Page 201 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet

I went to church.

The Cathedral of Naples was much grander than the small edifice we attended as children, but I’d navigated blindly into downtown Naples after leavingVilla Rosa,and something made me stop at the grand opulent structure dedicated to a God I didn’t believe in. It might have had something to do with the fact it was namedDuomo di San Gennaro, dedicated to the same saint Dante and I had celebrated what seemed like a lifetime ago in New York his first night of house arrest.

I was grateful to be wearing a silk blouse and black cigarette pants instead of one of the skin-baring dresses Dante had bought me, because Italians still took modesty in the house of the Lord incredibly seriously. As it was, no one stopped me from entering the Duomo.

It was quiet, with fewer than a handful of people milling inside. Lunchtime was meant to be spent with family or friends over wine in a piazza or the family home, but a few dedicated worshippers dotted the pews with rosary beads in their hands.

The click of my heels echoed off the marble floors and rebounded against the gilt-painted Baroque ceiling through the purloined archways bracketing the main chapel. No one watched me as I made my way to the main altar and slid into a wooden pew in the first row.

It had been years since I went to church, but my body knew how to fold itself to its knees on the provided cushions, hands clasping, head bowed. I wished I had beads to move through my fingers, counting my sins as well as my blessings like some religious calculator. Better yet, I wished I had Dante’s cross, the silver heavy and poignant in my hands.

I had nothing to grasp but my own turmoil.

Seamus was dead because I’d killed him.

Killed a man.

Killed my own father.

Cosima was my half sister because Mama had fallen in love with a Camorra capo and irrevocably changed our lives in doing so.

Would we have been protected from the mafia as much as we had been without that relationship? Would Cosima have ever been sold into sexual slavery without it, though?

Dante had loved her once. Of course, he had, almost every man I’d ever known had fallen in love with Cosima at one point or another. She was everything I wasn’t, likeable and loving, passionate and sensual, gorgeous and wise.

At some point in their shared history, he’d thought himself in love with her.

Like Christopher and Daniel with Giselle.

I was just the second-string sister.

The past was a knotted rope, tangled in my hands. I wanted to carefully unwind it so I could begin to understand why the decisions of others had seemingly landed our family, landedme, in this particular situation.

If I could understand it, maybe I wouldn’t be so hurt by the past.

But I knew even as I sat there until my knees ached and my skin grew cold and clammy from the air conditioning that I wouldn’t be able to decipher this the way I could the law or the constitution.

Human beings made messy choices based on instinct and the base urge to sin.

I didn’t know what it was like for Mama, raising two young girls without the help of a husband who increasingly didn’t return home at night or even in the morning. I didn’t know how it might have felt to have Amadeo Salvatore, so powerful and magnetic, take an interest in her, show her perhaps how a man should treat a woman, if only for a handful of nights.

But then, didn’t I?

That was exactly how I felt about Dante. How he’d seduced me away from myself and into something better.

Only, I’d had the courage to follow my capo into the dark when Mama had not.

The idea that Dante had wanted my sister romantically felt like a slap to the face of that courage. Was there something in me that reminded him of her the way it had with Christopher and Giselle? Was he using me to make her jealous? Was he wishing every day that I was someone else?

My head fell, chin to my chest, the weight of my chaotic thoughts too heavy to hold up anymore. Dante’s lyrically accented words echoed in the cavern of my reeling mind.

Io sono con te.I am with you.

Elena, you don’t realize this yet, but I see you, I know you, and I’m undone by you.

Sono pazzo di te. I’m crazy about you.

Only you, Elena. Only with you do I like fucking you, marking you, owning you with my body and my cum. Mine to fuck. Mine to cherish. Mine to love.