Page 114 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet

“What? Capos need cuddles too.”

“Ridiculous,” she muttered, but a smile haunted her lips. “How am I supposed to resist you when you act like this? The big bad capo and the boyish charmer with the big heart.”

“Awe, she thinks I have a heart.”

I winced when she pinched my side in retribution.

We were quiet for a moment, the kind of easy silence that doesn’t need filling. I focused on recovering my equilibrium after my savage orgasm, already planning what I might do to her and with her next.

“Aren’t you scared at all?” she asked softly, stroking her fingers through my chest hair as if she wasn’t even aware she did it. “You’re on trial for murder, Dante. That’s serious.”

“No,” I said honestly. “No matter what happens, I’m not going to jail.”

She blinked at me, and I knew she wanted to ask questions, real questions about my business. She had been so careful to avoid any topic that might be too intimate or too criminal until then. But she was curious, and it excited me to see that the truth didn’t make her flinch anymore.

It made her think.

Still, she didn’t ask. Instead, she put her cheek to my chest and cuddled just a little bit closer. “It won’t be easy, but I promise I’ll do whatever I can to get you free.”

Fuck me, but this woman could be sweet under that brittle shell.

“I know,” I told her because I did.

“I’m happy,” she admitted after a minute, almost bashfully, adorably girlish. “For a long time, I’ve felt as if I didn’t deserve that.”

Her words nearly winded me. I squeezed her, wishing I could extract the poison of her self-loathing through sheer will. “Why wouldn’t you deserve that?”

For a short pause, she seemed to drown in all the things she wanted to articulate but couldn’t. “I’m not a very nice person sometimes. I-I lash out at people when I’m hurt and say horrible things. When I found out about Daniel and Giselle, I told them both they would never be a part of the family, that I would always hate them. I meant it at the time, and a part of me means it still, but…I ended up alienating my entire family because of it. Even though I was the victim, I ended up acting in a way that made me the villain of the whole situation.” She shrugged soddenly. “It’s been hard to live with that.”

“Not everything is so black and white, Elena,” I murmured as I slid a lock of her deep red hair between my fingers. “Between the hero and the villain, there is the anti-hero. A person who may do evil deeds and seem unscrupulous, but who, within their own set of morals, possesses a big heart and the willingness to protect that which they know to be good. I know you well enough now that whatever cruelty you gave those two stemmed from the fact that they didn’t love you enough to treat you with kindness.”

Her sigh was accompanied by a shudder. “You can’t know that, for sure. But…I like that you give me the benefit of the doubt.” She tipped her head to the ceiling as if to confess to God. “It’s you that’s made me happy today. A man I thought I’d hate is now one of the men I most admire. I just don’t know what that means.”

Her admiration felt like an anointment from God.

“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” I assured her. “Happiness is the point.”

She pursed her lips around her knee-jerk reaction to argue with me, then sighed. “You make everything sound so simple when it’s not.”

She was right; it wasn’t. But lying there naked and cooling after some of the most intense sex I’d ever had, I couldn’t help but wonder if it could be.

If there was a way to ensure we could be happy together for longer.

Maybe even forever.

It snowed the day we finally heard when Dante’s case would go to trial.

April 17th.

That unlucky number.

The number of death.

I sat at the table staring blindly out the window after Yara passed on the news. I should have been working, filing some of the cases a senior partner had given me to work on, or putting my plan for the bookie who had rolled on Dante into action.

But I just sat there and stared out the glass as the first December snow fell on Manhattan and turned the calamitous, colorful city into a muffled world of white.

I officially had an end date for the risk I was taking that could make my career or destroy it.