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

by Giana Darling

“You can call it what you want. A game. A deal. But don’t forget who it is you’re dealing with, hmm? I’m nothing but the devil, and I’ll take you for all you’re worth. When I’m done with you, your precious rules will be in tatters just like your clothes around your feet.”

“I can see the fear in your eyes. I feel it in the pulse just here. What are you afraid of, Elena? That my wickedness might contaminate your thoughts… or your body? Are you so certain entering into this agreement with me is so wise?”

My father’s sinner's blood ran through my veins, and I couldn’t pretend for one second longer that I was above my avarice and egotism. I wanted success, money, fame. I wanted to be seen and known and heard. I wanted it all. And Dante Salvatore was the only man who could satisfy those base desires.

His eyes were dark as freshly tilled soil, fertile with wickedness as they locked on mine, and with a slight brush of his lips against my fingers, he agreed to my terms. Just like that, I made a deal with the Devil of NYC.

He blinked at me once, then threw his head back to laugh so hard he held on to his belly as if to contain his humor. I watched him, enjoying the sight of all those muscles contracting with mirth that I’d caused. It felt good to make someone laugh. To make him laugh.

It was an irrational fear, something like a superstition that each time Dante put his hands on me, something elemental changed in my physiology. I didn’t like his hand on my throat or my hand in his, so why had I let him do that to me? Why had I leaned into that strong collar just to feel my heart beat faster?

His laughter scored through me like a shot of grappa. He leaned back, releasing my hands to pat his tight, boxed stomach. “I like your mama’s pasta.”

But that was kind of what it felt like lying there with the urge to laugh in my belly while a big mafioso crushed my torso where he straddled me after his fake attack.

God, but I laughed. It burst out of me indecorously, seizing my belly and warming my chest. When I recovered, eyes wet with mirth, Rora had gone back to shaping pasta in her little fingers, but Dante was watching me with something written in black ink in those long-lashed eyes. “Bellissima,” he mouthed.

I could be an emotional terrorist, my broken pieces weaponized like shards of broken glass. I was used to being the bitch, the warrior, something strong and impenetrable, more a worthy adversary than a worthy friend. But Dante looked at me as if I was some priceless, mysterious work of art, and he wanted to know the story behind my almost smile.

“No,” he agreed on a low purr that was more threat than seduction. “Vieni qui, lottatrice mia.” Come here, my fighter.

The perverse side of me wanted to see what would happen when he did.

“Elena,” he said, clearly exasperated. “You are the most complicated woman I’ve ever known. So tough and strong, a born fighter because life taught you the need to survive, and that’s a beautiful thing.”

“Yet, you’re so afraid,” he said in a low voice, his words creeping across the space toward me like the slow roll of thick, ominous fog. “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.”

“You were more than that from the moment I met you,” he countered, stepping forward, stalking me across the room step for step. “You were my best friend’s sister, the woman she admired most in the world. How could I not be intrigued? And then you saw me in the hospital room, and I thought you would fight me there and then to protect her. But it wasn’t until you pushed me up against the wall with your little fist in my shirt and threatened me with death if I ever hurt Cosima that I knew you were something special. A true lottatrice, a female gladiator.”

“How could a man like me resist a woman like that?”

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

“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 to pretend to be a lady and say no.”

His own features were coated in shadow, his beauty stark and forceful in the low light. It took my breath away, the contrast between the ferocity of the body poised just over mine and the gentle way he cupped my chin. His night dark eyes swallowed me up as he looked into me, through me, behind every shield I’d painstakingly constructed.

Courage, my fighter. “Let me show you all the ways a man can appreciate a woman,” he continued, running his nose along my cheek to my ear, where he took the lobe quickly between his teeth in a sharp nip that made me gasp. “Let me teach you all the ways you can appreciate me.”

I’d never felt like this. This hammering, all-encompassing fervor that struck through me with each beat of my heart like a lightning strike. I wanted to prostrate myself for this beast of a man and witness all the ways he could bring my body back to life. He kissed the hollow of my throat, just a flutter of silken lips against warm skin, yet it made me want to cry. When was the last time someone had touched me with such reverence?

But it was more than sexual. That simple kiss laid roots through my flesh and bones, deep into the very center of my chest, where they wrapped intractably around my fragile heart. 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.

Come to the underworld with me, it seemed to say. Come and play with me in the shadows where you belong.

Good Lord, let him give up on me before it came to that. I was strong, and I was resilient, but I was not prepared to go to war with a man like him when the prize could mean more than my body.

His demeanor held an unmistakable dominance, but from the first time since Christopher, I felt curious about it, almost entranced by it. 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 caught Dante watching me sometimes when I sparred with Marco, who was short enough that we were more evenly matched, or when I spoke to Chen as I stretched about the recent economic downtown. He watched me with this look in his eye I couldn’t quite figure out, but it looked something like pride. I didn’t speak to him, avoiding any alone time with him as if it was essential to my safety, and in a way, it was. But I could admit to myself that I watched him too, and what I found continued to fascinate me.

“One thing rolls into another, and before you know it, you’ve let a pile of shit a mile wide accumulate at your back, and no matter how hard you run, you’ll never outpace it. No.”

“Someone gives you hell, Elena, you give it to ’em right back. You teach them that for every move against you, however slight, you’re ready to battle. So many of the wealthiest, most successful men you’ll ever see are bullies at heart, and there’s nothing a bully hates so much as pushback.”

“Besides,” Frankie continued, cuffing my chin lightly the way I’d seen fathers do to sons, as if he was imparting life wisdom. “You’re with us, now. You think the Salvatore borgata puts up with limp-dicked stronzi like this bastardo?”

It was enough to know that Frankie cared enough about me to stand up for me.

There was a restless energy coursing through me I wanted to satisfy with the bite of our banter, the feel of those deadly hands lightly touching my flesh. The truth was, I wanted to play, with our minds if not our bodies, knowing how dangerous it would be to tumble over that last hurdle and into bed with my client. With a mafia Don.

He was simply and extraordinarily exquisite. I couldn’t tear my eyes from him if I tried.

It was impossible not to wonder what that heavy cock would feel like in my own smaller hand and finer fingers. What the liquid leaking steadily from his crown might taste like, salty or musky or sweet. If I could make him shake and groan the way he was watching me watch him fuck himself. If I could fit even half of that wide shaft inside my fairly untrained mouth.

I sucked a sharp breath through my teeth when his neck strained, his tempo went erratic, and he called out, “Elena!” a second before he climaxed.

For the sight of Dante, big-boned and heavily muscled gone limp with pleasure in that chair covered in his own spend.

If anyone could take my broken and newly healed body in his hands and make it sing, it would be the mafioso I shouldn’t, couldn’t have. The only man I’d ever wanted with this level of physical zeal and the only man I truly could not let myself want.

From the beginning, Dante had caught sight of my red hair and turned to me like a bull, set on destroying whatever barricades lay between us in his quest to get to me. It still chilled me to wonder what he might want to do when and if he finally succeeded, but that chill was only a cool breeze compared to the firestorm of lust that swept through me lately whenever we were in the same space.

Good luck. Literally translated as “into the wolf’s mouth.” Exactly where I currently felt myself, clasped between Dante’s unshakeable teeth, unable and gradually more and more unwilling to get free.

If Dante could light my icy flesh on fire with just the touch of his lips to my pulse point, how would he make me feel with those lips on other parts of my body?

But there was no denying she looked exquisite in slumber, her classic features softer in repose, her mouth pink without the usual lipstick. I found I wanted to lean down to savor it with my own, exploring the small white teeth beneath those bow-shaped lips, sliding my tongue alongside hers to taste her dreams.

It was heady as fuck to know I could have that effect on a woman who had clearly never harnessed the power of her sexuality. My usual ironclad control was tenuous at best now, knowing that beneath that gorgeous, cultivated class lay the heart of a wanton, desperate for a man to show her how to navigate the world of pleasure and hedonism.

I wanted her, and I would have her, but Elena required a contrarian mix of forcefulness and care, my seduction a tightrope walk that could fail with even the slightest provocation. And I was more and more unwilling to fail.

It wasn’t in my nature to refuse myself much, and I found I didn’t even try as I reached out for the folded pages and opened them to read. I wanted to know what Elena had been in the hospital for. As her host, I felt it was my prerogative to know so I could take the best care of her. As a capo, I felt it was my right to know anything that happened under my roof to someone in my circle.

That was the night I discovered the true, tender underbelly of my fighter and decided, irrevocably, that I needed to have her. Not just have her to own her, because a woman like Elena couldn’t be owned and that was part of her powerful charm. I needed to have her to understand her. To have the privilege of unwrapping layer after layer until I got to the heart of her. Once, I’d thought her soul would be frozen through, an icy vessel used only to pump blood through her body, but I was beginning to understand the truth.

Elena Lombardi had so much heart. She was overfull with emotion, and she had no idea how to hide that vulnerability from people unless it was behind a mask of icy indifference and cool disdain. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t trust others with that tender, swollen organ so much as she didn’t trust herself to use it.

Because I resolved in much the same way I resolved to solve my mother’s murder and resolved to save Cosima from the Order of Dionysus that I would show Elena Lombardi what it was like to live and love freely. And I’d do it by loving her. First, I just had to trick her into letting down her shields long enough to let me try.

And that was how I ended one of the most vulnerable days of my life, surrounded by laughing men, most of whom had probably killed a man or committed any other half-dozen felonies. And for the first time in my life, snuggled between the two big warm bodies of my brother and the mafioso I was coming to like more than I should, I didn’t care.

I had always found, if you could understand something, it was almost impossible to hate it because then you could empathize with it.

His company. One month of our forced proximity, and I was dangerously close to capitulating to his game of corruption.