Page 171 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet

I didn’t know how to grow because I’d numbed myself to the point of intolerance. I didn’t allow myself to feel or experience life. It had hurt me so much, I didn’t trust myself to survive it anymore. It made my life bearable but hollow.

To think, for so long I’d never known true happiness. How foolish I’d been to think I could carve life up into parts and parcel them into neat little boxes on a shelf. I’d massacred any hope of joy, slaughtered newborn happiness before it could ever grow legs and stand tall. I’d condemned chaos, thinking it was the antithesis of everything a proper young woman should work for. Yearn for.

How wrong I’d been.

Dante had dragged me into the dark depths of his anarchic life and shown me the pleasure to be found in the shadows, the exhilaration of living on the knife’s edge of danger, and the headiness of power unfettered by morality or laws. Those tidy boxes of emotion and memories I’d kept so neatly organized came tumbling down, and among all that disorderly chaos, I found that seed again.

I’d found it because finally, after so many years, it had sprouted and grown leaves. It was still such a small, fragile thing in my chest, this new hope and direction after moving around blindly for years. But it was there, and it was so beautiful it made me want to cry.

But it also made me feel fierce and powerful, totally unafraid.

I was a lawyer, curiosity was my trade, so of course, after helping Dante move the body of the intruder down to the basement, I’d snuck back down to see what he would do with him.

The sight of Dante with a blowtorch in one hand and a spoon in the other, a detached, almost feral grin on the same mouth that spoke such beautiful words to me and did such wonderous things to my body did strange things to me.

I wasn’t horrified.

Oh, I knew I should have been. Watching my lover torture a man was a scenario I’d never thought up for myself. I’d always wanted a quiet, steady, wealthy lover who worked a quiet, steady job.

Not a mafioso who was astoundingly creative with his torture techniques.

I tried to remind myself how awful it had been for me when Seamus returned home broken and pulled apart by the Camorra for his unpaid gambling debts. How scared and upset I’d been.

But it didn’t have the same bearing anymore.

Now, I couldn’t forget that Seamus had somewhat deserved such treatment. He’d continually borrowed money from the outfit when he had little luck and no backup plan. The only thing that got him to pause his activities for any length of time was the particularly brutal beatings they doled out every once in a while to remind him that they weren’t afraid to take payment in the form of his life.

If Seamus deserved it, then didn’t this Umberto Arno deserve it now?

He’d blindly decided to assassinate Dante because he hadn’t liked Rocco’s plans for his cousin. It was sheer instinctual idiocy. If he’d used his brain for a moment, he could have questioned Dante’s motive in the scheme, wondered if the visiting Don would be happy about the idea of marrying some local Italian girl with a tarnished reputation.

But no.

Men.

Always acting as swiftly as they reacted.

So, I didn’t respond the way I would have even a month ago.

Instead, I felt the heat of desire and righteous fury flow through me as thick and hot as magma. I enjoyed watching Dante scare him the way most people might have enjoyed watching a well-acted play. I was engrossed and more than a little proud that that man, the one with all the power, the diamond-bright and hard-cut mind, and massive, threatening physique was allmine.

But then, watching wasn’t enough.

If he was mine, then I was his.

And didn’t that mean being at his side?

Fighting along with him.

When Umberto made the comment about Mirabella, I saw my opening. I knew what Dante didn’t, that he was protecting her not because of some transient passion but a deep, abiding love and respect that spoke of family.

I knew this because I knew Sebastian, if put in the same position, would have risked his life to get any one of his sisters out of the same place Mirabella found herself in.

It was risky to involve myself.

Dante said he wanted me by his side, but thought and action were two very different things. Most mafia wives and women were kept in the dark, meant to stay willfully blind and happy that way. I wasn’t most women, and Dante wasn’t most men, but we still lived and operated in that society.

So, I was nervous as I stepped out of the shadows, but no one stopped me. Not Nico, a familiar face from my childhood, or Frankie whose keen eyes told me he’d known I was outside the door all along. Not even Tore, who watched me with a steady, implacable expression as I crossed the floor, my bare feet sticking in cooling pools of blood as I went to Dante’s side.