When Villains Rise (Anti-Heroes in Love 2)

This would be harder than I’d imagined.

To make matters worse, the door across from us swung open as I took the seat Rocco gestured for me to have and a familiar woman walked into the room.

Mirabella Ianni was a local beauty. Not the way Cosima had been, her name taking on a mythological cast because for some inexplicable reason Don Salvatore had forbidden anyone to touch her. But she was known from puberty as premium wife material. She was full figured, her lush chest swelling over the edge of her neckline, the flesh damp with sweat probably from laboring in the kitchen for these men. Her thick hair curled from the humidity around her heart-shaped face and those big brown eyes, thickly lashed, were limpid as they snagged mine across the room.

“Dante,” she breathed softly, an exhale more than a word.

Her fingers trembled as she lifted her fingers to clutch the small golden cross at hr throat. The men around us chuckled at her reaction, thinking she was a romantic girl overwhelmed by her reintroduction to a lost love.

I knew the truth.

She trembled because she feared me.

She always had.

After a brief hesitation, she moved around the table to serve espresso to each of the men from a tray on the sideboard. When ordered, she carefully balanced the tray on one hip to cut a spiral of rind from a lemon for the men to rub on the lip of their cups or offered the small bottle of Sambuca to add a splash of licorice liquor to the bitter contents. She handled her subservience deftly, with an ease that spoke of lifelong ritual. It was as beautiful as it was sad.

I’d spent too long in America where the women were fierce and entitled, always climbing, grabbing, scratching. I’d learned to find the beauty in their tenacity and verve and I’d forgotten the gentle loveliness of women who yearned for less.

“Mira.” I inclined my head at her before I cut her out of my thoughts. “Don Abruzzi, gentlemen, if you have a place Elena could wait while we discuss business, let us proceed.”

“No,” Rocco decided with a mean little grin. “The girl stays.”

“This a conversation for men,” I appealed to their deep-rooted misogyny. “Women cannot be trusted.”

Behind me, standing with Frankie, Elena’s heels clicked as she shifted weight and I knew she was struggling to remain meek. It was not in her nature to be as mafia women were raised to be. Elena was fire encased in a hard shell of ice. One wrong word and her cutting tongue would reduce a man to ribbons, one wrong move and her flames would raze him to the ground.

I could feel her heat raise at my back.

“Come here, pretty one,” Rocco called sweetly to her, patting his thigh as he made room for her between the table and his lap. “You can sit with Zio Rocco, uh?”

Anger sizzled through my blood. “Do not disrespect one of my men, Rocco.”

“Frankie doesn’t mind, does he?” Rocco asked innocently.

“I do, actually,” Frankie drawled casually, but his words were laced with poison.

“I am showing you hospitality, it is only fair that you return the gesture,” Rocco insisted in a tone that was not to be debated. “Signora Amata, vieni.”

Without hesitation, Elena went.

I watched her move around the table with that inherent grace I’d never seen in another woman, her shoulders squared, chin canted high, legs rolling easily on those absurdly high heels she loved so much. She was a queen walking into the arms of a grubby monster.

Rage seethed and boiled beneath my skin. I was volcanic with it and only years of practicing iron-clad control allowed me to keep me seat as Elena elegantly perched on Rocco’s fat thigh.

He chuckled with satisfaction, leaning back in his chair in lazy triumph. “This is how all meetings should be conducted, eh, fratelli?”

On cue, his men laughed.

I studied them, looking for the difference between those who thought like him and those who were ruled by fear of him. It was the latter I would collect into my own keeping.

“So, Don Salvatore, what brings you back home?” An old Don, Pietro Cavalli, asked me in a warbled voice. “You fucked things up in the New World? I always say, the young have no respect for tradition.”

“Then you will not like what I’m going to propose, Don Cavalli,” I admitted easily, shifting my gaze to the younger men around the table. “Because my plan is rather radical.”

“Radical?” Paulie Gotti’s eyes cut fierce lines into his thick-skinned forehead. “I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. You and Tore were always radicals.”

I inclined my head, accepting it as a compliment rather than a flaw. “I’ve heard that la Cosa Nostra are using the money funneling in from their American drug smuggling ring to get a leg up on our stronghold in Campania.”