When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

Yara shrugged easily. “I do too. I suppose it depends on your definition. Mr. Salvatore, for example, is a man I consider to be one of the best. He is a fair boss, a loyal friend and family member, and he does his part for the community.”

“For a tax break, I’m sure,” I muttered truculently.

“Just because someone loves and values different things than you do does not mean they are heartless, Ms. Lombardi. Dante would and has risked his life and livelihood for his loved ones and those he feels need championing. If you can’t understand that, perhaps you aren’t the woman I thought you were. Why don’t you head home? If there is any update on Dante, I’m sure tomorrow morning will be early enough for you to receive it.”

I blinked at her, properly chastised but still conflicted. Having dismissed me, Yara retrieved her phone from her clutch and began to work. I looked at Dr. Crown who was staring at me with pursed lips, judging me just as readily as I’d judged Dante and his crew.

“He’ll be okay?” I asked quietly, my voice stripped raw so that it throbbed with vulnerable sincerity.

Whatever my feeling about his criminal enterprise, I didn’t think Dante deserved to die.

In fact, the thought made me sway on my feet.

Dr. Crown fixed that pale blue gaze on me, and despite his classic all-American good looks, a distinct apathy in his gaze spoke to a cold heart. I recognized the look because I often saw it staring back at me in the mirror.

“It’s not the first time someone has tried to kill him, and it won’t be the last,” was his stoic answer.

A shiver rolled through me like morning fog off the harbor, and it felt an awful lot like a premonition of things to come.

It was only later, when I was between the silky sheets of a bed that was much too large without Daniel in it, that I mulled over Yara’s words. Unbidden, I recalled a quote I’d read in law school from the ever-lauded Thoreau.

“It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as a respect for right.”

I lay in the dark shadows of my echoing empty home, wondering if I’d become so entrenched in society’s perception of right and wrong that I’d forgotten to form an opinion of my own.

DANTE

Death hadn’t scared me for a very long time.

Growing up at Pearl Hall in the moors of northern England where gold and pearls were inlaid in the furniture and my baby rattle was made of solid silver, very few people would have suspected I’d know the darkness of pain and death.

But very few people knew my father was a madman.

I’d suspected as much from an early age when I heard moaning from the basement, the inverse of some Jane Eyre novel where the ghostly calls in the night were real nightmares caged within the walls of our home. My older brother, the golden child, was blind to the dangers of Noel, the cruelty of his treatment to our mother, the servants, and the occasional pale apparition of a woman emerging from the basement at dawn some mornings with bruises on her throat like jewels.

And then my mother was killed.

Chiara and I were visiting her childhood friend, Amadeo Salvatore at his villa outside of Naples when she decided we weren’t going home to England. She was tired in a way I didn’t think, even if she had lived, she would have recovered from. Her black hair was brittle, cracking off in pieces under my hands when I hugged her bony frame, and there were troughs of inky blue beneath her eyes that I couldn’t remember not being there. She was still beautiful, but in the way of a broken thing, a doll played with too hard, then tossed to rot in the corner of a grown child’s room.

She was smiling that trip, though. I had just graduated from Cambridge with honors, and she was proud of me, almost ridiculously so because she always tried to make up for Noel’s lack of regard for me. I was the spare, not the heir, and from the beginning, I’d been too much like my mother and her people.

There wasn’t a subordinate bone in my body, and Noel knew it, so he pretended I didn’t exist or, if I got in his way, forcibly put me in my place.

We were eating dinner one night, a few days after she had begun to make plans to move permanently to Italy, when her cell phone rang. I knew instantly it was my father by the shadow that passed over her face dark as an eclipse.

“Don’t answer it,” I’d said, standing up from my chair at the dining room table to reach for the phone so that I could crush it the way I wanted to crush my father’s heart in my hands. “He can go fuck himself.”