When Villains Rise (Anti-Heroes in Love 2)

“Did they?” The weight of his stare was a tangible thing on my shoulders, but I couldn’t be held down by it.

Inside my chest, I was light as air.

“We had a lab run for prints and DNA matches,” I said slowly, trying not to be overly dramatic when the roar of victory surge through my blood. “Preliminary results revealed a match.”

“Do not drag this out, Mrs. Lombardi,” he warned.

“Of course,” I grinned, the same grin I’d seen Dennis give us when he decimated the validity of Carter Andretti’s testimony. “The results showed a match for USA Dennis O’Malley.”

Judge Hartford called the recess.

The courtroom was a flurry of questions when as he stormed into his chambers to await our team and the prosecution.

Dante was taken back to the holding cell, but he went with a wink in my direction.

He believed in me.

In this plan.

As he should. After all, he was the one who had corrupted me so beautifully. Before, I never would have thought to fight fire with fire, but now I knew, in the underworld, the only way to win was by any means possible.

“Are you fucking kidding me, Martin?” Dennis exploded when he was told what had happened. “There is absolutely no way that gun could be tied back to me!”

Yara and I sat placidly in the chairs before Judge Hartford’s desk watching Dennis storm around the room, bristling with hostility and disbelief. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked over to me, caging me in my chair.

“Did you do this, Moore?” he seethed. “Did you and your criminal lover think you could frame me?”

“My name isn’t Moore,” I reminded him. “You can call me Ms. Lombardi or Mrs. Salvatore. And don’t be ridiculous.”

He glared at me, his fury a tangible heat in the air distorting it like wax paper. “My office will conduct its own tests.”

“Of course,” I agreed. “That’s just standard procedure.”

He bared his white, capped teeth at me then turned to the Judge. “Marty, this is absurd.”

“Be that as it may, I can’t rightly continue the trial if the lead prosecutor is now under investigation for the same crime as the defendant.”

I tucked the edges of my mouth down, fighting the smile that wanted to dominate my face. We’d counted on Martin Hartford being too entrenched in his ways to allow that to happen. He might have wanted Dennis’s help for a bid at mayor, but he was still too upstanding to corrode as fully as the US Attorney.

Dennis gaped at him. “What the hell kind of motivation would I have for killing Giuseppe di Carlo? I didn’t even know the man.”

“No,” Yara agreed, as smooth and sly as a cat toying with her mouse. “But we did unearth a New York Times article from the fall stating that you intended to use this case to made a run at State Senate.”

“That means nothing.”

“That depends on your perspective,” I argued. “Sometimes, if you want something badly enough, you’ll go to extreme lengths to procure it.”

He stared at me then as if struck, not shocked exactly, but deeply unsettled. He was realizing that he had underestimated me. That he had assumed I hated my father enough to eschew criminality for the right side of the law. That I would never lower myself to the mud he himself rolled around in.

He didn’t know that I would go to hell and back for Dante Salvatore.

It had been surprisingly easy to distract Dennis at the gun range so that Frankie could pull his prints from one of the handguns he’d left displayed on the table. Mason Matlock had taken the gun Cosima used to kill his uncle, Giuseppe di Carlo, to protect her and confessed as much to Dante and Adriano when they were interrogating him months ago. Addie, Chen, and Jaco had searched every subway locker for two weeks in search of the one Mason had stored the weapon in.

But we’d found it.

The rest, was easy.

Frankie had applied Dennis’s pulled prints to the grip of the gun and returned it to the locker. Tore had called in the tip to Detective Falcone because I still had his card in purse and I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist taking down a potential murderer.

And here we were.

I smiled at Dennis, that old, familiar grin that frozen on my face from the force of its icy blast. “Run those tests, Dennis. Detective Falcone is on standby waiting to arrest you if they come back as conclusive as ours did.”

“You filthy, fucking bitch,” he snapped, stepping forward as if to hit me.

I stood, looming over him in my six-inch heels, daring him to act. “Better a victorious bitch than a scumbag loser. Call us when you have the results back, Dennis. And good luck. I have it on good authority from Dante that men like you survive in prison because they make such good little bitches.”