When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

ELENA

“Nice ride.”

I tossed my head to clear my face of my windswept hair and smiled at Ricardo Stavos as I closed the butterfly door and locked the car.

“It’s a…friend’s,” I explained with a lopsided shrug.

He grinned roguishly. “Sure, Elena, whatever you say.”

I shot him a look as I adjusted the Prada bag stuffed with papers and my iPad on my left arm. But still, I accepted his kiss on the cheek. Normally, I couldn’t abide such a lack of professionalism, but Ric was impossible to resist, and the kiss was part of his Ecuadorian culture as much as it was part of my Italian youth. In his early forties with dark brown hair he wore shorn close to his scalp, a deep tan all year round, and eyes that crinkled charmingly whenever he smiled, which was often.

He was the lead investigator at Fields, Harding & Griffith, and he mostly refused to work with associates. But he’d caught me smoking a rare cigarette outside of the Pearl Street courthouse one day, and we’d bonded over growing up in cultures where smoking was as normal as drinking soda was in America.

I was glad he was with me for this. It always made me nervous going to interview witnesses. One wrong step and it would be easy for a lawyer to end up having to testify against a witness in court, which would effectively end their participation in the trial.

But it was paramount we convince Ottavio Petretti to testify.

To our knowledge, he was the only living person other than the disappeared Mason Matlock to have been in or near his self-named deli the day Giuseppe di Carlo was murdered. Up until now, he’d flatly refused to talk to a single soul, but I was hoping a good old-fashioned dose of guilt and a little elbow grease would sway him.

“Let me have the first crack at him?” I asked Ric because even though I was the lawyer and higher up the food chain at the firm, he was vastly more experienced and incredibly valuable. I almost always deferred to him when we worked together. I had no problem taking the back seat if it meant I could learn how to be like those I admired one day.

He cocked a brow but nodded before gesturing me to proceed him up the sidewalk to Ottavio’s small bungalow home. “He’s going to be a hard nut to crack.”

I patted my purse and grinned at him. “The meatiest ones always are. Don’t worry, I have my bag of tricks.”

It felt good to walk up the cracked concrete stairs in my six-inch power heels and tailored gray houndstooth St. Aubyn suit. After the morning I’d had, defenseless against the inexorable pull of eyes darker than the night sky, I needed to be reminded of my own authority and independence.

Ric knocked on the door with a heavy fist, but I made sure to stand slightly in front of him so I was the first thing Ottavio might see through his foggy peephole.

A moment later, the door creaked open, and a true Roman nose poked out. “Don’t speak to cops or men in suits.”

“Good thing I’m a woman then, Signore Petretti,” I practically cooed.

When he tried to close the door, I wedged the toe of my pointed Jimmy Choo into the space between it and the jamb, effectively stopping his retreat. Ric followed my cue and slapped a hand on the door to push it intractably open.

Ottavio huffed as he was forced to back up. “You aren’t welcome in my house.”

“Are you going to call the police?” I suggested sweetly as we moved into the cramped, dark hallway. “I’m sure your neighbors would love it if you brought the cops around.”

His fleshy, pink-hued face contracted like an octopus as I called his bluff. No one in this neighborhood called the cops. There were mafiosos and their associates thick in the streets here, and if he was caught at home with two lawyers and the cops, he was as good as dead.

Screwed if he talked to us, screwed if he didn’t.

I was well-versed in such situations, so I knew how to handle them.

“Why don’t we sit down, Signore Petretti?” I offered graciously, indicating the sitting room with the plastic-wrapped floral couch I could see to our left.

He grumbled Italian curses under his breath as he reluctantly turned and trundled down the hall into the living room. When he took a seat in the only chair, Ric and I moved to the couch and sat down with an awful creak and groan of thick plastic.

“If you are here to talk about the murders at my deli, I’m not speaking of this,” he grunted, the “th” in his words transformed by his thick Italian accent into a “d” sound.

I shrugged easily. “I actually came to talk about something else. Or, should I say, someone else.” He watched me with beady brown eyes as I reached into my purse and produced an eight-by-ten glossy photo of my sister Cosima. It was a candid shot I’d taken when I visited her in England last spring, and she looked especially radiant in it. The reason for that was behind the camera, just to my right, her eyes were trained on the sight of her husband laughing with Mama. The sheer love and joy shining from her golden eyes and wide, full-lipped smile was palpable even through the photo.