When Villains Rise (Anti-Heroes in Love 2)
She was still in her damned nightgown, the silk so thin it molded to her every curve. For modesty’s sake, she’d donned the robe but I had taken the sash so the entire length of black silk gaped open and made her look even more inviting. Angry as I was, she still took my fucking breath away standing there with all that red hair mussed, her face bare of makeup and all the more striking for it.
In an entirely different outfit, in an entirely different space and she still reminded me of some heathen goddess of sex and war.
“Elena,” I began on a low growl, hyper aware of the blood sprayed across my face, the swollen, cut open knuckles on my bloody hands, the gory spoon in my fingers.
This was not how I wanted Elena to see me.
She was too smart not to know what a mafioso got up to in the shadows. How a Made Man might punish someone for trying to take away his life. She knew what I was on trial for, shed read the FBI files about my supposed crimes front to back more than once.
But she didn’t need to witness it. Let alone me doing those deeds.
She was a lady.
She deserved diamonds and silk and lace, manners and galas in velvet dresses.
Not basement rendezvous at midnight with a man’s cries still ringing against the walls.
Not even Cosima had ever seen this side of me, the ruthless, seething darkness I had inside of me. I’d never shown her, even though she was married to my brother who was often more monster than man.
I hadn’t trusted her, or maybe I hadn’t trusted myself.
Either way, standing over a man I fully intended to send to hell with the woman I would move heaven and earth for was a deeply fucking unsettling scenario.
She ignored me, her gaze pinned on Umberto. Without hesitating, she walked toward us, her bare feet catching in the blood splatter, tracking red footprints on portions of the clean tiles.
When she was in line with me, she stopped even though she didn’t acknowledge my presence. I was irritated, but also curious. What was my sharp-minded lottatrice thinking?
“You love her,” she continued in that liquid Neapolitan accent of dropped vowels and shushing ‘s’s’ that couldn’t be taught, only learned from birth. “You love her, but not as a lover. As a sister? Ah, no, maybe a beloved cousin?”
Umberto blinked, but there was an uncanny twist to his mouth that confirmed Elena’s suspicions.
“I know Mirabella is afraid of Dante,” Elena continued smoothly, sitting in my vacant chair primly, legs crossed, hands loosely clasped like she was in a holding room at a New York jail interviewing a client and not in the basement torture room of an infamous mafioso. “But he wouldn’t be a bad match for her, would he? He’s affluent and respected in the community. I don’t believe you’d kill him just to get your sister out of an arranged marriage. There’s another reason.”
Umberto’s lips twisted tighter, a valiant effort to cap the bubbling emotions bursting inside him.
Elena sighed, leaning forward earnestly. “You don’t seem very attached to your sight, Signore Arno.”
Taking her cue, I sparked the torch in my hand, the hiss of flame loud in the quiet room.
Umberto swallowed thickly. “My sister deserves to be happy.”
“Yes,” my woman agreed easily. “Everyone does. Whether or not that’s feasible is another case entirely. Have you thought that perhaps Dante doesn’t want to marry your sister either?”
“So he can marry you?” he snarled in heavily accented English. “Some American whore?”
Elena didn’t say a word as I grabbed Umberto by the throat and squeezed, his face plumping, reddening like an overripe fruit on the vine about to burst.
“Say another word against her, I’ll take your eyes and your balls.”
He wheezed painfully after I abruptly released him and stepped back.
“This isn’t about me,” Elena continued calmly, as if I hadn’t just strangled a man for insulting her, but I could see the way her thighs squeezed together and I wondered with sudden heat if she liked my heathen aggression. “This is about Mirabella. You want her to be happy. Maybe, Dante can make that happen.”
Umberto scowled fiercely at her for a long moment before something in his twisted mouth softened just slightly. His eyes flickered to mine in a gesture that was all question marks and reluctant hope.
“Forsa,” I drawled, maybe. I used the edged of the serrated spoon in my hand to scrape some dried blood off my palm. “But this bastardo tried to kill me. I don’t take that lightly. He endangered you, lottatrice, and that means, he needs to be punished properly.”
“So take his eyes,” Elena said with a little shrug, but there was that calculating gleam in her eyes.
I felt a surge of pride watching her, sitting prim like a principessa with the mind of a fighter, using her skills as a lawyer to manipulate this man into giving us what we wanted.