When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

I knew cyanide was deadly, especially in large doses.

My mouth was dry, and my palms were sweating. I swiped them on the silken dress Dante had bought me. A dress worth thousands of dollars. A dress I’d only ever found in my dreams.

Acid rushed up to eat at the walls of my chest.

I was shocked by it, but I truly didn’t want this man to die.

“He’ll be fine,” I asserted, an echo of Dr. Crown.

Dante’s associates, the only ones left in the messy and shockingly empty apartment, turned their black eyes to me. There were varying levels of curiosity and concern in those gazes, but I ignored them, tilting my chin up stubbornly to reaffirm my words.

“Si, Dante va bene,” Tore said with a tight smile aimed my way. “Now, what did Dante eat or drink that no one else did?”

I knew.

Of course, I did.

I’d known before that jerk, Jacopo, had yelled it in my face.

“The tiramisu,” I whispered, my tongue rasping against the dry roof of my mouth. “I brought it from my mama’s stall on Mulberry Street. But you have to know, she would never do anything to harm Dante. She was just telling me how much she liked him.”

Instantly, one of their men, surprisingly not an Italian but someone who appeared to be Japanese, moved toward the door. I had a cold flash of memory, a mafioso shaking Mama so hard as he interrogated her about Seamus’s whereabouts that she broke a tooth.

“Please, don’t hurt her,” I said, stepping forward then stopping helplessly.

“No one is hurting Caprice,” Tore promised darkly, casting a look at the Asian man who hesitated then nodded and returned to his vigil around Dante on the couch. “This is too simple, yes? Of course, the feast of San Gennaro in Little Italy is visited by thousands. Even vigilant, there is a possibility her stall was compromised, and we have many enemies.”

His mouth was a grim flatline as he considered, eyes pinned on something in the distance. I noticed with shock that Amadeo Salvatore had the same peculiar and striking shade of gold in his eyes as my twin siblings.

“Did you see anyone when you visited?” he asked me suddenly, stepping forward to grasp and squeeze my biceps. “Think, cervellona.”

I pursed my lips as I ran my mind back over the afternoon and remembered the thin limbs of the man who had bumped into me near the stall.

“A man bumped into me in the street.” I shrugged a little helplessly. “He wasn’t doing anything strange, though.”

“What did he look like?”

“He had auburn hair, close-cropped, and he wasn’t very tall, maybe an inch or two shorter than my five foot ten,” I described, uncomfortable with all the eyes on me. “He had a scar at the corner of his jaw, just here.”

The air in the room went flat, then flickered with energy and erupted as the men burst into motion.

“We’re hitting them now,” Frankie growled, his dark hair disheveled from his agitated hands. “Kelly and his crew hang out most evenings at that sports bar in Marine Park, Father Patrick’s. They’ll be done by the end of the night.”

“Frankie, chiudi la bocca,” Tore barked, ordering him to shut up. “We do not discuss these things outside the family.”

I looked at Yara, wondering how she was dealing with the crisis and the potential knowledge that Dante’s associates were determined to kill a group of men in the Bronx.

She turned her large dark eyes toward me, expression entirely imperturbable, and blinked slowly.

It occurred to me for the first time in a very real way that Yara Ghorbani was not the woman I thought she was. I’d wrongly assumed that because she wasn’t Italian, the mafia wouldn’t include her in the mechanisms of their schemes.

But I should have cottoned on the day we were shot on the way to court.

I should have known when Yara was so easy with Dante’s familiar treatment of me.

She was not just representing Dante in this RICO case.

She was their consigliere.

Not “other.”

She was Family.

In that room of shadowed eyes, I was the only one outside the Family.

Something curdled in my stomach, a reaction that surprised me as much as it ashamed me. Once again, I was left out of the group dynamic. At work, my fellow associates saw me as a threat. They called me the ice queen or the bitch because I was driven and didn’t know how to make anything beyond polite small talk when I could feel their disdain every time we spoke. Growing up, I’d been the red-headed girl playing with the true-blooded Italians who could be incredibly discriminatory. Even in my own family, I was different, set apart. I wasn’t vivacious and bold like my siblings. I wasn’t easy and comfortable with talk of love and sex and the ribbing that I knew logically was par for the course between sisters and brothers. Then Giselle and Daniel happened, and the entire family seemed to have known about it before I did.