Sorrow warped my throat into a misshapen swollen mess, air catching in the narrow channel until I felt I might choke.
I’d lost so much of myself before I’d ever truly known who I was.
It was strange to mourn for your own life, but as I sat at the piano and poured my overfull soul into the keys, the music sweet and aching in my ears, I said a little prayer that I might recover some of those precious fragments one day. That I might not go on so hollow and brittle, ready to crack into sharp pieces that might pierce anyone so brave as to pick them up.
As the final strains of the movement dissolved in the air, the staccato slap of clapping hands reverberated through the space.
“Bellisima, Elena,” Dante Salvatore commended over the hearty sound of his applause as he stood leaning against the doorframe between my living room and hallway. “Who knew you had such beauty at your fingertips?”
I blinked at him, prying my mind out of my dreamy introspection into the present, madly wondering what the condemned mafioso was doing in my house.
He took the time to smile; a long, slow pull of his full lips into a heart-stopping grin that carved creases into his cheeks and fine lines beside his big, dark eyes. It was the smile of a born charmer. He assumed it would work on me just as I was sure it had worked on countless women before.
Instead, it doused me in cold water, awakening me to full, alert outrage.
“What are you doing in my house?” I demanded coldly as I stood and walked to my kitchen to grab the landline. I raised the handle threateningly. “Do I need to call the police because there is an intruder in my home?”
“By all means,” he allowed agreeably, extending his massive hands with a shrug. Belatedly, I noticed the white plastic bag in his grip. “But I am an intruder bearing gifts, and I’ve never known an Italian woman to turn away a handsome man with food.”
I sniffed. “I don’t consider myself an Italian woman.”
“Ah,” he said irritatingly in the same tone my smug, know-it-all therapist used when I said something he found enlightening. “Just as I do not consider myself a Brit.”
“No matter what you chose to believe, you are the brother of a duke. I’d imagine that’s rather hard to ignore,” I quipped, determined to cut him to ribbons with my barbed tongue before tossing him out on his ear.
“You’d be surprised,” he said as he moved into my kitchen as if he had dined there a thousand times before. I watched, struck mute by his audacity, as he dropped the takeout bag on the marble counter and began to open cupboards in search of glasses. Once found, he produced a bottle of Italian Chianti from the bag with a flourish and continued to speak as if picking up the thread of a conversation we had already been having. “A little birdie told me Chianti is a favorite of yours. Typically, I would pair it with a good pasta, but that same birdie informed me you avoid Italian food. So…” He smiled again, that great big grin on his great big face. “I brought Sushi Yasaka.”
Pain lanced through me so intensely, I flinched then watched Dante’s smirk fall on the left side like a crookedly hung painting.
It was such a little thing, but I’d found it was the collection of small reminders that combined throughout the day to leave me aching and tired.
Sushi Yasaka had been our place, Daniel’s and mine.
I hadn’t eaten there in months as a result, but a small part of me yearned for the tuna sashimi Dante pulled from the bag.
“Bad memories?” he questioned so softly I found myself answering before I could stop myself.
“Old memories,” I allowed before shaking my head and fixing him with another glare. “Now, Edward Davenport, I’d like to know what you are doing in my house uninvited? It seems you have a habit of breaking in where you aren’t wanted.”
The first time I’d met Dante, it had been at the hospital bedside of my beloved Cosima. The sight of such a large Italian man looming over my prone sister had instilled a fresh terror in me that I hadn’t felt in years.
Needless to say, it hadn’t exactly been a successful first impression.
Dante, though, only chuckled in that way I’d learned he had when someone tried to make him face uncomfortable truths. “I was invited to her bedside. You just didn’t know it. And I am here, quite simply, Elena, to determine if you are fit to be one of my legal representatives.”
Instantly, I bristled, ready to don the armor I’d honed over the years of having to prove my worth in the legal profession as both a woman and an immigrant.
Dante held up one large, deeply tanned hand before I could protest, laughter dancing in his eyes. It annoyed me beyond measure that he seemed to find hilarity in every single thing I did.
“I did not mean to imply you aren’t technically a fine choice,” he allowed with great generosity. “Only that I need a specific type of person on my legal team, and even though you recovered well enough from the shock of the drive-by shooter today, I get a sense you are the type of woman who prefers the straight and narrow.” When I continued to glare at him, he cocked an eyebrow and made an innocent gesture, hands open to the ceiling. “Am I wrong in assuming this?”
I ground my teeth together. “You know what they say about assumptions.”
His head tilted to the right, strong brow furrowed. “Actually, I don’t.”
I shrugged tensely. “They make an ass out of you and me.”
He blinked, then slapped a hand on the counter and positively roared with laughter. The robust sound swelled and ebbed in my narrow kitchen, too big and bright to be contained.
“The lady can be coarse,” he said finally, still speaking through his chuckles. “Oh, the sound of a curse on your lips is sinful, Elena. You should swear more often.”
I tipped my chin slightly in the air as my only answer. I certainly would not. If anything, his remark only served to remind me that “coarse” wasn’t an adjective I ever wanted to hear in conjunction with me.
I’d worked too hard to move past the roughness of my upbringing. To be the kind of woman who worked at a top-ten law firm in the city and the type of paramour a man like Daniel might take for his partner.
Dante studied me too keenly, bracing himself on his forearms to lean familiarly over the counter as if we were two close friends having a tête-à-tête. “You know, it is the contrast between two opposites that heightens them both to keener glory. You shouldn’t be afraid to be coarse, just as I shouldn’t be afraid to be gentle. Too much of one thing is boring, Elena.”
“I’ve been accused of much worse,” I retorted acerbically.
I’d never been good at the unflappable act. It was one of the qualities I’d admired most about Daniel, his ability to remain physically unfazed even in the face of utter chaos. There was too much Latin in my blood, no matter how I tried to curb it, to rid myself of the wild extremity of my emotions.
Dante could have very well been teasing me in the way I knew many people did to build a rapport, but however well-intentioned, I wasn’t good at taking criticism.
I felt red-faced and slightly ashamed, then angry with myself for feeling that way. The complicated knot of my own raw emotions was too difficult for me to unravel. Suddenly, I was tired of myself. So exhausted by the simple act of being me.
It wasn’t an unusual sensation these days, but it made me weary to the bone.
Dante seemed to sense the shift in me, his ink-dark eyes tracing the softening line of my shoulders and the swell of my chest beneath the silk blouse as I let out a deep breath and raked in a new one.
“There,” he said, almost gently, averting his eyes as if to give me privacy while he collected my plates, glasses, and the food to move to my small round dining room table. “It is the end of a long day, Elena. Why don’t you sit down and help me eat all this food, hmm?”
I blinked as the large Made Man folded himself almost comically into a chair at my tiny table and then spread his thick thighs until barely any space remained for me to pull out the other chair. He proceeded to dish out fo
od from various containers onto his plate, humming a vaguely familiar song under his breath as he did.
I blinked again.
It perturbed me how easily he could throw me off even though I reminded myself this was extremely bizarre behavior. The man had broken into my house to invite himself to dinner he’d bought, and somehow, he made me feel unhospitable and ungracious.
“Seduta,” Dante ordered mildly.
Instantly and without thought, I sat.
Anger spiked through me, chased by humiliation.
It had been a long time since I’d accepted any orders from any man in any language, let alone one I’d banished from my mind.
When I went to stand again, vibrating with anger, Dante lashed out and grabbed my wrist in a light but unyielding hold, making me flinch. Our eyes caught, snagged on each other for a long, disquieting moment where he looked too deep inside me.
“We will speak only English, okay?” he promised solemnly.
I stared at him, finally pinpointing what it was exactly about Dante Salvatore that put me so ill at ease.
He was utterly genuine.
In his dominance, in his charm, in his concern.
He committed himself entirely to the moment, to that which was at the center of his attention. To be in his spotlight felt like being naked, razed of every defense I’d spent twenty-seven years meticulously forging.
“Fine, I’m sitting,” I offered stiffly, crossing my legs. Dante’s eyes immediately went to the edge of the opaque band at the top of my thigh-high stockings. I uncrossed them and tugged my black cashmere skirt down farther. “What did you break into my house to tell me?”
“We do not do business at the dinner table,” he admonished even though he shot me that wicked grin.
It was an age-old rule, one that even I knew as a civilian outside of the mafia.
“I’d rather we get on with it. You’re encroaching on my plans for this evening.” I arched a chilly brow at him as I reached for the tuna sashimi, my stomach rumbling quietly, reminding me I’d only eaten half an apple since breakfast.
“Oh?” The word was swallowed up in a chuckle. “Hot date?”
I looked down my nose at him as I popped a piece of silken fish into my mouth and hummed lightly as I swallowed it. There was no reason he had to know the closest I’d been to a hot date since Daniel left me was a glass of wine, a box of my favorite French chocolates, and an episode of True Blood. “Perhaps.”
Dante’s hands, the palms thick with plump muscle, looked faintly ridiculous holding the slim chopsticks, but he maneuvered them like a pro as he picked through a spicy salmon roll. “Then I insist we talk about this. Cosima implied you were… not interested in men.”
I choked on a piece of sushi, inhaling the wasabi painfully. Calmly, eyes dancing, Dante handed me my untouched glass of Italian red.
I glared at him as I swallowed it down, breathing with relief when the burning in my throat eased.
“I’m very interested in the right kind of men,” I corrected him in a throatier voice than usual, rough from my coughing fit. “Men of honor and substance. It’s not my fault they’re a rare breed.”
“I wonder if you’d give any man the chance to prove his worth?” Dante mused.
The words weren’t unkind, but they hurt all the same. Late at night lying in the big bed I’d once shared with him, I’d wondered if I hadn’t given Daniel a proper chance to be himself with me, to prove that whatever more he was could be beautiful to me.
I’d shut him down because I’d been afraid.
I could admit it now, after months of reluctant therapy.
His sexual proclivities had broken open old scar tissue from Christopher’s abuse in my youth, and like a coward, I’d let my fear rule me and ruin my relationship with the best man I’d ever known.
I didn’t say any of that to the mafioso sitting across from me as if we were at his house instead of mine. Something about his easy manner seemed to exacerbate every single one of my flaws. I felt naked and raw under that olive-black gaze, and I didn’t like it at all.
So, I tipped my chin and slanted him a cool look. “Nothing worth having is ever easy.”
An abrupt laugh erupted from his broad chest. “Oh yes, Elena, with this, I can agree.”
I plucked up a piece of silken sashimi and let it melt on my tongue before I set my chopsticks down and fixed him with a cool, professional look. “As long as you’re here, we should run through tomorrow’s proceedings. The probation officer will be at your address at ten in the morning to fit you with your ankle monitor and set up the system. Unless you have approval from their office to attend doctor’s appointments, church, therapy, or something equally pragmatic and important to your health, you will be restricted to your home.”
He shrugged one thick shoulder and took a long sip of his wine. I watched his throat contract as he swallowed, wondering at the density of muscles in his neck deepening over his shoulders. I was an avid runner who never missed a workout, so I knew he must have worked every day to maintain such an outrageously fit physique.
“It is okay to admire me.” His voice bumped into my thoughts, upending a flush that spilled like the wine in his glass all the way from my cheeks to my breasts. “You are a Lombardi woman, and as such, I’m certain you have a deep appreciation for beauty.”
“This is why I dislike Italian men. You’re so arrogant.”
“Is it arrogance if it is based in fact? Why fake humility? Would you rather I deceive you than speak the truth?” he countered calmly.
I felt as if I was being cross-examined at court, his eyes searching for cracks in my façade, his mind carefully calculating every word out of my mouth. It infuriated me that he thought he had the right to interrogate me. That he thought he had a right to know me.
No one did.
I was an island, and I liked it that way.
“First of all, Edward, I was not admiring your so-called beauty. You may make a certain type of woman swoon, but I prefer my men un-Made and considerably more sophisticated.”
“You have such hatred for the Camorra, yet your sisters both seem unaffected by this,” he mused, prodding at me in that way I was learning he had, trying to get into every nook and cranny of my being.
His words triggered my first horrific memory of the Camorra and their presence in our lives.
My siblings were too young to remember the depravity of our childhood with any kind of true clarity. Our trip to Puglia when the twins were only babes and Giselle a dreamy toddler was remembered only for the turbulent private plane we took to get there.
They didn’t remember, as I did, three years older than them, the horror that had led us to flee our home in Naples for the sun-beaten shores of the south.
I could still remember the taste of steel in my mouth, the feel of the gun heavy and cold on my tongue like some macabre phallus. How tears had burned the backs of my eyes like a lighter held to my optic nerves and how I’d refused to let them fall, holding my breath and clenching my fists until I was more stone than flesh.
I was six years old when Seamus and Mama returned home one day to find a soldato in the local Camorra holding me against his body with his gun lodged in my mouth.
It wasn’t the first time Seamus had owed money, but it was the first time they’d threatened his children. Giselle was only four, the twins nearly three years old. For the first time in my memory, Mama had usurped Seamus’s will, and the next day, after cleaning out our savings to pay his debts, we’d moved to Puglia to stay with Mama’s cousins.
It didn’t last, of course, but our time spent on the island was one of the only happy eras of my childhood.
“You might be poetic about crime, but I’ve lived it enough to see the horrors,” I finally said, dragging my gaze back into the present and pinning him with my judgmental gaze. “You might have no problem beating a man or threatening his family if he goes against you, but I’ve been the daughter of that man, and I’ve been that child who was
threatened. How you can see anything worth admiring in that, I have no clue.”
“You are substituting a part for the whole. The actions of one bad man do not extend to every other man in his community,” he argued.
I finished my wine, surprised by how quickly I’d downed the lovely vintage.
“Are you suggesting you aren’t a bad man, capo?” I asked sweetly.
He flipped over one of those big paws on the table, showing me the strength in his hand by flexing and releasing a fist. “Si, these hands have seen violence and retribution, Elena, but does that mean they cannot also comfort a child, bring pleasure to a lover, or protect an innocent?”
I scoffed. “Excuse me if I can’t see you protecting an innocent.”
Instantly, Dante’s open features shuttered close, and a scowl knotted between his thick brows. “You act very high and mighty for a woman who judges me without knowing me, especially when I am trying to get to know her.”
“You don’t need to know me for me to work my ass off for you on this case,” I rebutted, hovering off my chair as I glared over the table at him.
“Well, you need to know me if you want to stay on this team and get that success you’re so desperate for,” he countered as he pushed back from his chair and leaned across the little table, his hand wrapped around my throat in a shockingly firm grip. My pulse hammered against his fingers, but I didn’t move, immobilized not by his grip on my neck but by the ferocity in his eyes.
“Ascoltami,” he seethed in Italian, ordering me to listen to him. “I have made sacrifices for innocents and loved ones that your neat black and white world could never compute. When have you made a sacrifice, hmm?”
Nausea flooded me as a memory spun like a fractured kaleidoscope through my mind’s eye. A mafioso hitting me because I’d hid pretty Giselle from him and then Christopher, begging him not to harm her.
I didn’t say that, though.
Instead, I looked into the burning dark of his gaze and slid my response like a blade between his ribs. “I have. I’m sacrificing my integrity by helping you because I made Cosima a promise.”
When Heroes Fall Page 5