When Villains Rise (Anti-Heroes in Love 2)

“Tu si l’azzurro dò mare sì duci e si amar,” I told her. You are like the sea, sweet and salty. “A sailor does not leave the sea because it storms and it does not begrudge the ocean her moods. I have no intention of giving up on you, Elena, because there is no part of you I do not find worthy and fascinating. If this ends, it will be because you chose to end it and you refuse to let me fight to win you back.”

“I don’t want that,” she whispered, so quietly it was barely sound.

“Then I am with you,” I promised, sealing the words with a kiss to that full red mouth.

And when I broke away, she pulled me back fiercely, speaking the words into my parted lips like a gardener planting a seed. “Io sonno con te.”

Five

Elena

Naples was a city of contrasts. They say a person is molded by their place of birth, by the city they were raised in, so in ways I was both ashamed and proud of, for better and for worse, it made sense that Napoli was my home.

We passed through the streets of the city in a long, low Lamborghini Aventador that had appeared outside Rocco Abruzzi’s downtown villa sometime while we’d been locked inside. Dante took the keys from a pimply faced youth wearing a S.S.C. Napoli soccer jersey and six gold chains around his thin, almost fragile neck. It was impossible to look at him and not imagine Sebastian at the same age if he’d given into the pressure of the Camorra and joined their ranks.

Dante caught my little shiver, but didn’t say a word as he helped me into the low car and shut the door behind me, calling out to Frankie who was climbing into a black Range Rover lingering in the middle of the street despite the honking traffic wedged behind it.

In fact, we were both oddly silent as we traveled through the streets. Maybe he was as mired in memories as I was, though it seemed surreal to me that Dante could have existed in the city at the same time I had. It was romantic and foolish, but I felt certain I should have felt him in the atmosphere, a magnetic force drawing us together across the stuccoed walls and chain link fences.

It was obvious from Rocco’s ostentatious villa and the sleek Lambo we were currently cruising through the streets in that Dante’s experience of the city was vastly different than my own.

When we crossed into Forcella, the Spanish district, I finally recognized my hometown. There were countless bassi there, one or two room poor houses with direct access to the street or clogged into alleyways that were the arteries of the city. A man slept face down on the ground outside the Ascalesi hospital, using a bag of old lemons as a pillow. Prostitutes lingered in open doorways partially veiled with swathes of brightly patterned cloth and kids tumbled through the streets running errands for their parents, kicking soccer balls off of walls and into the street where they wedged under old, abandoned cars.

This wasn’t the glamorous Italy, the tourist’s Italy.

This was my Italy.

My chest ached as I passed swiftly through the streets. It was a strange and unsettling realization to see how far I’d come from my childhood, sitting there with a Made Man in a hundred-thousand-euro car on our way to what would surely be another opulent villa the likes of which tourist’s and daydreamers always envisioned as quintessential in my country.

I’d seen a luxury car once or twice in my youth, the yellow paint gleaming so much brighter than the chipped urine-toned stucco on our little house outside the city. Don Salvatore had been in that car, visiting us the way he had sometimes at Christmas or on birthdays. As soon as one of us kids spotted the car in our cracked asphalt driveway, Mama told us to scram so she could talk to the capo herself.

“A penny for your thoughts,” Dante offered as we finally broke through to the outskirts of the city and he gunned the engine, zooming onto the highway that took us south. “They are so loud, I can almost hear them.”

I snorted softly, my fingertips on the window pane as if I could touch the passing scenery. “Just remembering.”

“Bad memories?”

I shrugged one shoulder weakly. “Mostly. We were pretty happy sometimes, though. Mama struggled with work and four children, with Seamus and her own depression, but she loved us. She would sing while we hung the laundry in the backyard and chased the twins around endlessly because they always had so much energy. She was always cooking for us, standing in the kitchen chatting about our days while she rolled dough like master sculpture with clay. It was where we congregated at the end of every day. Even Giselle and I were close when we were young, but she doesn’t seem to remember that.”