Page 22 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet

If physical pain didn’t break him, perhaps emotional brutality would.

So, when Mason muttered something in the negative, I was ready.

When I snapped my fingers, Jacopo stepped forward to hand me a phone with a video already presented on the screen. I grabbed Mason by the chin and forced him to look at it.

“This is your sweet sister, Violetta, isn’t it?” I purred as I forced him to watch the footage of his younger sister gagged and tied to a chair, struggling to avoid the hands of my man, Adriano, as he ran a knife gently down her cheek. She jerked, and the metal cut into her flesh, blood beading like a string of ruby across her jaw.

“You motherfucker,” Mason barked, finding the energy to spit at me. I wiped it off my cheek with a flick of my fingers. “You fucking motherfucker! She has nothing to do with this.”

“She does, actually,” I argued. “She’s the niece of Giuseppe di Carlo, the same man who tried to fuck with Cosima and therefore, who tried to fuck with me. You di Carlos have been so far up my arse lately trying to fuck up my deal with the Basante cartel that I figured I should return the favor.” I paused and studied the video with him. “Violetta does have a fine arse.”

Mason thrashed against the coarse ropes even though they dug into his shoulders and back. The movement opened old wounds, causing his skin to weep red tears.

I studied him without emotion. A psychologist might have called it dissociative behavior. They might have blamed it on one of three popular schools of criminal theory like the Chicago School or strain theory that postulated my tendencies were rooted in poverty, lack of education, or cultural pressures. But I was a Cambridge graduate in psychology, the son of one of the wealthiest peerages in the United Kingdom.

They might have explained it away by using subculture theory—that I was a privileged white boy acting out against societal mores.

They would all be wrong.

It was simple.

I was the son of an evil man.

There was a difference between a bad man and an evil one.

A bad man was corrupted by the influence of his upbringing or surroundings, by the people he associated with, and perhaps by the choices of other people in a position of power over him.

An evil man, a man like my father, Noel, was born a different kind of being than most others. A man whose natural expression was violence and whose moral compass wasn’t so much broken as never formed at all. A man who thought and felt only of himself and his need to sin.

Noel Davenport might have been a duke of the fucking realm, but he was a criminal, a murdering sociopath of the highest order.

As his son, was it any wonder I’d drifted into crime myself?

Of course, it was Noel who drove me out of the British moors I’d grown up in, from the well-heeled society of my fellow Oxbridge graduates and peers to the dark, shifting dens of immorality in Italy’s southern mafia stronghold.

But it was easy for any man to blame his choices on someone else.

Yes, Noel drove me from England and my birthright as a wealthy, ennui-laced aristocrat. But I made the choice to hitch my cart to my “uncle” Amadeo Salvatore’s criminal enterprise.

Honestly, I loved life. I love the pleasures to be had in it. The sex, the food, the bloody good wines, and all those highs were only amplified by the edge of danger and fear that my existence in the underworld lent to my life. I lived every day like it was my fucking last, and I’d learned that from my mother.

Chiara Davenport, the Italian beauty who’d been seduced by Noel into moving from Italy to the cold, wet lands of England where he neglected her, abused her, and then, ultimately, murdered her.

There.

My entire history summarized neatly. I was a thirty-five-year-old man with a degree in psychology and a job that relied wholly on my ability to perceive others. I knew who I was, what I wanted, and how I was going to get it.

But as I stared at Mason struggling, as if that would free his sister, I had a flash of misgiving as the high, smooth contralto voice of a certain ice queen lawyer infiltrated my thoughts.

You might have no problem beating a man or threatening his family if he goes against you, but I’ve been the daughter of that man, and I’ve been that child who was threatened.

I growled at that voice and banished it to the farthest reaches of my mind. I didn’t need Elena Lombardi’s judgmental voice in my head urging me to fuck up this situation even further. It was my last night of freedom before being tethered to my fucking apartment, and I needed Mason Matlock to break like cheap plastic.

“Feel like telling me what I want to know?” I asked Mason in a hard rumble. “Or should I tell Adriano to use that knife on the softest places a woman has?”

Mason swore savagely at me in English, so far removed from his ancestry that he didn’t realize Italian curses were far superior. “You wouldn’t dare.”

I raised a brow at him, then coiled quickly to land an exact punch to his left kidney. His breath exploded from his lips, bloody spittle flying over my black shirt.