Page 85 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet

Four weeks of little touches while I recovered from my procedure and nothing else.

It was death by a thousand caresses, slowly shredding my ten-foot walls to ribbons.

My skin pebbled into goose bumps just being in the same room as Dante now, just catching the gravitational pull of those dark eyes across the living room.

I had to remind myself sternly that Dante was a criminal, a killer, essentially a beast in a multi-thousand-dollar suit. He wasn’t fooling anyone, least of allme.

I knew better.

Every experience in my life had taught me to know better.

But there was this flutter, a palpitation that I wondered if I should get checked out at the doctor whenever he found an excuse to touch me. And he did. Touch me. Often.

It wasn’t personal. I was learning that Dante touched everyone. He kissed Tore freely on both cheeks, hello and goodbye. He clamped a hand on the shoulder of asoldato, shook hands, and rubbed shoulders with his men the way a puppy might in a pen with its siblings.

He was incredibly tactile, which struck me as odd for a man in this day and age. Society had moved to a more cerebral plane, perhaps because of the influx of technology that allowed us to interact with minimal physical effort to obtain whatever we desired. Dante seemed to go out of his way to remain archaic. He had a young boy, Tony, deliver three physical copies of the paper every morning—The New York Times,The Guardian, andCorriere della sera. He demanded in-person meetings whenever he could manage it, even under the close watch of FBI surveillance, when there were countless platforms he could have used to conduct his business online that would have undoubtedly been less circumspect.

It wasn’t just his physical closeness that was wearing me smooth like waves against rocks.

Of course, as a woman and an educated, strong-willed one at that, I took fundamental umbrage with the mafia. How could any woman romanticize a system that viewed families as a feudal system run by men and only men, with the women used as janitors, cooks, nannies, and the occasional matrimonial bargaining chip?

This, I was learning, was not theborgataof Dante Salvatore. Of course, there was still a hierarchy. Dante and Tore at the top, a kind of bizarre co-captaincy you didn’t often see between mafiosos who were, as a rule, power-hungry and incapable of compromise. Then Frankie Amato, the tech whiz and right-hand man, who magicked whatever the Salvatores wanted seemingly out of thin air. There were the underbosses below that, manning their own mini fiefdoms, but they were not, I’d learned, exclusively male.

Frankie’s wife did work for the family.

Yara was their consigliere, a woman, and a non-Italian.

It was obvious that Dante had flouted the traditional norms that had ruled the Camorra and other Italian organizations like it for decades.

And it seemed to be working, financially at least.

No one seemed to want for anything. I’d seen the matte black Ferrari 458 Spider in the garage, secretly lusting after it; the Rolex, Patek Phillipe, and Piaget watches on the wrists of Dante and his men; the sheer size and expensive furnishings of the apartment I lived in temporarily. Dante and his crew of merry criminals owned hotel chains and construction companies, an incredibly lucrative and innovative energy company, and restaurants and bars across the company. The sheer scale of their legitimate or at least legitimate-facing businesses was staggering. In combination with their illegal dealings, the loan sharking, gambling, and fraud I never caught wind of, I could only guess at the billions of dollars coming in.

It also seemed evident that this new-fangled way of doing things did not go over well with important members in other organized crime families. I eavesdropped without shame, the lawyer in me unable to resist, and Dante didn’t try as hard as he could have to shield me from things.

I knew the di Carlo family was after him. The same family that had wrapped Cosima up in a drive-by shooting and put her in a coma.

When Gideone di Carlo called me, not once but twice, I didn’t answer, and eventually, I blocked his number.

In short, I knew too much.

Too much about the men behind the criminal masks, Chen’s quick mind, Marco’s humor, Frankie’s charm, Adriano’s quiet kindness, and even Jacopo’s bursts of good-natured ribbing. It was so much more difficult to hate them for their crimes when I knew more about their personalities than their illegal activities.

I had always found, if you could understand something, it was almost impossible to hate it because then you could empathize with it.

The same, of course, could be said for their boss.

Slowly and irrevocably spending time around Dante’s heat had thawed my icy demeanor toward him. I found myself bantering with him instead of trying to cut him to pieces with the sharp edge of my tongue. After going back to work from my surgery, I spent my late working hours at the living room desk or coffee table instead of the office because I liked the company.

His company.

One month of our forced proximity, and I was dangerously close to capitulating to his game of corruption.

Giving in to the lust I felt swelling tsunami strong in my gut. A sensation I had never in my twenty-seven years felt before meeting Dante.

The thaw he’d instigated with that simple neck kiss and extraordinary show of masturbation had never made me more aware of my body and its yearnings. I felt almost sensuallyalive, aware of the taste of food on my tongue, the very air on my skin, the cashmere I pulled on my body to ward against the deepening winter chill. I found myself craving things I’d eschewed for so long, chocolate and whiskey, dance and song, but most of all,sex.

I wanted him so badly even my teeth ached with it.