Page 193 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet

It was messy and loud, utterly filthy.

“That was incredible,” I croaked into his damp neck as he held me up though I didn’t know how he had the strength.

“Completamente,” he agreed on a hoarse whisper.

“Let’s do it again,” I said, not even sure how much of it was a joke and how much of it was a rabid, reckless wish.

He was my drug. Even after taking a hit, I craved more with an intensity that was next to madness.

His laugh stirred sweat-wet hair. “Do you know how it makes me feel to see you as the ice queen for everyone else and the fiery temptress for me and me alone?”

He pulled back, letting my legs slide to the ground so he could untie my hands. His strong thumbs worked the stiffness out of my joints before he raised each palm to his mouth to place a kiss in the center the way he was making a habit of doing.

“It makes me feel like a king,” he confessed.

“A Don,” I corrected, gasping as he bent to collect me in his arms to carry me back to the house. It was archaic, but I was grateful because it seemed my bones had melted. “A Don and his Donna.”

One week in Italy felt like an entire lifetime.

For the first time since I was fourteen, I didn’t have a job to occupy my time, but that didn’t mean I was lazy.

To my surprise, Tore ran a business out of his steeply terraced lemon orchard and olive grove. He made boutique olive oil that sold for over one hundred euros a jar and limoncello so bright and creamy, I found myself liking the liquor for the first time in my life. He took me with him to tour the processing house where the olives were pressed, and I helped a group of workers pick Meyer lemons one day, collecting them in old-school huge wicker baskets the women propped on their hips like babies and the men on their hatted heads.

Dante was in and out of the house planning his wedding with Mirabella and taking meetings with Rocco to plan a two-pronged assault on the Cosa Nostra, in America and in Italy. I tried not to think about what would happen if we didn’t come up with a plan to pull off the wedding without Dante having to marry her. Mama’s words echoed in my ears. If anyone could fix this problem, it was Dante or me.

News from New York was grim. Marco had survived his first week post-surgery, but a number of complications could still arise, and he was still in a medically induced coma. The di Carlos had ambushed another deal with the Basante cartel and set fire to a construction site owned by one of Dante’s shell corporations that set them back millions of dollars. I’d FaceTimed with Aurora and Bambi once, but even the little girl seemed tensed and frightened. They didn’t say anything about Marco, and when I asked about Bambi’s boyfriend still scaring her, she clammed up. I was desperate to get back to the city, but I hadn’t figured out yet how to do so without Dante going to jail.

Despite everything, Dante still found time for me, taking me on dates escorted by Frankie in case anyone saw us out together and reported to Rocco. We went to Rome and Ravello, spent a late afternoon in Positano getting drunk onAglianicored wine until Frankie finally told me the whole sordid story of his romance with his wife, Lilianna.

I continued to spar in the mornings with Dante and Frankie, but many of the men joined us too, including Tore. It was amusing at first, to watch my six foot five, packed with muscle lover circle the older man who was still high muscled, but lean and corded next to Dante’s bulk. The moment they first made contact, I lost my smile.

They attacked each other like two beasts locked in a cage. Their swinging fists weren’t tempered, hammering through the air to impact with the body on a dull, wince-inducingthud. They kicked and ducked, punched in a variety of combinations that was entirely too quick to track. Dante was better, but youth gave him his edge where Tore was all experience. He knew when to duck and bend and when to attack relentlessly.

By the time they were done, the mats were slick with sweat, large crystal beads of it rolling down both men’s glistening bodies.

They trained like Spartans, like they were headed off to battle the very next day to fight for their lives.

When I told Dante this after the first time I watched them, both of us under the cool stream of the shower in our room, he’d laughed even as he said, “We don’t fight often, but when we do, Lena, that’s what it is. A fight for our lives.”

His words should have chilled me more than the cold shower, but they had a different effect, one I was beginning to understand was my natural reaction to danger.

My whole life, I’d been risk adverse, careful to the point of drudgery.

Now, my bubble was cracked open, and everything was spilling inside, violence and chaos, the threat of death that only proved to heighten every other aspect of life.

I was coming to know myself, and something about that was frightening.

Like meeting the monster you always knew lurked under your bed.

I wasn’t all elegance and refined grace.

If I was a shell, there was that pearl of refinement inside me, but it was surrounded by the grit of sand and dirt.

I was baser than I’d ever realized.

Sex was on my brain anytime Dante was in the same vicinity as me. I couldn’t look at those densely muscled hands without imagining how his thumb might taste sucked into my mouth. I couldn’t sit across from him at the breakfast table without running my toe over the crisp hair of his calf just to have the intense thrill of his skin against my own. I wanted to bite him until bruises blossomed like tattoos of my ownership. I wanted to fuck him until all that power in those muscles and bones melted away, and he was lax and vulnerable with spent ecstasy.

There was violence in me too. Maybe I’d always known that. I’d taken too much delight in beating Christopher when he came for Giselle. I enjoyed the tang of blood in my mouth when Damiano mistimed a punch and hit me on the edge of the chin. The feel of a gun in my hand was becoming natural, an extension of myself that suited the armor I’d honed all these years.