When Villains Rise (Anti-Heroes in Love 2)

“I’m not better than you because I’m pure as snow, Rocco. I’m better than you because I may be a villain, but I’m not a monster. I have a heart and I know how to use it. But again, that’s not why I’m going to end up the victor here. That’s not why I’m going to shoot you straight through your thick skull.”

I bent closer, my mouth so close to his that the old, bigoted fool flinched and made me cackle. “I’m going to kill you because I want to live more than you do. Because I’ll do anything it takes to stay alive and keep my woman at my side. I’d skin you alive and feed pieces of you to your entire crew to show them just how much I mean it when I saw the reign of Rocco Abruzzi is dead and the Salvatores are taking over Naples again.”

“You greedy fuck!” Rocco shouted.

I slapped him. Open palm with all my rage behind it. His head cracked to one side, his skin gone red immediately like instant Jell-O.

“You hit like a girl,” he spat, blood tinged saliva falling to the desk.

“I hit you like a bitch because you are one,” I told him matter-of-factly. “You think you can force Mira into marriage, Cosima Lombardi into sexual slavery, and threaten Elena?”

“You can’t,” Elena cut in, her voice true and ringing like church bells throughout the room.

It drew my gaze.

She stood just to the side and behind me, her gun aimed straight at Rocco. Her eyes were as cold and grey as the metal in her hands.

“Lena, don’t,” I ordered.

But I knew as I said the words that she wouldn’t listen. This was the truth of why she’d demanded to come with me.

She wanted revenge herself.

The gun fired, the recoil smashing back into her hands. She didn’t even flinch.

I look at Rocco who was staring at her in stupefied horror, clutching his chest with his undamaged hand. At first, I thought she’d missed, but then Rocco’s chin tucked to his chest and his hand fell away from his torso, revealing a bubbling hole in his right side.

Straight through his lung.

His breath wheezed in and out, trying to gather enough air to speak.

I knew he wouldn’t die for a long time with a wound like that and I was glad.

Elena wasn’t meant to be a cold-blooded killer.

She was better than me in soul and spirit. I didn’t want the stickiness of my depravity to transfer wholesale to her.

So I blocked Elena’s view of Rocco, leaned close to his laboring face again and whispered, “May your soul burn for eternity in hell if you betray the Omertà and the Family.”

Rocco gasped, “Figlio di puttana.”

Son of a whore.

I brought my Berreta to his temple and pulled the trigger.

Elena made a noise of distress for the first time behind me as his brains blew out the back of his skull at across the wall, his prized Titian painting splatter with grey matter.

When I turned to Elena, it was with mild apprehension.

She’d seen me kill in the basement of that house in Brooklyn. Watched me drill three rounds into her father’s head. Witness me burn out a man’s eyeball with a blowtorch and a spoon.

But this was different.

This was mafia brutality. An execution not self-defence.

She stared at me with wide eyes, pale as silver dollars in the low light, her eyebrows cut high into her smooth forehead.

“Stai bene, lottatrice?” I asked her softly, moving forward as if toward an anxious colt.

She shivered then rolled back her shoulders, snagging my hand in a tight grip so drag me closer. When I stepped against her, she lunged to her toes and pressed her mouth so hard to mine, I could feel her teeth beneath the cushion of her lips.

When she pulled away, her eyes were dark again, hot like the sky during a summer storm. “You once told me, sometimes the only honor to be had is in revenge.” Her eyes darted quickly over my shoulder to the dead capo and then returned to mine with even greater conviction. “Thank you for killing the man who made my family suffer for so long.”

She kissed me again, this time soft and sensual, sucking my lips, rolling her tongue over mine in a languid glide that made my blood heat. When she pulled away, she cupped my neck, her thumbs on both pulse points.

“I hope you know, since I met you, you’ve been the hero I never knew I needed.”

Her words rocked through me, satisfying some entrenched white knight complex I’d buried deep in the ground of my soul.

I was a bad man with good intentions, but people only ever say what they wanted to see and a capo was a villain.

Even Cosima had seen me as one when all I’d wanted to be was her hero.