When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love Duet #1)

by Giana Darling

From the day Chiara disappeared, I started to work for Amadeo Salvatore and reinvented myself as Dante Salvatore.

I was an island, and I was okay that way. I didn’t need anyone to look out for me. I didn’t need to be coddled or protected the way the entire family had done to Giselle for her whole life. I didn’t need anyone for anything.

There was such a thin line between love and hate, just as there was between heroism and villainy. It all depended on the circumstance and perspective.

I wanted to make her shake for me, quake for me, fucking break for me.

I lifted my hand and cupped her long throat easily in my palm, curling my fingers around the side over the mad thrum of her pulse.

“No,” I agreed in a low purr. “You aren’t a soldier or a slave. You are a fighter, my fighter until you’ve won this war with me. But I am the general, Elena, and the sooner you get used to taking orders from me, the better.”

“I don’t take orders from any man,” she snapped, teeth clicking together with th...

“Ah, but I am not just a man,” I promised her, gentling her the way I would a nervous mare, my thumb stroking down her throat. “I am capo dei capi of the New York City Camorra. I...

“Next time you hit me, lottatrice, I will hit you back. Only it will be on that sweet little arse I’ve glimpsed behind your tight skirts, capisci?”

Elena Lombardi was an acquired taste, something to be appreciated by only the most refined palette, the most exquisite mind. As deep and brilliantly complex as expensive Italian wine, and the more I learned about her, the more I wanted to drink her down like a glutton and force her to be mine.

“Please, Dante,” I started to explain, but an expression overcame him that arrested me mid-speech. “What?”

“The sound of ‘please’ from your lips sounds even better than a curse,” he murmured, stepping closer to raise a thumb to the edge of my mouth.

“You’re so goddamn afraid of being soft and tender because all that silk beneath your armor would rip so easily in the wrong hands. This insecurity blinds you to the truth. It corrodes the goodness in you. If you saw what I saw when I looked at you, you would never doubt yourself again. You wouldn’t be tricked by the easy flattery of some stronzo like di Carlo into thinking he was good enough for you.”

“For once in your life, be brave,” he demanded. “And maybe I’ll give you what you’re too terrified to ask me for.”

“I want to leave.”

“No,” he purred darkly. “No, you want me to fuck you senseless without asking for your permission. If I don’t ask, you don’t have...

“Coraggio, lottatrice mia,” he coaxed softly. Courage, my fighter.

“Let me show you all the ways a man can appreciate a woman,”

“Let me teach you all the ways you can appreciate me.”

The kiss was kind. That was it. That simple and that profound for me. Dante was showing me kindness, the depths of which I hadn’t experienced much of in my life.

Dante was dangerous, violence dressed in a thousand-dollar suit, but beneath it all, he was also the kind of man who wept at a friend’s hospital bedside and made pasta with a girl who called him uncle.

He was tall, dark, and sinfully handsome, a masterfully created man.

I would show Elena Lombardi what it was like to live and love freely. And I’d do it by loving her.

“Are you flirting with me?” I asked, proud that my voice didn’t shake the way my thighs did beneath the table.

“Will you hit me if I say yes?”

His playfulness was infectious. I tamped down my urge to smile and no...

“Good,” he said with a wink, “then hit me. I ...

“I’ve never been so proud to make another person laugh,” he told me seriously.

“Don’t say I should do it more often.”

“No, the rarity of it makes it more beautiful. I’m becoming rather pos...

“One day, Elena,” he practically purred, the sound a rough vibration that hummed through me. “I am going to kiss you until you melt, and then I am going to lick up every inch of you.”

“Let me show you passion, Elena. Let me teach you how to love again.”

“Not all love is romantic,” he pointed out rationally, staring into my fearful eyes. “I don’t think you’ve had enough of it to know that, but I’m offering the love of a friend and the love of my body. The love of a man who can see you are not hateful. You are not villainous. You are misunderstood. And Elena, you don’t realize this yet, but I see you, I know you, and I’m fucking undone by the beauty of you.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” I insisted. “You don’t know half of the bad things I’ve done.”

“And you don’t know mine,” he agreed. “But we are more than our flaws and our mistakes. Who told you that you were hard to love? G...

“I don’t want to b...

“Let me love you anyway,”

They say there is a thin line between love and hate. The moment Dante Salvatore twisted his hand in my hair and yanked me in for a savage kiss, I knew he had just pushed me over that invisible line into something infinitely more dangerous than hate.

At that moment, every single atom in my body was owned by him. One kiss. For one kiss, I risked it all. My career, my family, my freedom. And my life. But, Dio mio, I’d do it again and again if it meant feeling like this. So alive I burned.

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.

“Next time I kiss that gorgeous red mouth, I’m going to make you so crazy that all you know is Italian.”

“You can take it. I’ll make you.”

“Vieni per me,” Dante gritted out between his teeth. “Come for me, Elena. Let me feel you come apart around me.”

“There are many things I can and will make you feel,” he promised darkly. “Now that I’ve had you, I won’t let you go until I’ve had my fill, and I have a feeling that will take a very long time.”

It wasn’t just about the fact that Cosima had killed Giuseppe and that she was a known associate of Tore and me (though no one but the three of us knew to what extent).

“They were gonna blow up your deal with The Fallen MC,” he panted, bloody spittle drooling down his chin. “Apparently, they got an in with the New York chapter.”

How was it possible there could be a time when she didn’t seem like mine? But donna. Boss. The queen to my kingpin. A partner not just in this case against me but in crime. In my shadowed underworld. It should have seemed ridiculous, but a part of me could picture her there under the faded frescos, checking guns and ordering soldati coolly, efficiently. She would be fucking magnificent.

It was a habit I’d built around her, this need to feel her heart beat, to feel the woman who thought she was made of ice pulse with fire.

“I’m going to make you come like this on my hand, and you are going to play for me all the way through your climax,” I ordered. “Because I want to watch you fail. I want to see you lose control just for me.”

“Break apart. Come for me. And say the name of your capo when you do.”