“Si, Dante va bene,” Tore said with a tight smile aimed my way. “Now, what did Dante eat or drink that no one else did?”
I knew.
Of course, I did.
I’d known before that jerk, Jacopo, had yelled it in my face.
“The tiramisu,” I whispered, my tongue rasping against the dry roof of my mouth. “I brought it from my mama’s stall on Mulberry Street. But you have to know, she would never do anything to harm Dante. She was just telling me how much she liked him.”
Instantly, one of their men, surprisingly not an Italian but someone who appeared to be Japanese, moved toward the door. I had a cold flash of memory, a mafioso shaking Mama so hard as he interrogated her about Seamus’s whereabouts that she broke a tooth.
“Please, don’t hurt her,” I said, stepping forward then stopping helplessly.
“No one is hurting Caprice,” Tore promised darkly, casting a look at the Asian man who hesitated then nodded and returned to his vigil around Dante on the couch. “This is too simple, yes? Of course, the feast of San Gennaro in Little Italy is visited by thousands. Even vigilant, there is a possibility her stall was compromised, and we have many enemies.”
His mouth was a grim flatline as he considered, eyes pinned on something in the distance. I noticed with shock that Amadeo Salvatore had the same peculiar and striking shade of gold in his eyes as my twin siblings.
“Did you see anyone when you visited?” he asked me suddenly, stepping forward to grasp and squeeze my biceps. “Think, cervellona.”
I pursed my lips as I ran my mind back over the afternoon and remembered the thin limbs of the man who had bumped into me near the stall.
“A man bumped into me in the street.” I shrugged a little helplessly. “He wasn’t doing anything strange, though.”
“What did he look like?”
“He had auburn hair, close-cropped, and he wasn’t very tall, maybe an inch or two shorter than my five foot ten,” I described, uncomfortable with all the eyes on me. “He had a scar at the corner of his jaw, just here.”
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 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 their consigliere.
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 ashamed 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.
“In my experience, criminal gangs are like cockroaches,” she said with a wry smile. “You stomp one out only to look over your shoulder and discover another.”
“And if you can’t beat them…” I dared to imply that this was why Yara had joined forces with a known criminal entity.
Yara stared at me for so long, my skin itched, and I fought the urge to squirm like a girl under her mama’s scolding gaze. “If all people were pure, Elena, there would be no laws. When we become lawyers, we are disbanding our perception of right and wrong in order to do our job to the fullest extent of our capabilities. Anyone who gets into law to defend the weak and innocent will inevitably become heartbroken and disillusioned.” She paused for dramatic effect. “Do not tell me you, the woman they call a gladiator in the courtroom, became a lawyer for such a nonsensical reason.”
I didn’t tell her, though she wasn’t far off the mark. In truth, I wasn’t sure how to express the complicated tangle of contradictions that clogged my throat and made it hard to breathe.
I could have told her I wanted to fight injustice because my entire childhood had been rife with it. With people who were so poor they had no choice but to appeal to la mafia for loans and jobs and unrepayable favors. I understood why so many Italian revered the mafia as much as they feared it. It was a necessary component of their lives.
But a horrific one for some.
Wh
en I was growing up, I wanted to be a lawyer so I could stop the mafia’s exploitation of the poor.
But then we moved to America, and I lost the threads of my dream and only saw the broader tapestry.
Become a lawyer.
My idealism was replaced with realism and capitalism.
Yara let me marinate in my conflict for a long moment before she dealt her deathly blow. “Some people argue that lawyers are more criminal than their clients, Elena. Perhaps it would make you feel better to know that there are more villains in this profession than heroes. It might ease your adjustment period.”
People had always led me to believe I was cold, but looking into Yara’s morally bankrupt gaze, I reevaluated myself.
“I would rather work with good people,” I said somewhat lamely, feeling lopsided and upside down.
Anxiety spiked in my blood as I realized that spending time with Yara and Dante was already taking a toll on my perception of good and evil.
Yara shrugged easily. “I do too. I suppose it depends on your definition. Mr. Salvatore, for example, is a man I consider to be one of the best. He is a fair boss, a loyal friend and family member, and he does his part for the community.”
“For a tax break, I’m sure,” I muttered truculently.
“Just because someone loves and values different things than you do does not mean they are heartless, Ms. Lombardi. Dante would and has risked his life and livelihood for his loved ones and those he feels need championing. If you can’t understand that, perhaps you aren’t the woman I thought you were. Why don’t you head home? If there is any update on Dante, I’m sure tomorrow morning will be early enough for you to receive it.”
I blinked at her, properly chastised but still conflicted. Having dismissed me, Yara retrieved her phone from her clutch and began to work. I looked at Dr. Crown who was staring at me with pursed lips, judging me just as readily as I’d judged Dante and his crew.
“He’ll be okay?” I asked quietly, my voice stripped raw so that it throbbed with vulnerable sincerity.
Whatever my feeling about his criminal enterprise, I didn’t think Dante deserved to die.
In fact, the thought made me sway on my feet.
Dr. Crown fixed that pale blue gaze on me, and despite his classic all-American good looks, a distinct apathy in his gaze spoke to a cold heart. I recognized the look because I often saw it staring back at me in the mirror.
“It’s not the first time someone has tried to kill him, and it won’t be the last,” was his stoic answer.
A shiver rolled through me like morning fog off the harbor, and it felt an awful lot like a premonition of things to come.
It was only later, when I was between the silky sheets of a bed that was much too large without Daniel in it, that I mulled over Yara’s words. Unbidden, I recalled a quote I’d read in law school from the ever-lauded Thoreau.
“It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as a respect for right.”
I lay in the dark shadows of my echoing empty home, wondering if I’d become so entrenched in society’s perception of right and wrong that I’d forgotten to form an opinion of my own.
DANTE
Death hadn’t scared me for a very long time.
Growing up at Pearl Hall in the moors of northern England where gold and pearls were inlaid in the furniture and my baby rattle was made of solid silver, very few people would have suspected I’d know the darkness of pain and death.
But very few people knew my father was a madman.
I’d suspected as much from an early age when I heard moaning from the basement, the inverse of some Jane Eyre novel where the ghostly calls in the night were real nightmares caged within the walls of our home. My older brother, the golden child, was blind to the dangers of Noel, the cruelty of his treatment to our mother, the servants, and the occasional pale apparition of a woman emerging from the basement at dawn some mornings with bruises on her throat like jewels.
And then my mother was killed.
Chiara and I were visiting her childhood friend, Amadeo Salvatore at his villa outside of Naples when she decided we weren’t going home to England. She was tired in a way I didn’t think, even if she had lived, she would have recovered from. Her black hair was brittle, cracking off in pieces under my hands when I hugged her bony frame, and there were troughs of inky blue beneath her eyes that I couldn’t remember not being there. She was still beautiful, but in the way of a broken thing, a doll played with too hard, then tossed to rot in the corner of a grown child’s room.
She was smiling that trip, though. I had just graduated from Cambridge with honors, and she was proud of me, almost ridiculously so because she always tried to make up for Noel’s lack of regard for me. I was the spare, not the heir, and from the beginning, I’d been too much like my mother and her people.
There wasn’t a subordinate bone in my body, and Noel knew it, so he pretended I didn’t exist or, if I got in his way, forcibly put me in my place.
We were eating dinner one night, a few days after she had begun to make plans to move permanently to Italy, when her cell phone rang. I knew instantly it was my father by the shadow that passed over her face dark as an eclipse.
“Don’t answer it,” I’d said, standing up from my chair at the dining room table to reach for the phone so that I could crush it the way I wanted to crush my father’s heart in my hands. “He can go fuck himself.”
“Edward Dante,” she scolded, but her eyes were distracted, her lips a bloodless line in her face. She watched the phone in her hand ring the way I imagined a soldier watched a bomb countdown to detonation. There was almost a macabre resolve in her face I only recognized in retrospect. “There are some demons you cannot run from. Your father is one of them.”
I looked at Tore, but his face was a grim mask. He knew better than to argue with Chiara and think he could sway her when her mind was made up.
I’d gotten my stubbornness from her too.
We both stared at her silently as she stood from the chair and palmed the phone, ignoring the call even though, seconds later, it began to ring again.
“I think I’ll retire now,” she murmured in that mixed British/Italian accent I was coming to share with her. “Buona notte, figlio mio.”
I accepted her kiss on my cheek, closing my eyes as I carefully pulled her closer to my body. She was so slight compared to me. I felt I might accidentally break her ribs if I wasn’t gentle.
Guilt surged through me as she kissed Tore on the cheek, then slowly walked up the back stairs to her room. I’d been gone for four years at uni, throwing myself into my studies of the human mind and my freedom out from under Noel’s thumb. My criminal tendencies were already showing. I’d started a sports gambling ring with some of the posh students that had netted me over a million quid by the time I graduated with my master’s, and I was looking forward to moving to Rome to see what trouble I could get up to with Latin girls.
I hadn’t realized until this trip that in my absence, Noel had been beating Chiara much more than he had when I was a boy.
I should have known, but I was a stupid, selfish twentysomething kid with too much swagger and not enough sense. Whenever I spoke with her on the phone or she visited on the weekends, she was always all smiles and positivity, promising everything at home was fine.
But she only did that for us, for Alexander and me, so that we could get free of that pearly cage and free of Noel without obligation to her dragging us home.
“I didn’t know, either,” Tore admitted that night, looking older than he ever had before, his broad sloping forehead creased and rumpled like a used napkin. “I’ve let you both down.”
“No,” I argued, loving him so fiercely at that moment for being the kind of man who cared about his childhood friend and her family enough to risk Noel’s fury. “I should have watched her more closely.”
He sighed, swirling his glass of red wine so that it caught the candlelight and brightened to a blood red.
“She’s safe here. We won’t let her go back to England.”
“No,” I agreed. “I’ll move with her. She needs––I don’t know––love and attention after living with that monster for so long.”
Tore had agreed. We spent the next hour drinking wine and discussing what I might do in Italy. If maybe I was interested in working with Tore and his crew.
I wasn’t seriously considering it. I was a man with a wild, untameable heart, but I didn’t like the idea of becoming a criminal like my father.
And then we heard it.
The scream.
The hairs rose on the back of my neck as adrenaline poured like a bucket of ice water over my head.
I was up out of my chair and running before my mind had a chance to compute the noise into thought.
Tore was right behind me, one of his men trailing after that with his gun raised.
My legs took me to my mother’s room. The door was locked, but I didn’t think twice before I kicked in the old wood with one brutal thrust of my right foot.
The room was empty, the sheer linen curtains billowing into the room from the slightly open balcony doors.
And I knew.
Elementally, spiritually, I knew that what I found outside those doors would change my life forever.
My heartbeat thrummed in my ears like a ceremonial drum, my steps stomping heavily in tandem as I moved to the door and pushed it open with one finger.
The small balcony was empty, the climbing ivy over the stone walls rustling in the olive scented breeze.
“Edward,” Tore protested, reaching forward to grab my arm when I tried to go to the balustrade to look over the edge. “Don’t.”
I shrugged him off ruthlessly, not taking my eyes off the ground I could see from my angle. When I reached the edge, I held my breath as I curled my fingers over the stone and looked down.
But she wasn’t there.
In fact, over the next few days and months and years, Chiara Davenport was nowhere to be found. Local authorities ruled it a runaway, but we knew better.
When Heroes Fall Page 12