Page 41 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet

The air in the room went flat, then flickered with energy and erupted as the men burst into motion.

“We’re hitting them now,” Frankie growled, his dark hair disheveled from his agitated hands. “Kelly and his crew hang out most evenings at that sports bar in Marine Park, Father Patrick’s. They’ll be done by the end of the night.”

“Frankie,chiudi la bocca,” Tore barked, ordering him to shut up. “We do not discuss these things outside the family.”

I looked at Yara, wondering how she was dealing with the crisis and the potential knowledge that Dante’s associates were determined to kill a group of men in the Bronx.

She turned her large dark eyes toward me, expression entirely imperturbable, and blinked slowly.

It occurred to me for the first time in a very real way that Yara Ghorbani was not the woman I thought she was. I’d wrongly assumed that because she wasn’t Italian, the mafia wouldn’t include her in the mechanisms of their schemes.

But I should have cottoned on the day we were shot at on the way to court.

I should have known when Yara was so easy with Dante’s familiar treatment of me.

She was not just representing Dante in this RICO case.

She was theirconsigliere.

Not “other.”

She was Family.

In that room of shadowed eyes, I was the only one outside the Family.

Something curdled in my stomach, a reaction that surprised me as much as it shamed me. Once again, I was left out of the group dynamic. At work, my fellow associates saw me as a threat. They called me the ice queen or the bitch because I was driven and didn’t know how to make anything beyond polite small talk when I could feel their disdain every time we spoke. Growing up, I’d been the red-headed girl playing with the true-blooded Italians who could be incredibly discriminatory. Even in my own family, I was different, set apart. I wasn’t vivacious and bold like my siblings. I wasn’t easy and comfortable with talk of love and sex and the ribbing that I knew logically was par for the course between sisters and brothers. Then Giselle and Daniel happened, and the entire family seemed to have known about it before I did.

Alone.

God, I was so fucking tired of being alone.

“I can leave,” I offered as if I didn’t want to be there anyway while inside my chest, I burned.

Tore slanted me an assessing look. “We will go to the office. You and Yara stay with Dante and Augustus.”

Dr. Crown grunted. “Good, you’re distracting me. If you stay, don’t hover.”

I nodded, relieved I could stay to see if Dante would be okay.Cosima would want a report,I told myself, and it was my sisterly duty to stay so I could give her the full story.

The men filed out of the room, the one named Jacopo glaring at me before he rounded the corner and out of sight.

“Ignore Mr. Salvatore,” Yara suggested mildly, but her eyes were sharp on my face, peeling back my skin with scalpel-like precision to read things beneath it I wasn’t willing to share. “They call him Grouch.”

A wan smile tipped my lips. “Good to know it’s not just me. Is he Dante’s…cousin?”

Yara nodded as she finally took a seat with a sigh, rearranging her long limbs under her stunning black dress. “He is the son of Tore’s cousin, the same cousin who helped them establish their…business when they first moved here from Italy.”

“What happened to him?” I knew better than to ask questions about mafia dealings, but I was also a lawyer. My mind formed questions and hunted down answers the way a Rhodesian ridgeback stalked down lions.

Yara waved a hand, watching as Dr. Crown continued to administer care to Dante. “He was killed.”

I fought the urge to roll my eyes because I’d obviously already arrived at that conclusion. I wanted to know the how, which was frequently much more interesting than the why of a thing.

“And this Kelly person?” I asked, shifting my weight on my heels as they bit into the soles of my feet. I was tempted to sit down, but I figured I should stay immobile, holding the bag of saline for Dante.

“You haven’t heard his name?” she asked, faintly surprised. “Thomas ‘Gunner’ Kelly is the leader of the Irish mob.”

“I was under the impression such a thing didn’t exist anymore.” I thought back to articles I had read about the demise of Irish gangs in America, about the diluted sense of Irish identity after so many years of integration and an influx of more powerful foreign criminal outfits like the Triad and the Mexican cartels.