When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

I did too, from across the street pretending to window shop at a discount furniture warehouse.

I assumed he was meeting the di Carlo brothers or Thomas Kelly.

But I was not prepared who did pull up to meet him.

A sleek gold Bentley pulled into the gas station and up to a pump. Moments later, a man got out of the car and rounded the hood to pump his own gas.

He wasn’t tall or particularly striking, but I knew who it was even from across the street, traffic and snow obscuring my vision.

His brown hair was swept back in its usual side part, the long black trench mostly obscuring his signature blue suit. He had the look of someone in power, an officer in the military or a police captain, his face almost austere in its sternness.

Dennis O’Malley.

The United States Attorney for the Southern New York District.

I blinked and breathed, too shocked to function, as Seamus meandered over to the pump station and leaned against the other side, pulling out his phone as if to text someone. But I could see his mouth moving.

Dennis was meeting with Seamus Moore.

What. The. Fuck?

When we’d spoken about my dad, he seemed so unaware of his past, his criminal history, but here he was having some kind of cloak and dagger meeting with him after I’d called to say I was going to snitch on Dante?

Dennis started speaking, prompting me to remember why I was there in the first place. I tugged off my leather glove with my teeth and raised my phone to take a video, my thumb tapping the photo button as I recorded. It wasn’t the best quality and, if I hadn’t seen Dennis’s face hundreds of times in the past few years, maybe I would have had a hard time identifying him. But there was no doubt in my mind who that man was.

Fury sparked in my gut and more than a little outrage.

I’d been indignant when Yara had turned out to be corrupted by the mafia, but it made sense. Fields, Harding & Griffith were among the top firms in the city, but they were all notorious for taking on unsavory clients. They were about money and the bottom line, not putting the right kind of bad guys away for life.

But Dennis…

Dennis represented an institution and an aspect of law I’d always admired. He was supposed to put criminals behind bars, not associate with them outside of the courts.

It was a shocking betrayal even though Dennis himself didn’t mean anything to me.

It was the betrayal of my own ideals, this construct I’d created like a house of cards in my own mind. The good guys versus the bad guys.

I’d allowed myself to be teamed up with the bad ones because I’d been told I was bad all my life. First by Seamus, then Christopher, and when my own family shunned me for my treatment of Giselle after she and Daniel cheated on me.

I’d allowed that for myself because I felt I deserved it, but I’d secretly always wanted to be one of those good guys.

And now I was faced with the fact that it was all an illusion.

Dennis was just as motivated to win as we were. His greed and pride had corrupted him just as easily as the Irish mob had.

For one long moment, I was deeply disoriented. I didn’t know how to evaluate anything or anyone anymore.

On the one hand was Dennis, a man who was renowned for putting criminals away, who was making a bid at the senate on the basis of his superhero record.

And on the other was Dante.

The most infamous mafioso of the last twenty years, a man who was on trial for a murder I knew he hadn’t committed just as I knew he had committed others.

I realized I had this idea of a hero as someone who was socially accepted, someone who was revered by the masses. But heroism didn’t always arrive dressed in white and topped with a halo or on the back of some shining steed.

Heroism was about your willingness to right wrongs, to sacrifice your own comfort and safety to affect change when you crossed something that needed changing. It was assuming responsibility for people who didn’t have the power to stand up for themselves.

It was about being brave enough to live life by your own rules and accepting who you were, flaws and all.

I stood on that snowy corner for a long time after Dennis and Seamus parted, letting my entire world view crumble at my feet, and when I felt my skin frozen but my blood on fire, I felt lighter than I had in years.

I gave the footage to Yara.

She didn’t ask any questions. Instead, she’d raised a single dark brow and called for an emergency meeting with the prosecution before Judge Hartford.