When Heroes Fall

by Giana Darling

  Because they were mine to protect.

  Just as it seemed, now I was Dante’s to protect.

  It was a place of instinct, a primal impulse in my gut that transcended thought and even feeling.

  Dante was mine.

  How could I just let him go?

  I jumped to my feet and froze in my living room, gazing at the furniture and art I’d collected from another life with another man. It seemed ridiculous to me now that I’d held on to it for so long.

  I’d stopped grieving Daniel a long time ago. The truth was, I never loved him the way I should have, and obviously, he’d felt the same way about me. What I’d mourned from that loss for years wasn’t the man, but the woman I’d thought I had been with him. No, more than that, I lamented those last shreds of hope I’d retained then lost when he left me for Giselle.

  I missed my capacity to love, my propensity to have faith in people and mostly, in myself.

  Dante had taught me how to love myself again.

  He’d taught me how to let someone in again.

  How could I possibly give that up?

  “Beau!” I screamed as I started to run from the room down the hall back up to my bedroom. I took the stairs two at a time. “Beau, I have to go!”

  When I careened to a stop in my bedroom door, Beau was already beside my bed, calmly folding clothes into an open Louis Vuitton suitcase.

  “I know,” he said, smiling sadly at me. “Of course, you do.”

  I stood there and beamed at him like a lunatic until his smile cracked and spread wide too. And then we were laughing, laughing so hard our bellies ached. I ran to his side and threw my arms around him.

  “I love you,” I said. “I’m sorry I don’t say it much.”

  “Doesn’t mean I don’t know it,” he responded, hugging me tight. “Now, hurry up. You don’t want to miss his flight.”

  “It’s Newark,” I said, panicking, throwing the rest of what Beau had on the bed into the case and zipping it up. “I can buy new clothes there. We have to go now.”

  DANTE

  “Ready, Boss?” Chen asked me from the front seat as we waited on the tarmac at Newark Airport for the plane to get clearance for a runway.

  “Si, Chen, grazie,” I told him. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?”

  He laughed. “As if I don’t get enough shit Stateside about being a non-Italian Made Man. I’ll save us both the hassle and hold down the fort here. God knows Marco and Jacopo can’t do shit by themselves.”

  I chuckled, but it echoed vacantly in my chest.

  “Right, well, in bocca al lupo, fratello,” I told him, leaning forward with my good arm to clap him on the shoulder. “I will see you soon.”

  “Right, Boss,” he agreed, then hesitated. “I’m sorry, you know. She was something else.”

  I nodded curtly, not ready to examine the wound to my chest. Not the insignificant bullet hole I’d have Frankie stitch up on the plane, but the gaping hole in my rib cage where Elena Lombardi ripped out my heart to keep it for her own.

  I didn’t mind. I wanted her to have it.

  But the pain was fucking excruciating.

  I stepped from the car and made my way to the jet that would take Frankie and me back to the place that had started it all. It was an escape from jail, but it felt horribly like replacing one prison for another.

  New York was a tepid fish pond compared to the shark-infested waters of Italia.

  “Blood’s not your color,” Frankie told me as he met me at the base of the stairs with a few bags.

  The rest of our shit was already on the plane. Bambi had packed it and had Bruno drive it over while we were en route from Brooklyn.

  “If you’re going to crack bad jokes the entire flight, please, just shoot me in the head now and put me out of my misery,” I said dryly as we ascended.

  “If you’re going to be grumpy the whole trip because you didn’t have the balls to make Elena come with us––”

  “Stai zitto,” I snapped at him to shut up.

  “Too soon?” he asked with faux innocence.

  I was about to growl at him when a screech of car tires exploded in the silent night. Immediately, Frankie and I both pulled our guns.

  A moment later, Chen rounded the plane again.

  “What the hell is…?” I trailed off as he pulled to a stop at the base of the stairs and a familiar redhead appeared out the back door.

  I blinked, wondering if the bullets had given me a concussion somehow.

  “I see her too,” Frankie whispered.

  “Dante,” Elena called as Chen and Beau both emerged from the vehicle and went to the trunk. “I’m coming with you.”

  My chest was so tight I couldn’t fucking breathe.

  “I didn’t ask you,” I told her.

  Because this wasn’t a joke.

  We weren’t going on vacation to Bora fucking Bora.

  We were going on the run.

  As in I was jumping bail and facing serious prison time for skipping the country, and I’d have to be careful about every single move I made from here on in.

  “I don’t care,” she yelled back. “I’m coming.”

  I stared down at her, thinking that even with wet hair and no makeup, Elena Lombardi took exquisite to a new level. Cazzato, but I wanted her. I needed her. The idea of leaving her behind tore me up from the inside out.

  But I couldn’t be that selfish.

  How could I take her from every single thing she had ever known and throw her straight into the deep end of my criminal life?

  She turned on her heel to collect her bag from Chen, giving him a kiss on the cheek, before she wrapped Beau in a big, long hug.

  She was saying her goodbyes.

  She wasn’t going anywhere, and she was saying her goddamn goodbyes.

  But I didn’t do anything to stop her.

  Not when she pulled away from them and began to walk across the tarmac or when she started up the stairs toward me.

  Instead, I found myself walking down to meet her.

  The smile that spread across her face dazzled me as we moved toward each other, faster and faster.

  Then she was right in front of me.

  Elena Lombardi.

  And all I could think was mine.

  I opened my arms, and she stepped right into them, dropping her bag to wrapped her hands gently around my neck so she didn’t jostle my shoulder.

  “I won’t go back to my life before this,” she murmured into my chest as she hugged me. “Don’t leave me here in this purgatory where nothing makes sense anymore except you.”

  “I have too much of you in my heart to say no,” I admitted gruffly, pulling her head back by the hair so I could see her face.

  Her eyes were that soft gray velvet, warm and glowing. Looking into them, knowing she wanted to risk her entire life for me the way I just had for her, I had never felt more powerful.

  “Ti amo,” she told me as if the words couldn’t bear to go unspoken. “I love you, and I’m going with you.”

  I laughed. I laughed because we were both crazy and mad and hopelessly lost in this new and wild thing between us, and I didn’t give a damn about the consequences.

  “Sono pazzo di te,” I told her before I claimed her lips for a bruising kiss. “I’m crazy about you, Elena. But this new life,” I warned her one last time, “costs a pretty penny. It’ll cost you the full price of your old one.”

  She laughed too, her head tipped back to laugh with the stars.

  “Okay,” she said simply when she finished, smiling at me, more serene than I’d ever seen her. “They’re all afraid of you, and they all hate me. What a pair we make. Two villains in love. I’m not afraid of anything that will come at us, Dante. I just don’t want to be without you.”

  “Then you won’t,” I promised.

  And I kissed her.

  I wasn’t sure if there was such a thing as happily ever after for people like us, but I’d fight tooth and fucking n
ail to make sure I gave Elena Lombardi the world. It wouldn’t be the world she thought she wanted, but I’d make her regina of my dark kingdom and in the end, I’d ensure every single one of my soldati would die for her just as they would die for me.

  The End.

  For now.

  When Villains Rise (Anti-Heroes in Love, #2) releases June 18th!

  Pre-order it NOW!

  If you loved reading about Elena and her capo, you can read about her sister Cosima, and her mysterious husband, Alexander, in Enthralled! Discover what length the Italian beauty will go to in order to save her family from their father’s gambling debts to the mafia….

  “Giana enthralled me with her words, weaving a dark, sexually charged world that kept me hostage willingly. I could not get enough of these characters. A spirited lead and her villainous master have stolen my poor enslaved heart.” – International Bestselling Author, Ker Dukey

  One-click Enthralled now!

  Turn the page to read an excerpt…

  Enthralled, (The Enslaved Duet, #1)

  Excerpt

  From Amazon top 40 best selling author Giana Darling comes a dark, twisted tale of an Italian woman sold into slavery to a cold, calculating British modern day Earl with his own dark agenda…

  It was the biggest day of my life.

  I know most people say that about something joyous; a graduation, a wedding ceremony, the birth of their first child. My situation was a little different.

  Sure, it was my eighteenth birthday, but it was also the day that I was sold.

  Sold to a man with hair like a crown of gold and eyes blacker than the darkest pits of Hell.

  He bought me to own me, to control me, and to use me as a means to an end.

  I was his tool and his weapon.

  And through it all, somehow, I also became his salvation.

  Enthralled: Chapter One Preview

  It was the biggest day of my life.

  I know most people say that about something joyous; a graduation, a wedding ceremony, the birth of their first child.

  My situation was a little different.

  Sure, it was my eighteenth birthday, but it was also the day I was sold.

  And I don’t mean sold metaphorically. As far as I was concerned, my soul was still intact although my father might have been selling his in return for the thousands of dollars he would receive for my body. He wasn’t that worried about it. And honestly, neither was I. If Seamus Moore had a soul at one time, it had long ago dissolved into cinders and ash.

  You’re probably wondering why I went along with it. Even as I sat in the beaten-up red Fiat my twin brother, Sebastian, had just fixed for the fortieth time beside my potentially soulless father who was singing along to Umberto Tozzi as if it was a normal day, I was wondering the same thing. My eldest sister Elena was taking a free online ethics course, and even she didn’t know the moral answer to the question my life had been reduced to—was exchanging one body worth the price of multiple persons’ happiness?

  I didn’t really care that she didn’t have a response. To me, it was worth it.

  “You remember what I told you, carina?” my father asked over the tinny swell of sound from the car speakers.

  “Si.”

  “In English,” he reprimanded gently with a crooked smile in my direction. It was as if I was just being a silly child and teasing him with my mini rebellion. I wanted to tease his skin with the edge of a cold blade, but I held my tongue between my teeth and bit down hard until the fantasy dissolved in pain.

  “Tell me,” he continued.

  “No.”

  His hand found my slim thigh, and his steely fingers wound around it in a rough squeeze. I was used to his physicality, and it did not intimidate me, not now when I faced a potentially much more dangerous future. But I indulged him anyway.

  “I am not to look his eyes—”

  “In his eyes,” he corrected.

  “In his eyes. Or speak unless I am directly spoken to. I will obey him in all things and keep him in comfort. I understand, papa, it is like Italian marriage, but with a contract instead of vows.” I was fluent in the language, but stress ate at my erudite mind like termites.

  He grunted, unamused with my droll comparison. Even though Seamus was not Italian—his Irish accent, deep red hair, and ruddy complexion would always betray him as otherwise—he had assimilated himself into every facet of the culture until being Italian had become a kind of religion to him. And my father’s version of a priest? Let’s just say, you’d never want to meet Rocco Abruzzi, the man who ran a large gambling operation for the current Neapolitan capo, Salvatore Vitale. He was unassuming enough with flaccid features and brows that sagged over wet black eyes, but he had unusually large hands and he liked to use them to deal cards, diddle women, and pound in the faces of those who reneged on debts, those like my father.

  Seamus drew a hand over the lingering bruises on the right side of his jaw with fingers that were scabby and missing their nails. There was only one reason, in his mind, that I was being sold. And that was to pay off his incredible debt to the underground leaders of Napoli. For years, I wished that they would just finish him off, slice him up and drop him into an alley somewhere for someone to find and kick at, too afraid to report the murder to the police. A few times, when he had been missing for long enough, I thought my fantasy had come true only for him to show up the next day, bright eyed and bushy tailed as if he had been at the spa, and not on the run from men with wet eyes and bloody hands.

  “You must speak English with him, carina, in case he does not speak Italian.”

  I straightened at the information, not because I was uncomfortable speaking English. Seamus had made sure that all of us could speak it to some extent and I had studied rigorously for the past two years with Sebastian. If we were going to get out, English was going to be a thread in our lifeline. No, what had startled me was my own father’s lack of knowledge about who was waiting for us in a villa inside Rome.

  “You don’t know who is buying me?” My grinding teeth made my words gravelly, but I knew he could still understand me.

  My heart was in my stomach, and that was in my throat. I felt like one of Picasso’s strange imaginings, my body twisted up with tension and fear so that I couldn’t even recognize myself as human anymore. I was trying to focus on anything but the great and terrifying unknown of my future—the dust motes in our dirty car, the smell of alcohol leaking from my father’s pores, or the way the hot southern Italian sun burned through the windows like flames.

  “I hope you aren’t going to question your new…” He paused. “…guardian like that, Cosima. Remember, respect. Have I taught you nothing?”

  “Yes. You’ve taught me to distrust men, never blindly obey anyone, and to curse God for giving you the capacity to father children,” I said blandly.

  I could focus on the hatred of my father that blazed like a dying star in my belly instead of that awful fear threatening to overwhelm me.

  Hatred was more powerful than fear. One was a shield and an armament I could utilize while the other could only be weaponised against me.

  “Be grateful someone is willing to pay for you.”

  “How much?” I had refrained from asking so far, but my pride wouldn’t allow me to go on unknowing. How much was I worth? How much money could be found in the flare of my hip and the divot of my collarbone, in the meat of my tits and the folds of my sex?

  It was his turn to grind his teeth, but I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t answer me. Honestly, I didn’t think even he knew. It was a perverted friend of a perverted friend of my father who had set up the interaction, some human trafficker that Seamus had played cards with one time when he was drunk enough to admit he needed money and give away the secret of his beautiful daughter, the virgin. His trump card, as he often, tenderly, referred to me as.

  The news had gotten back to the Camorra, and the rest was history.

  “For how long?” I asked, and it wa
sn’t the first time I’d done so. “He can’t possibly own me for the rest of my natural born life?”

  “No,” he conceded. “A period of five years was promised… with the possibility of renewing the contract again for double the price.”

  “And how much of this dirty money will Mama and my siblings see?” I demanded even as my mind whirred.

  Five years.

  Five.

  I’d be twenty-three when all was said and done. If I was off the modelling track for that long, I would be too old to continue to any kind of fame and fortune. I could have done without both, but I wanted to be able to provide for my family until the end of their days.

  If I were a twenty-three-year-old washed-up model without any education to speak of, I wouldn’t be able to do that.

  So, some of the windfall from my sale had to go to my family.

  There wasn’t any other option.

  “Enough to cover my debts,” he admitted, adjusting his sweaty hands on wheel. “Nothing more.”

  I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against the windowpane, bringing up the sepia toned snapshot of my childhood home in my mind’s eye. A box of concrete pasted together by crumbling mortar and bandaged with planks of brittle wood my brother had cut himself. It was a small home on the outskirts of Naples in a part of town the tourists could never reach even if they became lost. My city was a place of dangers and illusions; webs cast between buildings and at the end of roads, catching you in their sticky fibers just as you reached for a promise behind the netting. No one could escape it, yet tourists came, and people stayed.

  I didn’t want my family to be condemned to those depths forever. There was no way I was going to sell my life away for anything less than security for my family.

  Seamus shot me a concerned look. “I can feel you thinking, Cosi. Put a stop to it right now. You are in no position to ask for anything more.”