When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

“Carter Andretti,” he confessed on a breath. “I went to school with him.”

“How quaint,” I mocked as I flicked a finger at Jaco, who nodded immediately and stalked off, already dialing a number on his phone.

I didn’t need to tell him to find Carter and kill him horribly, but only after he confessed who his other associates in the car had been.

The men who shot at Cosima would die in the most creative ways I knew how to dole out death.

I leaned forward and bared my teeth at the man who would, no doubt, die soon. It wouldn’t be by my hands, if I could help it. As Elena had said, I was poetic about crime, and it was considerably more elegiac if Mason was murdered by his own blood.

“Now,” I coaxed as if he had a choice. “Tell me how your scum family knew where we were meeting the Basante crew.”

The Basante deal would mean an influx of untold millions into the Family coffers. They were one of the leading Colombian cartels with access to some of the highest-grade cocaine in the world. Our borgata had a diverse scope of interests, mostly illegal gambling, real estate schemes, and money laundering through the oil and gas trade. Drugs were messy and violent, but they paid out massive dividends. I’d been arguing with Tore and Frankie for years about staying out of it, but when Juan Basante himself approached me to cut a deal for distribution, I wasn’t foolish enough to say no.

Only, the motherfucking di Carlos, the city’s Costa Nostra outfit who were the biggest cocaine distributors in Europe and closing in on that distinction in North America, had taken umbrage with our move. They’d ambushed our first meeting thirteen months ago, and I’d gotten shot in the side as a souvenir.

Mason was the nephew of Giuseppe, the man who’d lured Cosima into his web, and the only witness to the drive-by shooting at Ottavio’s deli that left her in a coma. He had also been very poorly guarded by his so-called family, just a single bodyguard who’d followed him about his life on Wall Street like a suited shadow. It had been all too easy to abduct him before the police could remand him into protective custody.

Mason winced. “Seriously, man, I don’t know who told them about it.”

“But you know someone did,” I surmised.

He hesitated, absently licking up a dribble of blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. “Maybe.”

I sighed heavily and called for Jaco. “Call Adriano and tell him to have at the girl.”

“No!” Mason yelled, then whimpered at the pain it caused in his potentially broken ribs. “Fuck.”

I narrowed my gaze at him as I gestured with my matte black Glock G19. “You claimed to love Cosima, yet you put her in danger. Now you claim to love your sister, yet you will allow me to have Adriano hurt her?”

“They’ll kill me,” he whispered brokenly. “It’s all fine and fucking dandy when you’re talking in hypotheticals, but actually knowingly exchanging your life for someone else’s is another story.”

“This is true,” I agreed, knowing perhaps better than anyone what it was like to give up your life and everything you’d known. I’d done it in my early twenties, exchanged polo sticks for handguns and clean money for dirty. Tore had done it nearly five years ago when he’d pretended to be dead and changed his name to help Cosima and to lure out the villain who had killed my mother.

Death was nothing.

Sacrifice, that was the real killer.

And it seemed Mason was unwilling to die like that.

“You worry about the di Carlos killing you? When they have been in shambles since Giuseppe's death? When I have you here in front of me and the sight of your cazzo di merda face makes me want to drill a bullet through your skull? I think you have more pressing concerns,” I said as I stood and trained my gun at his head. “You have five seconds to tell me what I want to hear, or I’ll kill you.”

It wasn’t a threat.

A threat implied probability, a chance either way.

No, my words were a promise.

It was early in the morning, dawn a pale thought starting on the horizon. I was about to be chained to my house because of a murder I didn’t commit, and I was fucking tired of this shit. I was tired of feeling like the di Carlos had something on my Family, something important that when pulled, would explode my operation like a hand grenade to the belly.

Mason’s lips quivered as he stared at the ground, and seconds later, wet seeped through his tattered pants, the sharp scent of urine perfuming the air.

Oh, good, he knew I was serious.

I grinned at him in a way that was more of a grimace and cocked my gun.