Page 52 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet

“I was so young, barely nineteen, but I knew the moment I saw him that he should be mine. He had that Italian hair, you know? Thick and silken, so lush and curling I could already imagine my hands carding through it as we kissed.” She laughed, and it was an easy sound, a strange one coming from so calculated a woman. “He noticed me a moment later, and I knew when we locked eyes that he wanted me. So, when he approached, I went with him easily. He was funny, and I liked the way he was always using his hands to tell me things in ways his mouth could not. There was such confidence in him it made me feel important to be next to him.”

She paused to take a sip of espresso, and I was struck by an overlay of her as that young girl, a beautiful Persian intrigued by the different culture and beauty of the Italian boy.

“My family hated him, of course, when they found out we were going together. I only told them because I fully intended to marry him. I was in law school, but I wanted to drop out and move permanently to Italy. I wanted to drink wine with him in Piazza Navona every night for the rest of my life and have his babies. My parents told me if I didn’t at least finish my degree, they would never talk to me again. I figured, what is one more year in the grand scheme of life and our love? So, I returned to America at the end of the summer, and we wrote letters to each other every day for the next six months.”

Her smile was sad, but then, I’d already known it would be a tragic story.

“I was graduating in three weeks when I got a phone call from Donni. His father needed money. Their butcher shop was struggling, and the bank wouldn’t give him a loan. So, he’d gone to the local capo of the Camorra and asked him. Not only did they give Signore Carozza the loan, they also offered Donni a job.”

My chest tightened with dread as I realized where this was going, that I was hearing yet another story about how the mafia had destroyed a life.

“Like any American girl, I’d watched movies about the mafia, but I didn’t really understand the intricacies of the institution. I didn’t know enough to ask Donni not to work for them. He started to make good money, saving to buy a house for us when I moved back.” She sighed, pain stale in those beautiful dark eyes, lips lax with remembered sorrow. “He’d only been working with them for a month when he was in a car accident.”

I frowned, my mouth opening as if I could correct her because I had been sure that wasn’t where the story was going to go.

Yara’s mouth tightened in recognition of my shock. “He was just twenty-three, and he was hit straight on by a drunk driver. There was massive damage, including trauma to his brain. When I flew out to Rome after getting the call, it was to visit Donni in the hospital, and he was hooked up to life support. He was in a coma, and the doctors didn’t have much hope he would recover.”

Tears glistened in her eyes, but her voice was strong, her eyes almost wild with mad intensity as she leaned across the table and grabbed my hand tightly in her own. “The Camorra paid for his hospital fees, to keep him alive for as long as Signore Carozza and I needed to say our goodbyes. Their women brought flowers every single day until Donni’s room was like a garden. The capo himself visited while I was there, a handsome, strong man with more power in his little finger than I’d ever seen in another man’s entire body. He took my hand and he promised me he would take care of Signore Carozza and his family until the day he died. He told me that even though he’d only known Donni for a short time, he knew in his bones he’d been a good man and would have made me a good husband. Apparently, my Donni talked about me all the time.”

Yara’s nail dug into my skin painfully, and when I winced slightly, she smoothed the pad of her thumb over the hurt. “They held a beautiful funeral for him. The capo gave me a traditional black lace veil one of the wives had made herself, and I saw my Donni off the way he would have wanted to go, with his family surrounding him and the man who’d saved them from destitution beside us. Do you know who that man was, Elena?”

I knew.

My lips spoke the words before my mind could even compute them. “Amadeo Salvatore.”

“Yes,” she almost hissed, and I finally recognized where that manic intensity vibrating from her entire body stemmed from. Loyalty. “Amadeo Salvatore did right by a man he barely knew. He took care of an entire family just because a young boy who worked for him died. When Signore Carozza died, Tore paid for his funeral. When Donni’s sister wanted to go to school, he sent her to the Universita di Bologna.” She paused to smile, all teeth. “When I needed a job after returning heartbroken to America, Tore found me one, and when he moved here five years ago, I was finally in a place to return his loyalty.”

My mouth was dry, my tongue coated with the bitterness of coffee. I had difficulty swallowing, maybe because I didn’t want to ingest Yara’s tale. I didn’t want to hear stories about the mafia being the good guys.

I’d already had to rethink so many fundamental beliefs since Daniel left me. I wasn’t ready to empathize with the villains who’d haunted me and mine my entire life.

Yara seemed to sense my recalcitrance, her mouth twisting tight over the carbonate anger I could see bubbling inside her. “A poor lawyer follows the law to the exact letter; the best lawyer makes the law work for them. Law and morality can’t always coexist, Elena, and sometimes, the difference between the two is loyalty.”

“What are you asking of me?” I demanded, tugging my hand free from her damp grip to reclaim my cold coffee. “I’m already on the case.”

“Are you?” she asked, one brow arched high like a question mark. “I was of the impression Elena Lombardi didn’t half-ass anything.”

“I don’t,” I countered immediately, unthinkingly.

“Good,” she said, her smile smug as the cat who ate the canary. “Then you’ll be willing to do anything to win this case.”

I glared at her truculently, unwilling to answer.

“I know you don’t want your sister’s best friend to come to any harm.” Her voice was warm again, cajoling. “You saw what this trial is doing to Dante. That won’t be the first attempt on his life if he can’t shake a conviction. His other…associates don’t trust a man on trial anymore. Rats are too common in the sewers of the underworld since Tomasso Bruschetta and Reno Maglione turned in the 80s.”

“I don’t want him to die,” I agreed because I’d found it was true. The sight of that massive body sprawled and lax on the black leather couch, broad face sheened with clammy sweat, all vitality lost, still made my stomach ache.

Yara leaned back in her seat, crossed her legs, and folded her hands in her lap. I recognized the pose because I’d often adapted that false coolness when I was about to go in for the kill.

My blood hummed beneath my skin in a way that felt like a pulled alarm, alerting me to leave at once.

I didn’t.

I should have.

But I sat there frozen in the amber of my curiosity and almost morbid desire to be included.

And Yara delivered her blow.