When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

When Ethan didn’t immediately respond, Frankie shook his head in his cruel hand, blood flying from the broken nose over the desk.

“Yes,” Ethan finally squawked. “Okay, alright, fuck! Chill.”

“Chill?” Frankie asked, then looked at me as if he was affronted. “I look anything but chill to you, Lena?”

“As a cucumber,” I agreed, because what else could I say?

A secret part of me deep inside thrilled at the sight of entitled, whining, asshole Ethan bleeding in Frankie’s hands. He wasn’t just a prick to me, but to every single associate in the office he felt was below his status, which was most of them.

Honestly, if Frankie hadn’t done it, it was probably only a matter of time before someone else did.

Even though I didn’t like the position it put me in, jeopardizing my job yet again, I also had to admit it was unlikely that Ethan would go crying to our superiors about it. His enormous ego would be too bruised to admit what happened. I had no doubt by tomorrow he would have circulated an epic tale about getting beaten up on the subway or for trying to steal some guy’s girl at a bar.

I didn’t care.

It was enough to know that Frankie cared enough about me to stand up for me.

It was nice to hear that he felt Dante would do the same.

As Frankie dropped Ethan’s face and started toward me, reaching for a handkerchief he kept in the inside pocket of his suit jacket, I surprised myself by smiling at him.

“That was more than slightly awesome,” I whispered as he met up with me and continued forward down the hall in tandem. “I won’t say I fully approve of your methods but thank you.”

“Hey,” he said with a blasé shrug as if it was nothing. “You remind me of my wife. It was nothing to do.”

“What’s she like?” I asked as we took the elevator down to the street level.

He shot me a sidelong glance. “She’s a real bitch.”

I laughed the entire ride down.

It was dark in the apartment when I stepped from the elevator after Frankie dropped me off on his way home to his wife and children. A tiny flash of disappointment flared in my chest when I didn’t see Dante in the living room or kitchen, his normal haunts late at night. There was a restless energy coursing through me I wanted to satisfy with the bite of our banter, the feel of those deadly hands lightly touching my flesh.

The truth was, I wanted to play, with our minds if not our bodies, knowing how dangerous it would be to tumble over that last hurdle and into bed with my client.

With a mafia don.

I got ready for bed feeling oddly deflated as I washed my face and applied my seven-step skin care, as I massaged lotion into my body and read my requisite thirty minutes of news before bed.

It did not surprise me that I couldn’t sleep.

Not with Dante lodged in my consciousness like a splinter.

With a ragged sigh, I threw off my eye mask, tossed my earplugs to the nightstand, and slid out of bed. I decided a nightcap was the only solution for my insomnia, so I padded down the dark halls to the back staircase and down to the kitchen. There was only the faint light from the streets spilling in through the floor-to-ceiling windows to light my way in the black-on-gray-and-white spaces, but I managed it.

I was opening the fridge when I noticed the faint glow of light coming from down the hallway.

My heart tripped over the excitement that collected in my chest, and before I could think through the impulse, I walked down the back hall toward the light.

It came from the office near the end of the hall. The door was just barely ajar, but through the gap in the wood, I could hear everything I needed to.

A faint, growling moan.

My body went white-hot then ice cold as I realized what could be happening behind that door.

Was Dante fucking someone in there?

Agony spun through me like a tornado, ripping up the foundation of confidence I’d found I’d unwittingly built around my relationship with the capo. I blinked hard against the disbelief that he would be with another woman when it had seemed so wonderfully apparent he wanted me in his bed.

Clearly, I’d forgotten myself.

I wasn’t some siren like my younger sister, Giselle, capable of enchanting men with her song, luring them to her depths even if it meant a rocky death.

I wasn’t a sensational beauty like Cosima, so radiant inside and out even a blind man would want her.

I’d been with two men who had both found me a disappointment, even if, in the end, they’d been a disappointment to me too.

Why would a man like Dante Salvatore with his raw, tangible magnetism and almost animalistic energy want to bed me?