Arraignments were often boring, but this was shaping up to be the most sensational one I’d ever attended.
“Your Honor, the accused has clear ties to England and Italy,” Dennis stood to say when the judge addressed him to state his case for not posting bail for the defendant. “His own brother, one of the wealthiest men in Britain, is here today and would have resources enough to get Mr. Salvatore out of the country––”
“Objection,” I murmured under my breath at the same time Yara stood to say the very same thing. “Conjecture.”
Judge Hartford slanted Yara an unamused look. “I hardly need Mr. O’Malley to state the obvious, Ms. Ghorbani. Your client has known connections in Europe and the UK, enough legitimate business to have access to significant monetary resources if he should want to flee the country, and sufficient motivation to do so. I see no reason he should not be detained until trial.”
Beside me, Dante stiffened slightly, the only clue that the idea of incarceration was unappealing to him. Then again, the fastest timeframe for a trial as big as this was at least six months but more likely one to three years. New York and its residents loved a good mafia case, and it was a prime opportunity for the city, its officers, district and US Attorneys, and government to showcase their protection of the city.
“With all due respect, Your Honor,” Yara said in that misleadingly lovely voice that meant she was about to kick verbal ass. “The prosecution has fairly insufficient proof to bring this to trial in the first place.”
“That matter is not currently up for debate, Ms. Ghorbani,” Judge Hartford interrupted coldly.
“No,” she agreed easily. “But my client is an established member of New York City society. He owns multiple businesses in the city and most of his living relations are residents. This is his first criminal offense on American soil, and therefore, he cannot be considered a threat to the public if he is granted bail. Furthermore, he was unduly attacked this morning based on these accusations, and there is a real threat of bodily harm should he be kept in the general population in prison awaiting trial.”
Judge Hartford stared at her flatly before his eyes flickered over to Dante and his jaw went tight.
He did not want to grant bail.
But he would.
While it wasn’t guaranteed, bail was the right of any person awaiting trial unless they were a proven danger to society, like a serial killer.
Of course, it was my opinion that Dante had probably killed numerous people in his sordid life, thus earning that distinction, but I wasn’t about to point that out.
“I know your reputation, Ms. Ghorbani, and I won’t have any shady business conducted in this courtroom, is that understood?” He waited for a firm nod then continued. “As I see it, Mr. Salvatore is a flight risk, but he poses no immediate threat to the public. I do not pretend to care about the safety of your client, Ms. Ghorbani, but I will allow bail to be set. Mr. Salvatore, I am releasing you on ten million dollars bond and placing you on house arrest. You will only be permitted to leave your residence for church, therapy, or medical appointments and will be monitored via GPS bracelet.”
There was a clamor in the room as shutters clicked, and people balked, then whispered at the decision.
House arrest.
For a man like Dante, a man who seemed like a barely leashed beast at the best of times, I imagined house arrest was akin to being locked in a cage for the next six months to three years.
Yet he sat there beside me in his bespoke black suit, sleek and powerful as a panther, looking nothing short of mildly bored and perhaps a little drowsy. I felt like shaking him until his teeth rattled, yelling at him that this was the rest of his life at stake and demanding him to tell me why he was so utterly blasé about the whole thing.
I didn’t know why I cared.
It wasn’t that I’d formed some lunatic instant connection to the man. In fact, I abhorred almost everything he stood for.
Perhaps, it was as simple as the fact that I wanted some of that unshakeable calm for myself. I wanted to steal the magic of his self-assuredness and bottle it like perfume to spritz on my pulse points whenever I needed validation.
“Court is dismissed,” Judge Hartford said distantly, and then there was chaos as everyone rose to leave, photogs clamoring for one last shot of the impudent mafioso.
“Well,” I said, unable to curb my impulse to poke at his calm, like a child shaking a bottle of pop hoping for an explosion. “I certainly hope this lends a new gravity to your understanding of the situation.”
Dante didn’t look at me as he unfolded to his immense height and adjusted the silver cuff links with the same crest emblazoned on his gaudy silver ring. Only when we were pressed together by Ernesto and Bill shuffling out of their seats did his gaze lock on mine with an almost audible click. I gasped slightly as a rough hand, that same one that had left an imprint on my thigh only minutes before, wrapped nearly double around my wrist, his thumb notched over my pulse. It drew my attention to the quickened thud of my heartbeat.
Adrenaline flooded my body at being so close to and held by such a man, a mammoth predator, but there was something else there too in the hot undercurrents, something sunk deep into my blood.
Something like lust.
I fixed a glower to my face and breathed through my mouth so I could avoid that oddly intoxicating lemon and pepper scent of his.
He wasn’t deterred.
If anything, his eyes danced for the first time since we entered the courtroom as his lips barely moved around the words, “You can cage the man, Elena, but not the idea. No collection of walls is strong enough to hold me or mine.”
“You are very poetic about organized crime.”
“Thank you,” he said even though it wasn’t a compliment. “Have dinner with me tonight. It’s my last as a free man.”
I’d missed that somehow when I’d been dazed out thinking about the irritating man shackling my wrist. Typically, he would be imprisoned pending house arrest, but I had no doubt Yara had finagled something legally or with a well-placed bribe to give the capo one last night. I tugged free of his hold and bared my teeth between my painted red lips, not caring for once how I might look to the photographers gathered.
“I wouldn’t go to dinner with you if it was our last night on earth,” I promised darkly before turning on my heel and following Bill and Ernesto, leaving my client with Yara.
The tendrils of his smoky chuckle somehow threaded through the noise of the room and wound its way into my ears, a casual, beautifully toned mockery of everything I held dear.
It was official.
I hated him.
ELENA
The mafia ‘lord’ laughs in the face of his crimes.
I scoffed as I read the headline in The New York Times above a grainy black and white photo of a laughing Dante Salvatore that still managed to capture the depth of his beauty. It made him look like a movie star playing some kinda charming criminal the audience was supposed to root for in an HBO show. The new moniker they had given him, “the mafia lord,” proved to glamorize and civilize him in a way that would appeal to millions of Americans.
Exactly Dante’s intention.
Though the article was a condemnation of his criminal character, there was no doubt he had succeeded in swaying public opinion at least slightly in his favor.
The reporter, a man whose work I’d read since my arrival on American shores and who I knew to be a hard-nosed, rarely forgiving journalist, even allowed that Dante Salvatore, though built like a savage beast, still retained some of the grace his rearing as a Lord’s second son had born in him.
I rolled my eyes as I tossed the paper onto the chair beside me, then pinched my nose to briefly relieve the headache stirring behind my eyes.
It had been a long day with the indictment, but we’d achieved what we set out to do.
Judge Hartford agreed to post bail.
To the outstanding tune of ten million dollars.
; Cash.
For a New York mafioso, such a number shouldn’t be a hardship. Dante was under investigation, which meant he had to be able to prove his bail money came from a legitimate business, but Yara had informed me that Dante had more than enough cash from his lawful businesses to post bail immediately.
In addition, he was going to be housebound, shackled to his apartment by a high-tech anklet that tracked his every move.
It was impossible not to think of him as a wild animal locked in a cage, prowling madly, growing restless as each day passed, his savagery ballooning to fill every inch of that cramped space.
In all likelihood, it was a mega-mansion, but Dante was a man with endless testosterone. I had no doubt he would turn into his basest self before too long when confined as he would be between four walls.
I was not relishing my interactions with him.
Almost as much as I was not looking forward to my appointment with Dr. Taylor.
“Elena?” the doctor herself said kindly as she opened the door to the luxuriously appointment room where I sat in a thin cashmere hospital gown on the exam table. “How are we today?”
“Anxious,” I admitted, though nothing in my straight posture or carefully clasped hands denoted the riot of nerves ricocheting in my belly. “I feel as though I’ve been waiting forever to know what’s wrong with me.”
Dr. Taylor’s severe face, Slavic and big-boned, gentled into a genuine smile as she sat on her wheelie stool and opened my medical file. “That’s very normal, I assure you. So let me get right to it then. I have good news. What you have is a combination of various abnormalities that have made fertility and orgasm achievement difficult for you. A decade ago, we wouldn’t have even noticed these collections of issues, let alone known how to treat them. In this day and age, though, with our advanced technology and surgical practices, I believe we can fix your primary anorgasmia and greatly improve your chances of conceiving a child one day.”
I blinked as my chest compressed painfully, and heat pricked the backs of my eyes. My breath wouldn’t move through my body, my lips wouldn’t form the words I wanted to say, probably because, in my shocked relief, I didn’t even know which ones to speak.
Thank God.
I can’t believe it.
Are you sure? Please, don’t let this be another cruel joke.
I can be fixed?
Instead, I sat there mutely, convulsively swallowing past the lump in my throat as I stared down at my clasped hands.
It was silly, really, that I should feel so emotional over potentially gaining the ability to orgasm after a lifetime of sex without true pleasure. Lord knew, sex wasn’t everything. It was hardly and probably understandably, given my affliction and history, a blip on my radar.
But it represented so much more.
Living as a woman who couldn’t orgasm with significant fertility issues in part because of an ectopic pregnancy five years ago was psychologically crippling.
Even though I’d eschewed my Italian culture for years, it was still pervasive enough to leave a lingering sense of shame that I couldn’t fulfill the Italian ideal of a woman: get married, give birth to an endless stream of children to satisfy the pope or the mafia, whichever religion my people subscribed to, and raise them in that faith.
Then there was the simple and crushing fact that my fiancé had left me for another woman after having a kinky, fucked-up affair with her for weeks behind my back. This was made even more excruciating by the fact that they’d recently brought a baby into the world.
A little girl.
I’d overheard Cosima talking on the phone to Giselle one morning, and apparently, little Genevieve even had Daniel’s beautiful blue eyes.
Pain lanced through me every time I thought about Daniel’s new family, spearing straight into my spine so that I felt I might break clean in two.
Given all of that, I decided to allow myself the agony of relief searing through me and the wet it brought to my eyes.
Dr. Taylor wheeled forward to place a hand on my knee and smile at me tenderly. “I don’t think I ever thought I’d see you so moved.”
I laughed, a choked-off, ugly sound. “Great bedside manner, Monica.”
She laughed too. “I do my best for my friends. Do you need a moment?”
“No, no.” I rolled my shoulders back and fixed her with my cool stare. “Run me through the procedure and let me look at my calendar, let’s get this booked in.”
“There are risks,” she warned. “You have endometriosis and significant fibroids. We’re talking about two procedures done simultaneously.”
A bitter coughing chuckle erupted from my lips. “Of course there are, and knowing my luck, I should know the worst-case outcome. But honestly, Monica, this is the best news I’ve had in so long…” I swallowed the unexpected surge of a sob rising in my throat and powered through. “It’s just good to know there’s a chance.”
“You’d have to continue with your therapy,” she reminded me. “There are mental obstacles to these kinds of issues as well, and Dr. Madsen seems to think it’s helping.”
I thought therapy was a waste of my valuable time, and I didn’t particularly like Dr. Madsen, but I only nodded, too relieved to put up my usual fight.
Monica smiled at me, a rich expression of joy that mimicked the feeling ballooning in my belly. “At the end of this, Elena, you’ll know carnal pleasure, and one day, I hope you’ll know the joy of being a mother. You might need additional hormone therapy to conceive because I’m worried about your estrogen levels, but natural conception should be a very real possibility.”
I swallowed the knot of tangled emotions in my throat and gave her a curt nod. I wanted to hope, but if life had taught me anything, it was that hope was a slippery thing, and just as soon as you found purchase with your hold, it slipped away again, elusive and cruel.
I’d once had everything I’d ever wanted, the job, the home, the man, but no sexual climax, no chance at fulfilling my dream of being a mother. It seemed a steep price to pay to swap one for the other, and I couldn’t help but be filled with bitterness at the thought that I couldn’t have it all.
I used to love my townhome. It was a Greek Revival three-story brick affair tucked away in the elite neighborhood of Gramercy Park. Daniel and I had bought it together after walking by it nearly every evening for weeks. At the time, when he was just hitting his stride with his real estate development firm, Faire Developments, and I was taking the Bar exam, it was at the upper end of our price range and entirely impractical. We were only two people, years out from starting a family, but Daniel had seen how much I loved it. He had known how I’d longed for a beautiful place to call home since I was a little girl tucked away in a rotting house the color of sunbaked urine in Naples.
He was that kind of man, the kind who would bend over backward to give his woman everything her heart desired.
To lose a man like that…well, thirteen months had passed, and I still felt the echo of his loss in my empty chest and the once-beloved, empty rooms of my townhome.
I felt the vibration of that loneliness pang through me as I opened the elegant black door to my house and stepped into the cool, neutral-toned interior. Keys went into the porcelain catch-all on the ivory side table, my carefully maintained Louboutin pumps in the closet beside it, and my cashmere coat hung above that.
Silence pulsed all around me as my stocking feet padded down the dark hardwood floors to the living room.
I’d thought, briefly, about getting a cat just to have a living creature yearn for my company, but just as quickly, I discarded the idea. I worked from seven in the morning until eight or nine every evening. The cat would resent me in the end, just as most people seemed to, and I didn’t think I could stand another rejection.
The quiet weighed on me that day, heavier than normal, so I did what I always did to shatter the silence and remind myself I was alive, even if there was no one to see it.
I cut diagonally across the room to th
e grand piano dominating the far corner, its surface glossy as an oil slick. My heart thundered in my ears as I dragged the stool out and perched on the cushioned edge. The metallic tang of adrenaline hit the back of my tongue as a quiver set into my long fingers, the digits trembling as I lifted the guard from the keys and pushed it back.
My body yearned for this the way addicts longed for their next hit.
Perhaps masochistically, I didn’t give in to the compulsion to play very often.
My siblings might have pursued creative careers against all the odds, but I was too pragmatic to indulge in my idle daydreams when we’d been poor and circled by carrion capos from the time we were born. I set my mind to better uses, but my soul––the wretched, dreamy thing––wouldn’t let me stay away from music for long.
I sucked in a deep lungful of air, trying to ignore the memories that threatened to drown me as I placed my fingertips on the cool ivories and began to play.
My eyes closed instinctively as “Somewhere Else” by my countryman Dario Crisman flowed from my hands into the glossy musical beast before me. It was one of the first complicated songs the hunchbacked old lady with nimble, youthful fingers who had taught me everything I knew about piano, Signora Donati, made me learn. It had resonated with me, the idea that somewhere else was a place I might one day be allowed to visit.
Until I was an adult, the glaringly bright and stench-strewn streets of Napoli were all I knew. Once, Christopher had taken me as far south as Sorrento. I remembered the cotton candy colors of the houses, how clean the streets seemed, and how true blue the water was without the murk and muck of a commercial fishing harbor to mar its beauty. But the memories were sullied by the very fact that Christopher, eighteen years older than me, had harnessed my girlish, sixteen-year-old excitement and made it malleable in his warm, searching hands.
I’d lost my virginity that weekend and returned feeling worldly both for my travels and my carnal experience. It wasn’t until later, when Christopher grew cruel, but more, when Cosima finally got us out of Napoli and away from him, that I realized what a nightmare that pretty place of Sorrento had symbolized for me.
When Heroes Fall Page 4