Page 4 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet

“You watch too many movies, Elena. In real life, the villain always wins because we are willing to do anything to succeed.” He paused as I did in the doorway. “I think you know a little something about that.”

A shiver worked itself down my spine like fingers on piano keys, trilling a discordant tune that sounded very much like a portentous music score in one of those movies he was talking about.

He shouldn’t have been so distinguishable in the dark, but then again, that was where monsters like him thrived, so perhaps it made sense.

Dawn was just flirting with the ink-stained night, the anemic light half-hidden by the dense cluster of buildings blocking the horizon and the artificial lights cutting shapes into the interior of the Town Car as we passed through the almost empty streets of Midtown.

Blocks of colored light spun over Dante Salvatore’s face like a child’s kaleidoscope, illuminating his bold features for seconds at a time, making his beautiful visage into something like a puzzle for my overanalytical brain to dissect and wonder over.

The truth was, he really was too startlingly handsome to be a Made Man.

I knew mafiosos. I’d grown up with them circling my family like carrion at the scene of horrific carnage. My father had been indentured to them for as many years as I could remember. My childhood was defined by the Italian Camorra’s presence in our lives.

I knew them to be short men with Napoleonic complexes, small eyes like glossed black beads in flaccid, flabby faces made swollen with too much indulgence in every kind of excess.

They were ugly men in ugly packages easily identified and labeled as the trash they were.

But this man?

The most infamous mafioso of the 21stcentury in a time when most Americans believed the mafia to be a dead and fossilized creature, well, he was another beast entirely.

He was too tall, quilted heavily with muscle that should have made him slow-moving and rigid but instead lent him the grace and constantly harnessed threat of a wild cat. He was as incongruous as one stalking through the concrete jungle of New York City, bigger and badder than the rest even though he wore the most meticulous suits and the most expensive designer brands.

Who he thought he was fooling with such a sheepish guise, I hadn’t a clue.

It should have been obvious to all and sundry that Dante was awolf.

“You say nothing for a woman with eloquent eyes,” he said then, jarring me from my introspection.

Momentarily, I was ashamed he had caught me staring, but then I remembered part of my job was to study him, so I settled comfortably back behind my professional mask.

My smile was thin. “Knowing my thoughts is a privilege I don’t share with strangers.”

“Ms. Lombardi,” my boss, one of the partners in my law firm and co-lead on the case, Yara Ghorbani, chastised me shortly, but Dante only laughed.

The sound moved through the Town Car like the crescendo of noise at the beginning of a jazz song, each note a building block leading to something richer, brighter.

It was a disturbingly pleasant sound to emerge from a murderer.

“Excuse Ms. Lombardi, please, Mr. Salvatore. She’s only a fourth-year associate, and we believed she was ready for the kind of responsibility this case would afford her,” Yara said softly, in that way she had of mellifluously delivering scathing insults. “I believe you and Ibothwill be disappointed if that proves untrue.”

I didn’t allow a single movement to betray how harshly I felt those words score down my throat. I’d learned the hard way over the years that people had no qualms about ruthlessly attacking any perceived weakness.

And I had no doubt thecapoof the New York City Salvatore Mafia Family would exploit anything he could find, even in his own legal team.

He watched me from his slight lounge across the back of the black leather seats, strong thighs parted inelegantly in his slouch, one hand rubbing at the thick stubble on his jaw.

We’d advised him to be clean-shaven.

We had also couriered over an entire outfit for him to wear to the arraignment because perception in cases like these was everything.

Of course, he wasn’t wearing it.

Instead, his big form was clad entirely in black, from the tips of his Berluti loafers to the perfectly tailored blazer hugging his broad shoulders. There was a glint of silver chain at his throat that I thought might have carried a cross or a saint’s pendant, but it was nowhere near enough to save his overall demeanor.

He looked criminal, filled with wicked intent and handsome enough to tempt the pope to sin.

Sonotthe look we wanted on a man being accused of three counts under the RICO Act.