Page 154 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet

“And if it happens?” I demanded as something painful twisted in my gut. “If we make a baby? Because, Elena, I do not intend to stop fucking you and filling you with my cum.”

She shivered again, her light eyes catching my dark, shadowed gaze in the mirror. “I don’t know… I used to want to be married first with the white picket fence American dream kind of life. But now…now I don’t know. All I do understand is that your world, maybeourworld now, is a dangerous place to bring a child into.”

“Si,” I agreed, linking our fingers together at her neck, dragging our twined thumbs over her slowing pulse. “But not for a baby of ours. Not when he or she will have you as their shield and me their sword.”

Emotion flared so bright in her eyes it blinded me like sunlight on steel. She tried to cover it, blinking and lowering that expressive gaze to the sink as if it was vastly interesting.

I used our joined hands to tip her chin up, forcing her to look at me.

“There is no shame in anything between us,lottatice mia. I will not have you feel embarrassed of your emotions with me. Embarrassed of the dreams I hope you’ll come to share with me. Most people have reason to fear me. I’d end them without blinking for even a slight offense against me or mine. But you?” I brushed my nose up her elegant neck and pressed an open-mouthed kiss to her cheek. “You have nothing to fear in me,capisci? You have had enough to fear in your life and I will break apart the entire universe if it dares to harm you again. Do you understand me?”

She bit her lip, the lipstick worn down to a pale red smudge. “It’s not you I’m scared of so much as I’m afraid of myself. I have the tendency to ruin every good thing I’ve ever had. And you are undoubtedly the best of them.”

I pulled my softening cock out of her slowly, moving my hand down to cup her drenched sex. Our mingled cum leaked between my fingers, sliding a lonely trail down the inside of one thigh. I cupped her there and at her throat as I looked into those storm clouded eyes and made her a promise I never intended to break.

“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 choose 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.”

Naples was a city of contrasts. They said a person was 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 an 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 in to 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 countlessbassithere, 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 facedown on the ground outside theAscalesihospital, 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 while kicking soccer balls off the walls and into the street where they wedged under old, abandoned cars.

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

This wasmyItaly.

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 tourists 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 windowpane 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 back yard 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 a master sculptor 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.”

“We all have different relationships to the past. Sometimes, we cancel out the whole to rid ourselves of a few bad parts.”

“Mmm,” I hummed because I thought he was right, but I’d never entertained the idea. “How did you get so wise?”

He slanted me a look. “Would you believe me if I said I was born this way?”

I laughed, some of the clotted poison in my veins dissipating. “No, I absolutely would not.”