When Villains Rise (Anti-Heroes in Love 2)

Blood dripped down his wrist to the floor from the wound in his left arm but he didn’t seem troubled by it. He curled her against his big torso, curving his shoulders inward, wrapping her tightly in his arms as if he could shield her from the pain.

He couldn’t.

Neither of us could.

I moved into them, wrapping one arm around Dante’s waist and the other around Aurora, who grabbed my hand and lifted it to her cheek cuddly it desperately.

We stood there together, silently, mourning, as the sirens grew louder and finally, red and blue blocks of light spiraled through the bloody crime scene.

Thirty-Three

Elena

Six months later.

Dante didn’t like it.

It was the only way, but I understood his reluctance. I never wanted to be within ten feet of another di Carlo ever again.

That Family had worked their asses off to ruin Dante’s. To ruin mine.

Now the New York Salvatores were a unit of four; Tore, Dante, Aurora, and me, though we still had our family by choice at our backs.

Which was why Dante eventually agreed with my plan to parlay with Gideone di Carlo, the new Don of the Cosa Nostra.

If we wanted to adopt Rora it was the only way to do it.

Technically, Gideone had legal rights to be her guardian as he was her only surviving blood relative. If we wanted to make her ours, we needed him to surrender those rights.

Surprisingly, it was Gideone who had reached out to me after the massacre at Bambi’s house. The crime was all over the news, throwing Dante and I into the spotlight again in a way I could have done without. Thankfully, it was obvious because of Bambi’s restraining order against Agostino and her records at the hospital proving his abuse that he was to blame for the circumstances of Jacopo and Bambi’s deaths.

We were free from blame legally, but not morally.

All three of us had been shell shocked by that night.

Dante couldn’t sleep most nights for the guilt he felt about not realizing their situation sooner, for not pressing Jacopo about his strange behavior or forcing Bambi and Aurora to live at his place.

Aurora, of course, was the most deeply affected by it. She couldn’t stand to be away from Dante or me at all so we had to work our lives around one of us being with her at all times for the first month she lived with us. She didn’t trust strangers and she didn’t want to go back to school where she felt exposed and vulnerable. Sometimes, at home, when I couldn’t find her, she was hiding in a cabinet in the kitchen or the bathroom. She told me it made her feel safe.

She broke my heart every single day.

Thankfully, we took her to see the best childhood psychologist in Manhattan, an old friend of Dante’s from his days at Cambridge, and within four months of bi-weekly therapy, Aurora was starting to be more like her old self again. She’d even agreed to have a sleep over at Mama’s house last weekend.

It was a process and I knew it would be a long one.

I hadn’t had the same childhood trauma, but I’d had my own and it had taken me twenty-seven years to get over the brunt of it.

I hoped that the love and affection of the rest of her family would go a long way to healing her much more quickly than I had.

Which brought us back to the little café Yara had first taken me to nearly a year ago to tell me her own mafia story.

I was close with the shop owners now, Andrea and his wife, Guilia, and they greeted us with big smiles and kisses as we turned up that Friday morning to meet with Gideone.

“I still don’t like that he had your number at all,” Dante grumped as we accepted our little white cups of thick espresso from Andrea and moved to one of the three tiny iron tables on the sidewalk.

I rolled my eyes because we had been over this one hundred times. “It was my work number, Capo, which has since been terminated because I don’t work for Fields, Harding, & Griffith anymore.”

He didn’t say anything, his silence churlish.

Again, I couldn’t blame him.

We’d healed a lot in the last six months, but losing two of his dearest friends had made Dante moodier than usual. He was such an alpha, such a protector, that it killed him believing he had let Bambi and Jaco down.

“Hey,” I reached across the table to grab his hand and pressed a kiss to its center the way he did with me. “Ti amo, Capo. Everything is going to be okay.”

“Sorry to interrupt.”

I looked up and over to see Gideone di Carlo standing a few feet away. I’d forgotten how handsome he was and also, how unlike his deceased brother he looked. I’d been worried about seeing the ghost of Agostino, how it might trigger the feeling of that gun in my mouth again, of the terror I felt fighting for my life.