When Villains Rise (Anti-Heroes in Love 2)

A little hair dye late last night and a pair of contacts procured from Capo Leonardo Esposito’s wife who worked in film and we were set.

My concern had been that Rocco would see through our ruse, but he was too simple a man to believe he could be fooled in such a way. Cosima kept mostly quiet as Mira, which was fitting for the girl’s personality and didn’t alert Rocco to anything afoot.

Alexander and Cosima were the perfect stand-ins while Dante and Mirabella got the hell out of dodge.

By the time the car bomb went off, Mira and Rosetta would have been halfway to France equipped with enough money from Tore and Dante to set up a life for themselves and two passports with new identities.

Dante was supposed to meet me at the airfield.

Instead, I was on a boat with Tore in the middle of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

We had been driving for twenty or thirty minutes when Tore angled the boat back into the coastline and the bright orange roofs of Sorrento came into view on the looming green mountains.

My heartbeat quickened.

“Why are we here?” I asked softly as the boat slowed and the engine quieted.

Tore turned to me, hair a windblown mess around his tanned face, and he smiled at me in a way that said he had a secret.

A secret he was dying to tell me, but wouldn’t.

“You know now that I have two children I was not allowed to parent for most of their lives. Only in the last few years did Cosima find out the truth about our relationship and Caprice has asked me not to tell Sebastian.” His face spasmed with pain then recovered its soft beauty. “But I was lucky enough to have a son by choice. A man who saw everything I was and everything I did, the bad and the ugly, yet he still chose to take my side. He chose to be my family, to be my son and my ally. I will never stop grieving for Chiara, but in death, she gave me the greatest treasure. Dante is the best man I know. It does not shame me to admit I learn from him every day. I am proud to be the father of his heart, so proud I could burst.”

He hit his chest with his open pam and splayed the fingers, a dramatic, Italian movement that made me smile even as my chest panged with the beauty and pain of his words.

“I am very grateful now, too, that he has found his anima gemella.”

His soulmate.

I swallowed thickly as Tore slowed the boat even further, calling to a man waiting on the docks to catch his rope. Before he tossed it, he reached over to squeeze my hand.

“Only a strong woman, a fearless one, could be with figlio mia and I could not have dreamed of one so perfect as you.”

“I’m not fearless,” I confessed thickly, watching blindly as he tossed the rope and it was tied down to a metal prong. “I’m far from perfect.”

“Ah, but that is in the eyes of the beholder,” he argued, turning off the boat and turning to me with an extended hand. “And the man who believes you are his treasure is waiting for you now.”

I took his hand, feeling so moved I was shaken, the tectonic plates of my soul shifting and rearranging around his words.

Because they felt very much like the blessing I told him I didn’t need.

And I found, in him giving it, that I wanted it more than I could say.

I didn’t ask questions as I followed him onto the dock, through the busy pier and into the streets of Sorrento. We walked with purpose, the only sign that we were living on borrowed time.

I had no doubt Rocco was looking for us and that if we stayed in the vicinity of his territory too long, he would hunt us down.

The sun was high in the sky, pale and nebulous behind thin clouds as we passed into the narrow, steep streets leading up the hills of the city.

Ten minutes later, Tore stopped at the end of the street across from a tiny piazza.

Across from us stood a small white chapel.

It was simple, unadorned but for the cross over the plain wood door.

Tore led us to the entrance.

“Tore…” I whispered, because it was getting hard to breathe.

He didn’t say anything as he pushed open the doors to the cool interior and pulled me inside. The space smelled of old paper and myrrh. It was basic for an Italian church, no gilt paint or carefully created murals, no glossy mahogany pews only old, scarred wooden rows and basic white walls carved into the requisite arcs. It was beautiful, somehow pure and elegant.

And it was empty.

I frowned around the vacant space, but Tore was already dragging me into a side room.