When Heroes Fall

by Giana Darling

  I sobbed as I tried to get closer to Dante but couldn’t because of my tied feet.

  “Hey, settle, amica,” Frankie soothed, suddenly at my side.

  He touched my shoulder as he moved on to check Seamus, collecting his gun before he returned to hand me another knife. Hands shaking, I sawed through the zip ties around my bloody ankles and then scrambled over the bloody ground to Dante.

  His eyes were closed, breath feathering faintly through his mouth. I looked up at Frankie frantically, but he ignored me as he cut open Dante’s black sweater and revealed the Teflon beneath.

  Two bullets were grouped in the center of his chest, flat as disks.

  Frankie removed the Velcro straps and lifted the vest from his chest.

  A second later, Dante sucked in a deep breath and opened his eyes.

  “Oh my god.” I didn’t think I’d ever cried so much in my life. “Dante, you idiot. What are you doing here saving me?”

  Dante blinked up at me, then looked at Frankie for a second before laughing, wincing at the pain in his ribs as he did. “Only you would be mad at me for saving you, my fighter,” he teased, the nickname my father had used somehow poetry from Dante’s lips.

  And then his hand fisted in my hair, and he pulled me down to kiss me.

  Hauling me halfway over his body even though it had to hurt, he kissed me like he hadn’t taken a breath since the last time he saw me, and he was dying for fresh air.

  I kissed him right back, pouring every single inch of me into that embrace. There were no words for the relief and gratitude and love flowing through me, so I fed them to him with my lips.

  “We gotta go,” Frankie grunted from beside us. “You can do that in the car.”

  I pulled away and reached out to squeeze his arm. “Thank you, Frankie.”

  His smile was tight but genuine. “Jaco said the police scanner picked up the disturbance. They’ll be here in minutes.”

  Dante nodded, grimacing again as he got to his feet, reaching for me the second he did. He untangled me from his side and took his gun from Frankie before stalking over to Seamus. I didn’t know if he was dead. Honestly, I hadn’t cared.

  The only thing I needed was for Dante to be okay.

  Still, I gasped as Dante stared down at my father and shot off three rounds into his skull. When he looked at me, his eyes glistened like an oil slick.

  I didn’t ask him if Seamus had already been dead or if he’d killed him.

  I understand that was part of the reason he’d done that.

  To show him I understood, I extended my hand to him and watched as relief moved over his face. He stepped away from the body and tucked me under his chin as he ordered Frankie, “Clean up and burn it down. Leave the bodies.”

  “You’re bleeding,” I whispered as he tugged me into his body, and I caught sight of the bubbling wound to his left shoulder, just beneath his collarbone.

  “I’m fine,” he assured, punctuating the words with another savage kiss I felt in my numb toes. “Andiamo, lottatrice mia. It seems I have to thank you for saving my life.”

  “I think it was a team effort,” I said on a giddy, mindless laugh as my adrenaline started to fade.

  Dante held me to his side as we climbed the stairs, walking over the odd dead Irishman as we left the house. Frankie stayed behind downstairs, and I caught sight of Marco with a canister of gas in the living room on the main level.

  By the time we made it to the car at the curb, flames were already flickering from inside the house.

  There were no neighbors in the streets. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood with park committees and neighborhood watch.

  Chen was in the driver’s seat when we got in the black SUV, and he tipped his chin up at me in the rearview. “Sorry it took a minute.”

  Another reckless laugh galloped from me. “That’s okay. I knew you’d come.”

  A minute later, after two figures ran from the house into another waiting car, we took off, and I finally took a breath.

  And then another.

  Each inhale bringing more panic than it had before.

  Dante held me against him, turning despite the pain in his shoulder so that he could face me head-on and cup my face in his hands.

  “You’re okay,” he said in that British-Italian accent I’d once hated. “Io sono con te. I am with you now, si? You are safe, Elena.”

  I blinked at him, falling into those night-dark eyes, finding solace in them when I used to find immorality. My hands moved over him, touching whatever I could just to reassure myself that things hadn’t ended differently in there. That he was alive and Seamus hadn’t succeeded in taking yet another thing from my life.

  And I knew it then.

  What it was to truly be in love with someone, body and soul, everything else be damned.

  Because I’d known as I picked up the gun, heavier and hotter than I would have imagined, that I’d raze every single one of my morals and mandates to the ground if it meant keeping Dante alive and at my side.

  I’d happily follow him to Hell if it meant being with him forever.

  I opened my mouth to tell him as much when he pressed his forehead to mind and admitted, “I have to go.”

  My heart stopped.

  “I’m sorry, Elena, but we disabled the ankle monitor to get to you. They’ll notice within twenty-four hours.”

  “You can’t go to jail,” I said instantly, fear pulling the words from me.

  I’d just got him, just realized I even wanted to have him.

  “No,” he agreed slowly, his thumbs rubbing the length of my cheekbones, gently over the abrasion my father had left on one. “I’m running.”

  I blinked.

  “I have a private jet out of Newark. It leaves in…” He checked his watch. “Just over an hour. I have to go. You know I didn’t kill Giuseppe di Carlo, and I had a plan for that too, but…” He shrugged. “This was more important.”

  You were more important.

  I didn’t know what to say or do. My entire world had turned on its axis in the past twenty-four hours, and I couldn’t see straight anymore. All my life, I’d run from the dark, only now I seemed unable and unwilling to escape Dante’s shadowy embrace.

  “I don’t want you to leave,” I said pathetically.

  His sigh fanned over my mouth. “I know, cara. I don’t want to leave you, but I must. Where I am going, it is not safe for you to follow. And even if it was, I would never ask you to leave your entire life behind. I’m afraid it wouldn’t be waiting here for you when you returned.”

  There was nothing I could say to that.

  It was true.

  I couldn’t run away with Dante into the night like some criminal fairy tale. Where would we go? What would I do?

  I was a lawyer with a career, a home, and a life here.

  But how much of a life was it? a little voice whispered. How much had I been living before I’d met the black-eyed capo who had just risked everything for me?

  “We’re dropping you off at your house,” Dante continued as he touched me, long strokes of my arms, into my sweaty hair, over my dirty clothes. Like he couldn’t stand the thought of not touching me again in a few hours, and he was shoring up his memories.

  A sob lodged in my throat, and I choked on it.

  “Bambi will see that you get all your things returned to you. Marco called Beau, and he’s going to be waiting for you there. I don’t want you to be alone after all this,” he continued, in full-fledged capo mode, organizing my life as if it wasn’t coming apart at the seams.

  I said nothing.

  My voice was lost in the depths of my tossing, storming gut.

  So, I just pressed my entire body into his good side, turned my nose into his neck and breathed in his sun-warmed citrus and pepper scent.

  We arrived at Gramercy Park too soon.

  “Will you… can you call or contact me?” I asked as Chen pulled up outside the building.

  I didn’t want to go i
n.

  For the first time in my life, the sight of my brownstone made me want to burn it down.

  Maybe if I did, Dante would have to take me with him.

  “I shouldn’t,” he said, his face creased with pain and exhaustion, but those beautiful eyes so clear as they looked at me, so full of tenderness. “But I will.”

  We stared at each other, caught up in the vortex that existed between us and always had since the moment I shoved him into a hospital wall and threatened his life if he hurt my sister.

  He was right, what he’d said about us being made of the same stuff. We weren’t opposites, not even close. He was a chaos of contradictions, and I was a contradictory chaos, but that was why we worked. In all my life, the only person who had ever understood me despite my best efforts to stop them was Dante.

  And now I was losing him.

  I curled my hand into his blood-soaked black tee and yanked him so I could kiss him. Because I didn’t have words, I only had the fire he’d started inside my soul, and the only way I could share it was by sliding it like a present under his tongue.

  He took it with a moan, eating at me, devouring me.

  I never wanted it to end, and I whimpered when he pulled away.

  But still, I didn’t have the words.

  “Sono con te, lottatrice mia,” he said, “anche quando non lo sono.”

  I am with you, my fighter, even when I am not.

  My vision blurred as tears fell silently down my cheeks. I stamped a bruising kiss on his lips, wishing I could brand it there, and then I pulled away, already moving to the door.

  “I’ll see you again,” I whispered thickly, the words more breath than sound.

  He nodded curtly. “You will.”

  I echoed his nod, then turned quickly and got out of the car.

  A sob blossomed in my throat, so big I couldn’t swallow it down so I held my breath as I rounded the car to the curb and climbed up the stairs to my slightly unfamiliar front stoop.

  I didn’t look back.

  I knew if I did, I would run back to that car, throw myself on the hood, and never look back at my house, New York, and the life I’d painstakingly built for five years.

  I’d just follow Dante blindly into the night.

  The door to my house swung open, and Beau stood there, backlit by a halo of warm light.

  “Elena,” he said, so much in the one word I made a note to ask him how he did that so I could try to learn.

  And then I collapsed into his open arms and gave up trying to stand.

  Behind me, the car pulled away soundlessly and disappeared down the street.

  ELENA

  Beau made me shower.

  Which was fair.

  I was covered in the blood of my father and of my lover.

  I should have been disgusted by it, but I was only numb as I stood under the hot spray and let it sluice over me, pink water swirling around the drain.

  Beau was waiting when I got out, holding the towel out for me like a child. I didn’t say a word. He hugged me in the fabric as I stepped into it, rocking me back and forth for a moment.

  “I don’t know what to say,” he admitted into my ear as he held me close. “I want to give you advice, but how can I? A stranger named Marco calls to tell me to be at your place ‘stat’ and not to be alarmed that you’re covered in blood.”

  He sighed raggedly as he turned me in his arms to face him. “Lena, I was gone for six weeks, and I come back to find you shacked up with a mafioso?”

  “He’s more than that,” I whispered impulsively. “I-I can’t explain how much.”

  Beau’s blue eyes widened as they searched my face. He pushed a wet lock of hair back from my forehead and then pulled me in for another hug. “Okay, Lena.”

  I sighed into the hug, trying to take comfort from the short, slender arms of my friend when I ached for the all-encompassing embrace of another man.

  “Why don’t you get dressed, and I’ll make some tea, okay?” he suggested as he pulled away.

  He kept looking at me like maybe I would turn to dust if he did something wrong. I tried to reassure him with a little smile, but it felt like cracked plastic between my teeth.

  “Sure.”

  He left with one last look over his shoulder.

  My wrists and ankles were aching, cut open into smooth circles by the zip lines. I pulled out the antibiotic ointment and hissed as I tended to the wounds before getting dressed in a comfortable cashmere set. I brushed my hair and teeth, then moisturized my face and body all on autopilot.

  If I didn’t think, I wouldn’t think of him.

  Or the fact that I’d probably killed my father.

  Patricide.

  That was what it was called.

  A class-C felony for manslaughter.

  Maximum fifteen years in prison if convicted.

  “Elena,” Beau called from down the stairs. “Come on.”

  He was in the kitchen assembling a tray when I appeared. My favorite Japanese teapot and little cups arranged with some dried flowers I recognized from my entryway.

  He ushered us into the living room, put the tray on the coffee table and reached for me, wrapping his arms to pull me down on the couch at his side. He arranged us together the way he did models on set, deliberately fiddling with our limbs until we were twined together, forehead to forehead.

  Before Dante, Beau and Cosima were the only people I ever let get close.

  My eyes burned as I blinked at him.

  “Talk to me,” he pleaded, stroking my damp hair. “What happened?”

  “So much,” I whispered, my throat too swollen with sorrow to make any sound. “So much, I don’t even know how to think about it, let alone talk about it.”

  “Try,” Beau coaxed. “Start with the most important things.”

  “I love him.” Tears formed and broke free of my eyes like diamonds rolling down my cheeks. “I do. I love him. I don’t know how it happened…He just…he wouldn’t leave me alone.”

  I laughed wetly, and Beau did too a little.

  “He’s not anything I ever would have allowed myself to like or know. He’s my client. Being with risks my career. Being with him risks my life,” I tried to explain, but the words just kept coming more and more panicked. “It makes no sense, Beau, but we are compatible. He’s a criminal, a hedonist, a sinner. But everyone likes him. You should see it. It’s impossible to dislike him because he has this smile and this charm…”

  “He sounds like a complicated man,” Beau said gently. “Fitting for a complicated woman.”

  I nodded, rolling my teeth under my lips to keep from sobbing. “He tells me to be brave.”

  “And do you feel that way with him?”

  Another nod, my lips wobbling.

  “Then what happened? Why can’t you be with him?”

  “He’s leaving,” I murmured. “He has to leave now because of me. He’s going, and I don’t know where or for how long, but I probably won’t ever see him again. And I love him.”

  The tears were burning up as my skin heated with something like anger, something with bite. Suddenly, I was furious at the world for doing this to me, for giving me this beautiful man in this wretched situation and then for making it impossible for me to be with him.

  “I can’t explain what’s happened inside me,” I cried, clutching at my heart through my chest like I could pry it from between my ribs and show him how it had been altered. “But I’m not the same anymore. I used to think I knew who I was, but I never felt like this before.”

  “Like what?”

  “So alive I burn.”

  Beau blinked at me as I leaned over him, panting with the force of the turmoil coursing through me. “Elena, why can’t you go with him?” he finally said.

  “Because, because I just told you! I have no idea where he is going or for how long or with who. I have a job here and a life, and I can’t just leave that for…for a giant question mark.”

  “You’re not
leaving it for a giant question mark,” he reminded me gently. “You’re leaving it for him.”

  “He didn’t ask me to go with him.” It burned in me, but it was the truth. He’d never asked. He’d only told me I couldn’t. That I had to stay.

  “Are you so sure he didn’t ask because he didn’t want to ask you to give up your entire life for him?”

  “No,” I admitted. “That’s basically what he said.”

  “Then you have a choice, Elena, and I don’t envy it,” Beau said. “But I think you should consider it hard. I’ve never seen you like this.”

  “A mess?” I said with a snotty laugh.

  “So alive you burn,” he repeated my words back to me softly. “I’ll be right back, okay?”

  I barely noticed him leaving. I just flipped to my back and stared at the ceiling.

  I’d shot my dad.

  Together, Dante and I had killed him.

  I knew it wasn’t something I was going to get over anytime soon. I knew I’d need endless rounds of therapy to even begin to make sense of the tangle of relief, justification, anger, and despair I felt about the act.

  But I didn’t regret it for one second.

  He’d threatened Mama, Giselle, and Genevieve.

  He’d destroyed our lives in Naples and sold Cosima into sexual slavery.

  He’d nearly killed Dante.

  And even if none of the other things had happened, I knew in my heart that would have been enough reason for me to kill him.

  I couldn’t bear the thought of knowing I existed in world where Dante didn’t.

  And he had done the same for me.

  I’d always known Dante was a killer.

  You only had to look at those massive hands quilted with muscle, ribboned with tendons and veins that popped beneath his deeply tan skin to know that there was sheer murderous power there.

  But this was different.

  Knowing that Dante had killed for me, that he had risked his freedom to search for me and helped end the life of a man who had made me suffer the entire length of mine, resonated somewhere deep inside.

  It was the same place that burned when he touched me, when he taught me what to do with his body and what to do with mine. It was the same place that stirred whenever my family had been threatened in Naples and I’d stood up to protect them.