” I assured.

Too quickly, too cheaply.

“Do I need to pull over this car and force you to tell me what’s causing that haunted look in your eye?” he demanded in the same voice he’d used when interrogating Umberto Arno in the basement. The voice of a ruthless capo.

“No,” I responded, almost mulishly, annoyed that he was so perceptive.

“Then tell me, now. And Lena, if you even think about lying to me or passing whatever it is off as non-trivial, I will not be responsible for my reaction, capisci?”

I sighed, but it released none of my tension. Mama’s words about telling Dante the truth and my own desire to communicate better with my loved ones forced me into a corner where I felt I had to tell him even though I was loathe to. I couldn’t look at him as I started to speak, my eyes pinned to the blurred scenery, the rose gold coin of the sun descending into the cerulean sea.

“When I was young, I was with a man named Christopher. He was my boyfriend, I guess you could say, because even when I was thirteen and everything really started between us, that’s what I called him. My boyfriend.” I never called anyone that again, after him. It was why Daniel had always been my partner, why I now thought of Dante as my man. Boyfriend had been tarnished all with so many other things in that man’s wake. “He was Seamus’s friend from the Universita degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. We all grew up with him around the house and he was kind to us all. He took a special interest in me when I took English tutoring with him. He said he liked my mind and the way I looked, that my red hair reminded him of home.”

My sigh fogged up the window, obscuring the beauty beyond it.

Beside me, Dante emanated a dark, pulsating energy as if he was an imploding star about to transform into a black hole.

“We started to date secretly when I was thirteen, but we came out to my parents three years later. I wasn’t that young and it wasn’t that unheard of in Naples for such sixteen-year-old to have a relationship with an older man.” This was true. It was a staple of our culture, specifically of la mafia and its propensity for arranged marriages. “Seamus and Mama were happy for me.”

“He raped you,” Dante ground out, his voice savaged by fury.

I swallowed back the bile that rouse in my throat. “Not at first, not for a long time. He started to take a fancy to Giselle. I think he was pedophile really, and I was getting old for him by the time I turned eighteen. He started to see her secretly behind all of our backs. I guess he didn’t want me to be suspicious so he told me nasty things about her, how she was less than me, how she was always trying to make me out to be some troia. I was surprised when I found them together one day behind the house kissing in the shade of a Cyprus tree.”

I could still remember the hot knife of betrayal sliding into my back.

“It didn’t occur to me that Giselle wasn’t very willing. She was young and naïve, she didn’t know how to say no to him. Cosima found out somehow and sent Giselle to Paris to study so she was free of him.”

“But not you,” Dante concluded.

I shot him a look, noting how white his knuckles were around the wheel, how fast the car took each curving corner.

I didn’t tell him to slow down. The air was filled with an anger so hot it felt as if we had already wrecked the car, the frame on fire and filling rapidly with acrid smoke.

“Not me,” I agreed, staring down at my hands. “He asked Mama if I could move in with him and she agreed. He was still the love of my life, even though he’d wanted Giselle. I was so desperate for love and attention, I didn’t care I was second place. But he was angry after she left and he started to take that out on me. He used me for a few months, so hard I had bruises but always where only he could see.”

“How did you get away?” His teeth clipped as he snapped the words between them.