Page 169 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet

“Che palle,” he cursed. “Okay, you bastard, no one sent me because I came myself.”

This was a surprise. I studied the younger man again, but I was certain I didn’t know him. When I looked up across the room at Tore, who leaned against the wall with his arms and legs crossed casually like he was waiting for something as mundane as a bus, he shook his head.

We didn’t know this man for him to hate us enough to kill us.

“Why?” I demanded, dropping the spoon because I was bored.

Umberto sighed in relief until I grabbed the abandoned torch and lit it an inch from his eye.

When he finished screaming, I repeated myself.

“Because I love Mira!” he shouted hoarsely, too loud and forceful, the tendons in his neck straining.

It was the look and sound of a man at the end of his rope.

This pleased me.

“You’re in love with Mira?” I asked, vaguely surprised that the meek woman could inspire such passion that thisstronzowould risk his life trying to take mine in my own home.

He clamped his mouth shut truculently, but before I could light the torch again, a soft, lilting voice spoke in a language that I wasn’t used to hearing from her.

“In love with her? No, you love her, though, don’t you?”

I sucked in a deep, steadying breath before I looked over my shoulder at the woman who could seduce me and infuriate me in equal measures.

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 blowtorch dangling between 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. She’d read the FBI files about my supposed crimes front to back more than once.

But she didn’t need towitnessit. Let alonemedoing 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 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-mindedlottatricethinking?

“You love her,” she continued in that liquid Neapolitan accent of dropped vowels and shushingS’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 an uncanny twist to his mouth 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.”