When Heroes Fall

by Giana Darling

  I was already on the legal team of and living with the most infamous mafioso of the twenty-first century. It was debatable, but I’d already started down the slippery slope of moral degeneration.

  Maybe Dante was right about making the risk worth something.

  Something more than my career and its success.

  Something worth the cost of my soul.

  If I was going to damn myself anyway, I might as well do it by sleeping with the Devil of New York City.

  ELENA

  “Nice ride.”

  I tossed my head to clear my face of my windswept hair and smiled at Ricardo Stavos as I closed the butterfly door and locked the car.

  “It’s a…friend’s,” I explained with a lopsided shrug.

  He grinned roguishly. “Sure, Elena, whatever you say.”

  I shot him a look as I adjusted the Prada bag stuffed with papers and my iPad on my left arm. But still, I accepted his kiss on the cheek. Normally, I couldn’t abide such a lack of professionalism, but Ric was impossible to resist, and the kiss was part of his Ecuadorian culture as much as it was part of my Italian youth. In his early forties with dark brown hair he wore shorn close to his scalp, a deep tan all year round, and eyes that crinkled charmingly whenever he smiled, which was often.

  He was the lead investigator at Fields, Harding & Griffith, and he mostly refused to work with associates. But he’d caught me smoking a rare cigarette outside of the Pearl Street courthouse one day, and we’d bonded over growing up in cultures where smoking was as normal as drinking soda was in America.

  I was glad he was with me for this. It always made me nervous going to interview witnesses. One wrong step and it would be easy for a lawyer to end up having to testify against a witness in court, which would effectively end their participation in the trial.

  But it was paramount we convince Ottavio Petretti to testify.

  To our knowledge, he was the only living person other than the disappeared Mason Matlock to have been in or near his self-named deli the day Giuseppe di Carlo was murdered. Up until now, he’d flatly refused to talk to a single soul, but I was hoping a good old-fashioned dose of guilt and a little elbow grease would sway him.

  “Let me have the first crack at him?” I asked Ric because even though I was the lawyer and higher up the food chain at the firm, he was vastly more experienced and incredibly valuable. I almost always deferred to him when we worked together. I had no problem taking the back seat if it meant I could learn how to be like those I admired one day.

  He cocked a brow but nodded before gesturing me to proceed him up the sidewalk to Ottavio’s small bungalow home. “He’s going to be a hard nut to crack.”

  I patted my purse and grinned at him. “The meatiest ones always are. Don’t worry, I have my bag of tricks.”

  It felt good to walk up the cracked concrete stairs in my six-inch power heels and tailored gray houndstooth St. Aubyn suit. After the morning I’d had, defenseless against the inexorable pull of eyes darker than the night sky, I needed to be reminded of my own authority and independence.

  Ric knocked on the door with a heavy fist, but I made sure to stand slightly in front of him so I was the first thing Ottavio might see through his foggy peephole.

  A moment later, the door creaked open, and a true Roman nose poked out. “Don’t speak to cops or men in suits.”

  “Good thing I’m a woman then, Signore Petretti,” I practically cooed.

  When he tried to close the door, I wedged the toe of my pointed Jimmy Choo into the space between it and the jamb, effectively stopping his retreat. Ric followed my cue and slapped a hand on the door to push it intractably open.

  Ottavio huffed as he was forced to back up. “You aren’t welcome in my house.”

  “Are you going to call the police?” I suggested sweetly as we moved into the cramped, dark hallway. “I’m sure your neighbors would love it if you brought the cops around.”

  His fleshy, pink-hued face contracted like an octopus as I called his bluff. No one in this neighborhood called the cops. There were mafiosos and their associates thick in the streets here, and if he was caught at home with two lawyers and the cops, he was as good as dead.

  Screwed if he talked to us, screwed if he didn’t.

  I was well-versed in such situations, so I knew how to handle them.

  “Why don’t we sit down, Signore Petretti?” I offered graciously, indicating the sitting room with the plastic-wrapped floral couch I could see to our left.

  He grumbled Italian curses under his breath as he reluctantly turned and trundled down the hall into the living room. When he took a seat in the only chair, Ric and I moved to the couch and sat down with an awful creak and groan of thick plastic.

  “If you are here to talk about the murders at my deli, I’m not speaking of this,” he grunted, the “th” in his words transformed by his thick Italian accent into a “d” sound.

  I shrugged easily. “I actually came to talk about something else. Or, should I say, someone else.” He watched me with beady brown eyes as I reached into my purse and produced an eight-by-ten glossy photo of my sister Cosima. It was a candid shot I’d taken when I visited her in England last spring, and she looked especially radiant in it. The reason for that was behind the camera, just to my right, her eyes were trained on the sight of her husband laughing with Mama. The sheer love and joy shining from her golden eyes and wide, full-lipped smile was palpable even through the photo.

  Ottavio leaned forward, bracing his hairy forearms on his thighs to get a better look. I watched the magic of my sister transform his grumpy features into something softer, his eyes warming as they studied the photograph.

  “Cosima,” he almost whispered. A finger uncurled from his fist to gently touch the print. “È una ragazza bellissima.”

  “Yes, she is very beautiful,” I agreed, smiling at him when he caught my eye to show him that I meant no harm. “Of course, I’m biased because she is my sister.”

  His wiry eyebrows shot up on his forehead, and if he’d still had a full head of hair, they would have disappeared into it. “You?”

  I laughed lightly, not offended at all. “We don’t look much alike.”

  He scratched his chin as he studied me, his demeanor still relaxed, Cosima’s magic still working to make him forget the real reason we were there. “A little in the eyes.”

  “Grazie,” I said earnestly because it felt good, always, to be compared to her. “She is beautiful inside and out.”

  “Si,” he agreed with a vigorous nod. “She came to my shop very often, your sister, and she always ate an entire plate of my wife’s tiramisu. I do not know where she put it. So skinny!”

  I laughed again. “She can eat like a horse.”

  He nodded, his eyes closed with solemnity. “Yes, this is very good. She was a good girl, Cosima. Always told people to come to Ottavio’s. Just seeing her in the window was good for business, drew in all the neighborhood men.”

  “Mmm,” I hummed in agreement before I frowned and made a show of rifling through my bag before producing yet another photo that I stared at for a moment. When I finally turned it to face Ottavio and placed it on the table before him, he reeled back in his chair, his mouth open and pursed raggedly like a bullet hole blown through his skull. “You seem to have admired her. I’m surprised you let men do this to her in your own shop.”

  This photo depicted my sister on the yellow-tinged linoleum of his deli, her hair a curling mess like spilled ink around her head, ribbons of brilliant red blood pooling around her prone body from the three bullet holes torn through her torso and the one that had grazed her skull, splitting flesh open to the bone over one ear. There was so much blood that she seemed to be floating in it, her face almost peaceful in her comatose state.

  It was a jarring, ghastly contrast to the previous photo of her smiling and whole that lay beside it.

  Ottavio looked at me with his mouth still open in horror.

  I nodded as if he�
�d spoken because I’d felt much the same way when I’d first seen the photos. “Three bullets to the torso, one to the head. Did you know she was in a coma for weeks?”

  He shook his head almost imperceptibly.

  “Do you know why they did this to her?” I asked, my tone hardening with every word I spoke, weaponizing them to kick the man while his defenses were down.

  Another tiny shake. Sweat beaded on his thick upper lip and dripped down the side of his mouth. He licked it up unconsciously.

  “Did you know they would do this to her?” I asked, subtly changing my question.

  We weren’t on trial in court before a judge. I could lead the damn witness as much as I wanted to.

  And I was going to lead the horse straight to the hay.

  “They don’t tell men like me anything,” he muttered, his eyes back on the photo of Cosima.

  “You have a daughter nearly Cosima’s age. Rosario, isn’t it?” I knew because Ric had done the homework for me. “Does she know her father let this happen to someone else’s daughter?”

  “I did not want this to happen,” he finally barked, breaking out of his stunned stupor. “No one wants these things to happen, capisci? Who am I, simple Otto, to stand between those men and what they want, huh?”

  “What did they give you for your silence? A grand, two?” Ric interjected, his words like gunshots.

  One by one, they found their way into Ottavio’s round chest. He jerked at the impact and placed his hands over his heart as if to protect it.

  “You are estraneo, an outsider. You know nothing,” he practically spat at Ric.

  “But I do,” I told him, shifting into Italian, leaning forward to tap the horrible photo of Cosima. “I know the horrors of the Camorra because I lived them while I was a girl in Naples.”

  “Ah, si, then you know,” he said, almost eagerly, yearning to alleviate his guilt. “You know to talk is to die.”

  Continuing in Italian because I didn’t exactly want Ricardo to know how far I was taking things, I said, “I know that good people die every day because they don’t stand up for the things they know are wrong. An innocent man is being accused of murdering Giuseppe di Carlo and his thug because no one will say a word. Is that just?”

  “It’s not my problem,” he beseeched me, opening his hands to the sky on a shrug, more expressive with his gestures than he was with his words.

  “I think it is,” I argued. “I know you are afraid of the di Carlos, but they are fractured from Giuseppe’s death. Do you know who is being accused of killing him?”

  “I stay out of this,” he reminded me angrily.

  “Dante Salvatore,” I said, unfazed by his returned belligerence. “Have you heard of him, Ottavio? They call him the mafia lord, the Devil of New York City.”

  “Don Salvatore,” he whispered, moving to clutch the small gold-plated cross he wore at his throat. “Yes, I know him.”

  “He is a very scary man,” I agreed with his unspoken fear. “Have you seen his hands?” I held my own up and fisted it. “Each one is the size of a man’s head.”

  Ottavio scowled at me, reading exactly what I was trying to do.

  Illustrate just how much he was screwed if he did and screwed if he didn’t.

  I smiled kindly at him, leaning forward on that creaking plastic to pat his hand comfortingly. “The way I see it, Signore Petretti, you could side with a fractured family, one that has much better things to focus on right now, or you could hitch your cart to the Salvatores. Earn their protection and admiration.”

  “They’ll kill me,” he insisted, eyes darting to Ric for support even though the investigator couldn’t understand Italian.

  “Maybe,” I agreed with a nonchalant shrug. “I suppose it’s a gamble. With whom are your odds of survival better?”

  We stared at each other for a long moment, unblinking. A woman trundled down the hall to the mouth of the living room, her hair big and bouffant, her body thick and soft with curves.

  “Who is this?” she asked her husband in Italian.

  He waved his hand at her wearily, dismissively.

  “Signore Petretti,” I said, moving in for the kill as I smiled at his wife. “How would you feel about a trip to your ancestral home? Where is your family from?”

  “Pomigliano d’Arco,” he muttered.

  “Well, when this is all said and done, I think you and the missus deserve a vacation. On us,” I offered.

  Us.

  Fields, Harding & Griffith.

  Yara Ghorbani.

  Don Dante Salvatore.

  Me.

  I’d used slightly unscrupulous tactics before. To be a lawyer was to know how to twist words and actions into the results you needed for victory.

  But I’d never railroaded a man so succinctly, leaned on him the way a mafioso might with threats of violence.

  It should have made me sick.

  Once, before all this, before I made that promise to my sister to protect the brother of her heart, it might have given me indigestion or a sleepless night.

  But I only felt bone-deep satisfaction and a hint of acute relief as I pulled the papers out of my bag for Ottavio to sign in order for him to act as a witness for us in court and handed them over to him. With only a brief glance at his wife, than another longer one at the photos of Cosima, he accepted the Mont Blanc pen I handed him next and signed on the dotted line.

  When I accepted the papers back, I did it with a grin like a wolf, a distant howl ringing through my blood.

  ELENA

  “That was something else, Elena,” Ric said as we reached the Ferrari. “I’ve seen you in fighter mode before, but that shit was full-on gladiator.”

  I laughed, a pleased flush in the cheeks that were pinned back by the force of my smile. “It felt good.”

  “I love a ruthless woman. When you told him the size of Dante Salvatore’s hands…” Ric held his side as he laughed from his belly and then wiped a tear from his eye. “Bravissima, Elena.”

  I blinked at Ric, then fisted my hands on my hips. “I’ve known you, what, four years? And you’ve never once let on you speak Italian.”

  He winked at me. “And women are the only ones who can keep secrets? A man of mystery is a thing of beauty, no?”

  I laughed at him, always put at ease by his self-confidence as if some of it rubbed off on me. “You have many talents.”

  He shrugged with faux humility. “As do you. Yara will be pleased. Partnership, here you come.”

  I hesitated for just a split second, my smile faltering.

  Because honestly, I hadn’t been thinking of partnership in there.

  There had only been one thing on my mind, and it was six foot five with thick black hair and the propensity to look at me as if I was the Mona Lisa, to be wondered at and admired.

  Ric frowned at me, but I waved him off. “You’ll make sure he gets somewhere safe?”

  There was no way in hell we would leave Ottavio to be picked off by the di Carlos or the prosecution. His testimony could mean the difference in winning or losing. Ric would transfer him to a safe house guarded by hired security until the trial. We still didn’t have a date, but the wheels were in motion, and we suspected a start time in the next few months.

  The Salvatores’ bribes and Fields, Harding & Griffith influence made an expedited trial a reality even though it was usually unheard of for such notorious cases to go to court in under one year.

  “I will,” Ric agreed, slotting his hands in the pockets of his jeans, and he rocked back on his heels. “I almost hate to mention it, but have you considered the possibility that Cosima might have been the one to kill Giuseppe.”

  Every atom of my body stilled.

  Of course, I had considered it. It was still one of my top theories.

  I liked Ric, but I wasn’t sure I trusted him enough to divulge something that could put my sister at risk of arrest.

  So, I slanted him my best cool look of incredulity.

  He
shrugged good-naturedly. “Just a thought. The autopsy and witnesses say di Carlo was killed before the drive-by shooting. It’s a fair assumption that someone in that deli could have murdered him. Going by the supposition that his own thug didn’t shoot him before dying himself, that leaves two people we know for sure were in Ottavio’s. Cosima and Mason Matlock, who is missing.”

  Presumed dead, he didn’t have to say.

  It was safe to assume someone, maybe even the Salvatores or Mason’s own di Carlo family, had gotten to him before the cops could find him.

  Of course, Ric had arrived at the same theory I had.

  “My sister is a model, Ric,” I said in my best condescending voice, acting as if Cosima was nothing more than a bimbo when she was anything but. “I don’t think she would even know how to fire a gun if she wanted to.”

  He nodded affably, but his brown eyes were keen on me from under his lashes. “Of course. It was only a theory.”

  I nodded curtly at him, then threw up a bright smile, hoping to blind him from the truth. “It was good to do this with you.”

  “Always,” he agreed, kissing my cheek again and grasping my elbow with a little squeeze. “You seem…easier today.”

  Instantly, my brow notched, and I was even more on guard than before. “Excuse me?”

  He held up his hands in surrender on a laugh. “Jesus, don’t go all icy on me again. I meant it as a compliment, Elena. You seem easier in yourself today. There was no hesitation in doing what needed to be done in there for our client. Before, you might have struggled with it. And…”

  “And?” I almost snapped at him, panic flooding my system like water spilled over a hard drive.

  I was glitching hard at the idea I might be giving something away that could link me to Dante beyond a professional capacity.

  “And,” he drawled. “if I didn’t know better, I’d think you had gotten laid.”

  My chest tightened until I couldn’t breathe, but I forced myself to laugh lightly and brush his words away with a casual wave of my hand. “Trust me, Ric, I’m over all that.”