Page 183 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet

Not just the Duke’s second son with the money and prestige.

Not just the mafia Don with the edgy dangerous sex appeal.

Me.

Edward Dante Davenport Salvatore.

Realizing that felt like a baptism, a spiritual rebirth. I hadn’t even known I felt unworthy and afraid of love until I fell for my fearless gladiator. It was only when she seemed impervious to my flaws, uncaring of my dangers, that I realized I’d been expecting her to run away scared at the very least or hating me at the very worst.

She did none of those things.

Shooting her father, carrying the body of a man I’d knocked out cold into a basement then watching me interrogate him with a blowtorch and spoon, Elena hadn’t run scared once.

She’d barely even fucking blinked.

It occurred to me that if she was right about being born for me and the life I could give her then maybe I’d been born for her. Only my history could have prepared me to understand how it felt to be unloved by your family, to be ostracized by them and then to do it to yourself because you wondered how you could possibly be good enough if even your family didn’t believe in you?

Maybe every bad thing that had happened to us, maybe every single time we’d been made to feel like the villains of our own life story, we had been moving farther along the path to this.

To us.

Two broken and battered people made whole by love.

Not sweet, sugary, happily-ever-aftercazzato.

No.

This love was all teeth and claws, fight and passion.

Light was easy to love.

This love was dark. It was night as black as my eyes and as stormy as hers. It was seeing the shadows in each other’s souls and being drawn into their abyss. It was knowing we would never understand each other, not fully, and it was loving that challenge as much as the mystery.

This was what happened when two villains fell in love.

And it was as beautiful as anything I’d ever known.

“Say yes.”

She blinked up at me, her mouth red as a flower I wanted to pluck with my lips.

“Scusi?”

“Say yes,” I told her, holding her so tightly I could feel the bones beneath her skin. “I’m going to ask you to trust me because I’m going to tell you a nightmare, but then I’m going to hand you a dream.”

“Dante…” she murmured, a wary question.

“Dimmi si,” I repeated in Italian this time.

“Okay,” she said simply, melting into my arms even further so I was almost carrying her, trusting me with her body as well as her mind. “Yes, Dante.”

“There is going to be a wedding between Mirabella Ianni and me,” I told her slowly, ready for her flinch. She tried to pull away, but I held her close and let her struggle fruitlessly. “Marco’s in the hospital fighting for his life. He could be the mole, and even if he isn’t, there is someone out there whoishelping the di Carlos come for our family, Lena. We have to do something. We won’t get support from the Italian Camorra without this wedding. It’s how things are done in the Old Country. I don’t have to tell you that.”

“You’re marrying Mirabella Ianni,” she said coldly, the ice queen back in such force she was almost too cold to touch. “After everything.”

“No.” The word was a bullet piercing her through the heart. “No,cuore mia, I would never marry Mirabella, but there will be a wedding, and I need you to trust me even though it might seem like I’m betraying you.”

“Just tell me the plan,” she insisted.