Page 18 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet

He flipped over one of those big paws on the table, showing me the strength in his hand by flexing and releasing a fist. “Si, these hands have seen violence and retribution, Elena, but does that mean they cannot also comfort a child, bring pleasure to a lover, or protect an innocent?”

I scoffed. “Excuse me if I can’t see you protecting an innocent.”

Instantly, Dante’s open features shuttered close, and a scowl knotted between his thick brows. “You act very high and mighty for a woman who judges me without knowing me, especially when I am trying to get to know her.”

“You don’t need to know me for me to work my ass off for you on this case,” I rebutted, hovering off my chair as I glared over the table at him.

“Well, you need to knowmeif you want to stay on this team and get that success you’re so desperate for,” he countered as he pushed back from his chair and leaned across the little table, his hand wrapped around my throat in a shockingly firm grip. My pulse hammered against his fingers, but I didn’t move, immobilized not by his grip on my neck but by the ferocity in his eyes.

“Ascoltami,” he seethed in Italian, ordering me to listen to him. “I have made sacrifices for innocents and loved ones that your neat black and white world could never compute. When haveyoumade a sacrifice, hmm?”

Nausea flooded me as a memory spun like a fractured kaleidoscope through my mind’s eye. A mafioso hitting me because I’d hid pretty Giselle from him and then Christopher, begging him not to harm her.

I didn’t say that, though.

Instead, I looked into the burning dark of his gaze and slid my response like a blade between his ribs. “I have. I’m sacrificing my integrity by helpingyoubecause I made Cosima a promise.”

He stared at me unblinkingly for a long moment, that hand still banded around my throat, so hot it scorched my skin. The air around us throbbed in time with my pulse. There was a flush in my cheeks I could feel and a heaviness in my gut I told myself was anger instead of something more carnal.

I watched as the darkness in Dante’s eyes warmed with something other than anger. I sucked a sharp breath into my mouth, tasting his peppery cologne accidentally as he brought my face closer to his in order to rasp his stubbled cheek against my own and whisper in my ear, “Who knows,lottatrice, maybe you’ll find more pleasure being in bed with the devil than you would have imagined.”

What happens after the fall of a dynasty?

The big bang and flash of fireworks exploding in a decades-long show of glitz and glamour, dissolving into wisps and embers and then… into nothing.

It leaves a huge ink-black sky ripe for the filling.

A black hole just waiting for someone to step up and control the void.

The mafia of old died in the 80s after the trial of Arturo Accardi hit the final nail in the coffins of the Old Guard. The public hits, Made Men caricatures wrapped up in tailor-made Prada suits with gold chains and pockets bulging with rolls of fat hundreds, were gone.

But the mafia itself could not be killed.

Not then, certainly not now, and if I had to hedge a bet, notever.

The mafia was founded on the idea of brotherhood and greed, both so essential to the human existence it could never be snuffed out.

So, we iterated, reiterated, again and again. We were an amorphous shape, constantly changing with the times and adapting better than any other institution or organization because we didn’t have to worry about pesky things like the law or morality.

The mafia originated in Sicily because, after decades of constant invasions and shifts in power, the natives developed a finely honed sense of loyalty to their neighbors over their loyalty to the government. As a result, they were able to maintain a culture based on their unique community and not that of their oppressors.

The mafia was founded as a result of a greater power trying to cut Italians down, so Italians created their own organization to fight back and police their own.

This was why even after the massive governmental and police attacks on the American mafia in the 80s, families of organized crime not only still existed… They fucking thrived. Not even cancel culture could cancel the mafia. Some institutions existed outside of time and place.La Famigliawas one such institution.

Where did I fit into any of that?

Well, in this life, my third in thirty-five years, I was Dante Salvatore,capoof the Salvatoreborgata.

Charmingly mad, bad, and entirely too dangerous to know.

Or so they said.

Few people knew the real me, but perhaps the one who loved me most currently sat scowling beside me, drinking an expensive glass of Chianti as if it was cheap American beer.

“It is not for them to doubt us,” Amadeo Salvatore muttered darkly into the wide bowl of his glass, dark brow knitted together into one long, furry line. “They are to listen and obey. You have to earn respect to get respect. Is this a concept youth today cannot grasp?”

I grinned at my pseudo-father, noting that even at eleven at night after a full day of work, his Brioni suit was still immaculately pressed. Tore prized control over almost any other quality. He was intractable with his rules, rigid in his regard for conformity within the Outfit.