When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

I rolled my eyes. “You obviously think I mean more to Mr. Salvatore than I do. I’m just a lawyer on his legal team. Despite the obvious fact that he’s on house arrest, he wouldn’t come for me even if he could.”

“Oh?” Kelly asked, eyebrows raised to his hairline. “I didn’t realize…”

He moved away to a table in the corner and then returned, tilting a piece of paper into the light.

Only, it wasn’t a piece of paper.

It was a photograph.

In it, Dante had me caged against the open French doors to his balcony, his face in my neck, my eyes closed as if in ecstasy.

Obviously, they’d been watching.

“Now she’s quiet.” Kelly laughed, and I got the feeling he found all of this––crime, danger, and violence––fun and exciting as if it was all one big game. “Seamus, your daughter is a capo’s whore.”

Behind him, my dad didn’t move an inch. There was a tension in him, a kind of rending down the middle as if he was tearing himself in two from the inside out. When he looked at me, his eyes were unfocused, his mouth slack. I wondered what he saw in my face, if he realized how alike we were. Not just in appearance, but in having that same quality.

I’d been trying to rip myself in two for years.

The good Elena and the bad.

How impossible that seemed now, especially watching Seamus fight himself.

He was going to lose.

As if in answer to my thought, he shook his head to clear it and then moved to the coat he’d discarded over a box. Fishing in the pocket, he produced a flask, untwisted the top, and devoured the contents in one endless gulp.

“Dad,” I called, just to make it harder for him. “Dad, are you really going to let them do this?”

“They aren’t doing anything,” he countered, wiping the alcohol from his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’re safe.”

“Safe?” I echoed. “I’m tied to a pole, and I’m bleeding. Your asshole friend drugged me to get me here.”

Kelly shrugged almost manically, and I realized he was definitely not all there. The thought scared me. Seamus could be reasoned with, but there was a frenetic violence to Kelly that said he couldn’t be reasoned with easily.

His phone rang, and he took it into another room, shooting Seamus a careful look before leaving us alone together.

“Dad,” I tried again. “Papa, per favore, aiutami.”

Papa, please, help me.

He hesitated, and I could see that his eyes were slightly glazed over in the dim light.

“You haven’t seen me in years,” I coaxed. “Come closer and let me look at you.”

Outside, a dog barked, startling him. His eyes darted between the boarded-up window at the top of the ceiling beside him and then to me.

“I won’t help you, Elena,” he told me as he came closer, standing right under the overhead light so that it cast long, ghoulish shadows over his face. “I would have tried, maybe, if you didn’t try to fuck me. You followed me? Huh? Thought you could get one over on dear old dad? Well, you can’t, and I’m ashamed you would even try.”

Then, in Italian, he added, “You were also so ungrateful. Do you have any idea how hard I worked for our family? I provided for you. I kept you clothed and put a roof over your head. Your mother turned you against me when she fell in love with that Italian scum.” He was getting worked up the way he used to when he’d been drinking, his hands gesturing wildly as he bounced on his feet. “I did everything for you, and what did I get? My own daughter threatened me if I didn’t leave you all. Now another daughter risks my life to better her career!”

“Better my career?” I bit out, struggling as the plastic ties dug deeper into the bloody mess of my wrists. “I was trying to help the man I love.”

My own words rocked through me.

Love?

“Love?” he echoed my shocked thought, then laughed so hard he almost lost his balance. “My fighter? My cold fish? You never loved me, and you never loved your family. You wouldn’t have betrayed me if you did.”

“You betrayed me first,” I cried out. Tugging at the bonds, I wanted to claw his eyes out. “You betrayed all of us by gambling and lying and putting us in jeopardy every day of our lives. Even now, you. Are. Still. Doing. It.”

Pure malice overtook his features a second before his hand lashed out across my face. Pain exploded under my left eye, and my head cranked to the side so hard, my neck spasmed.

“Puttanna ingrata,” he snarled into my face. “You don’t know half of what I’ve suffered for you.”

He was close enough.

I slammed my head down, my forehead connecting with his face perfectly. Stars wheeled over my vision at the impact, leaving me dazed, but I was aware of Seamus cursing, holding his bleeding nose.