When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

“You are the most frustrating man on the planet,” I muttered.

Dante sat on the edge of the bed even though I hadn’t moved over and gently reached over to reposition the pillow at my back and neck so I was close to the middle of the bed and cozier than I had been before.

If I closed my eyes to breathe in his lemon and pepper scent while he leaned over my torso, he didn’t notice.

“You are the most infuriating woman,” he countered, but his eyes glittered like the New York City nightscape outside my windows.

“What a pair,” Sebastian interjected in a long drawl.

I shot him a glare, but he only widened his eyes in faux innocence and readjusted against the pillows on my other side. “The last time I saw you two together, you were practically choking Dante out for information on Cosi.”

Seb shrugged. “We’re men. We shared a glass of wine and talked about women one night this summer when we were both visiting Cosi in England.”

“Old friends,” Dante agreed.

“Men,” I muttered under my breath, secretly wishing things between women could be half as easy.

“Done,” Adriano announced, stepping back from the TV with a little smile on his big face.

“Took you long enough,” Marco grumbled.

“You did shit all,” Chen pointed out.

Marco sniffed. “I supervised.”

Frankie threw the remote control at his head in response.

“Interesting company you’re keeping these days,” Sebastian murmured to me.

As I looked at the motley assembly of criminals in my bedroom trying to make me comfortable after an invasive, personal surgery I thought I’d recover from alone in my brownstone, I considered the fact that Seb was right.

The nightmare that had started out as Dante and Yara forcing me to move in with him to keep him abreast of the RICO case had become something surprisingly more.

For now, these interesting men had made me one of their own.

“What’re we gonna watch?” Marco demanded as he settled at the foot of the bed. Chen and Addie also took seats in the armchairs by the vanity. “As long as it ain’t vamps, I’m good.”

“I don’t know, Co,” Frankie said, winking at me before he took a seat at the foot of the bed. “You might learn something valuable.”

Everyone, even Sebastian, laughed.

And that was how I ended one of the most vulnerable days of my life, surrounded by laughing men, most of whom had probably killed a man or committed any other half-dozen felonies.

And for the first time in my life, snuggled between the two big warm bodies of my brother and the mafioso I was coming to like more than I should, I didn’t care.

ELENA

Four weeks of little touches, a hand wrapped around my neck when he wanted me to focus on him, a stroke of my hair when he passed me in the kitchen, a squeeze of my hip when I stood beside him at the island making dinner, late nights spent watching movies in my room or on the couch with our shoulders pressed tight.

A few times when I’d fallen asleep on the couch following my surgery, Dante had even picked me up, all five-foot-ten inches of me, and carried me to my bedroom. I’d pretended to be asleep, too embarrassed to do otherwise when I was so close to his heart beating through the hard wall of his chest.

Four weeks of little touches while I recovered from my procedure and nothing else.

It was death by a thousand caresses, slowly shredding my ten-foot walls to ribbons.

My skin pebbled into goose bumps just being in the same room as Dante now, just catching the gravitational pull of those dark eyes across the living room.

I had to remind myself sternly that Dante was a criminal, a killer, essentially a beast in a multi-thousand-dollar suit. He wasn’t fooling anyone, least of all me.

I knew better.

Every experience in my life had taught me to know better.

But there was this flutter, a palpitation that I wondered if I should get checked out at the doctor whenever he found an excuse to touch me. And he did. Touch me. Often.

It wasn’t personal. I was learning that Dante touched everyone. He kissed Tore freely on both cheeks, hello and goodbye. He clamped a hand on the shoulder of a soldato, shook hands, and rubbed shoulders with his men the way a puppy might in a pen with its siblings.

He was incredibly tactile, which struck me as odd for a man in this day and age. Society had moved to a more cerebral plane, perhaps because of the influx of technology that allowed us to interact with minimal physical effort to obtain whatever we desired. Dante seemed to go out of his way to remain archaic. He had a young boy, Tony, deliver three physical copies of the paper every morning––The New York Times, The Guardian, and Corriere della sera. He demanded in-person meetings whenever he could manage it, even under the close watch of FBI surveillance, when there were countless platforms he could have used to conduct his business online that would have undoubtedly been less circumspect.