When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

I felt as if I was being cross-examined at court, his eyes searching for cracks in my façade, his mind carefully calculating every word out of my mouth. It infuriated me that he thought he had the right to interrogate me. That he thought he had a right to know me.

No one did.

I was an island, and I liked it that way.

“First of all, Edward, I was not admiring your so-called beauty. You may make a certain type of woman swoon, but I prefer my men un-Made and considerably more sophisticated.”

“You have such hatred for the Camorra, yet your sisters both seem unaffected by this,” he mused, prodding at me in that way I was learning he had, trying to get into every nook and cranny of my being.

His words triggered my first horrific memory of the Camorra and their presence in our lives.

My siblings were too young to remember the depravity of our childhood with any kind of true clarity. Our trip to Puglia when the twins were only babes and Giselle a dreamy toddler was remembered only for the turbulent private plane we took to get there.

They didn’t remember, as I did, three years older than them, the horror that had led us to flee our home in Naples for the sun-beaten shores of the south.

I could still remember the taste of steel in my mouth, the feel of the gun heavy and cold on my tongue like some macabre phallus. How tears had burned the backs of my eyes like a lighter held to my optic nerves and how I’d refused to let them fall, holding my breath and clenching my fists until I was more stone than flesh.

I was six years old when Seamus and Mama returned home one day to find a soldato in the local Camorra holding me against his body with his gun lodged in my mouth.

It wasn’t the first time Seamus had owed money, but it was the first time they’d threatened his children. Giselle was only four, the twins nearly three years old. For the first time in my memory, Mama had usurped Seamus’s will, and the next day, after cleaning out our savings to pay his debts, we’d moved to Puglia to stay with Mama’s cousins.

It didn’t last, of course, but our time spent on the island was one of the only happy eras of my childhood.

“You might be poetic about crime, but I’ve lived it enough to see the horrors,” I finally said, dragging my gaze back into the present and pinning him with my judgmental gaze. “You might have no problem beating a man or threatening his family if he goes against you, but I’ve been the daughter of that man, and I’ve been that child who was threatened. How you can see anything worth admiring in that, I have no clue.”

“You are substituting a part for the whole. The actions of one bad man do not extend to every other man in his community,” he argued.

I finished my wine, surprised by how quickly I’d downed the lovely vintage.

“Are you suggesting you aren’t a bad man, capo?” I asked sweetly.

He flipped over one of those big paws on the table, showing me the strength in his hand by flexing and releasing a fist. “Si, these hands have seen violence and retribution, Elena, but does that mean they cannot also comfort a child, bring pleasure to a lover, or protect an innocent?”

I scoffed. “Excuse me if I can’t see you protecting an innocent.”

Instantly, Dante’s open features shuttered close, and a scowl knotted between his thick brows. “You act very high and mighty for a woman who judges me without knowing me, especially when I am trying to get to know her.”

“You don’t need to know me for me to work my ass off for you on this case,” I rebutted, hovering off my chair as I glared over the table at him.

“Well, you need to know me if you want to stay on this team and get that success you’re so desperate for,” he countered as he pushed back from his chair and leaned across the little table, his hand wrapped around my throat in a shockingly firm grip. My pulse hammered against his fingers, but I didn’t move, immobilized not by his grip on my neck but by the ferocity in his eyes.

“Ascoltami,” he seethed in Italian, ordering me to listen to him. “I have made sacrifices for innocents and loved ones that your neat black and white world could never compute. When have you made a sacrifice, hmm?”

Nausea flooded me as a memory spun like a fractured kaleidoscope through my mind’s eye. A mafioso hitting me because I’d hid pretty Giselle from him and then Christopher, begging him not to harm her.

I didn’t say that, though.

Instead, I looked into the burning dark of his gaze and slid my response like a blade between his ribs. “I have. I’m sacrificing my integrity by helping you because I made Cosima a promise.”