When Villains Rise (Anti-Heroes in Love 2)

“In any life I might have lived before, you were mine,” I agreed, running my nose down her cheek. “And I was yours. Still, I am sorry you’ve had to give up so much to be with me. I promise, I will fix it so that we can go home.”

“New York isn’t home without you. I don’t care about that.”

“But the law, you must miss it?” I was pressing because I wanted to know I was about to do the right thing.

She hesitated, her eyes turning vacant as her mind traveled across the Atlantic. “I do. I love the puzzle of a good case, how to make the laws bend and contort for me. But, I’m sure I will find something else to do in Costa Rica.”

She wouldn’t.

Costa Rica was a mirage. She didn’t belong there.

She didn’t even really belong here in Italy.

Elena was a city girl in Chanel suits and bold lipstick. I wanted to give that back to her and I knew I’d die trying to right enough wrongs for to do so, even if it was without me.

“What happens now?” she asked, so trusting when she had been so closed off four months ago no one could reach her without a fight.

I pulled away enough to look into those gray eyes and say, “Now, we begin our bloody honeymoon.”

Twenty

Dante

We went in the early hours of the morning just before the sun is a thought on the horizon, a smudge of burnt orange limning the horizon. We’d stayed in the cave for another hour because I had to take her again, this time with her arms free so she could touch me too. Instead of the porti di Napoli, we pulled into a private dock owned by Damiano and then took a waiting Fiat to Villa Rosa. Rocco would never dare wage a full-scale effort against the home, as fortified as it was, so we felt safe to reconvene and arm ourselves for battle.

Frankie took out Pietro Cavalli at his mistress’s house in Ravello, killing him clean through the head when he went to open the window, having staked out a neighboring unit’s balcony for just that moment.

Nico took out Paulie Gotti. He paid of the woman tending the front desk, opened the coffin-like lid on the tanning machine and shot Paulie three times in the gut.

Damiano took out Martinelli on the back patio by old-fashioned strangulation.

There was more.

Nine staunch supporters and higher ups in Rocco’s organization all killed to end his reign of tyranny and poor economic success in the Neapolitan Camorra to make room for a return of the Salvatore’s.

Elena and I went after Rocco himself.

She demanded she be allowed to come with me and I didn’t want to refuse my bride on her wedding night even though the idea of endangering her still made me sick. The truth was, since I’d told her about women becoming Made just as men did, I’d noticed the mad glint in her eye that implied she wanted that.

Not because she was inherently violent, but because she wanted to be with me and mine more than she wanted anything else. We had become her family, but she wanted to be apart of the Family too.

I would never let her take another life if I could help it.

Her father’s life had been more than enough, even if she wasn’t certain who between us had delivered the killing blow.

It wasn’t that I had some fucked-up Madonna-whore complex where I wouldn’t want her anymore if she became too sinful. It was both simpler and more profound than that.

I didn’t want to corrupt her totally. I didn’t want to eradicate those things I loved about her and those things that made her Elena. Her love of justice and her thoughtfulness around morality. I need those qualities from her as much as she did and I wouldn’t see them ground to dust under the heel of my violent life.

So, we drove in the Lambo together, a gun on my console beside the gear shift and one in her hand loosely resting on the other side of mine. We both wore black and it shocked me how goddamn sexy she looked in the absence of color.

And we had a plan.

Rocco’s villa downtown was ridiculously easy to breath. The walls abutted neighboring estates on both sides so whatever security he had in place was accessible at three points. We parked the car in an alley off Spaccanapoli street and walked to the neighbor’s house on the left of Rocco’s. The streets were empty but for a drunk man sleeping sprawled across the stoop of an apartment building down the block. No one noticed when quietly broke into the front door using a lock pick and no one asleep in the home stirred as we carefully took the stairs up, up to the fourth floor.