Page 109 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet
He left.
I watched him go with my hands crossed over my chest, brain whirring. I wasn’t surprised when Frankie stepped up beside me and adopted the same pose.
“You think we got a problem with him?”
I sighed, scrubbing my hand over the sharp stubble at my jaw. I wanted to be upstairs with Elena, preferably inside her, discovering more of the ways I could make her come for me. Instead, I was deep underground dealing in the shadows I’d lived in my entire life.
“I find it hard to believe he’d risk a business he stood to inherit if something happened to me. He’s a man motivated by his family name and the success attached to that. We’re doing well despite the RICO case. As long as we bring in money, Jaco should be loyal beyond the ties Tore gave him. But after Mason, I’m not sure about anyone. Wouldn’t be sure of you if you didn’t owe me your goddamn life.”
Frankie nodded. “If I ever thought of leaving, Liliana would kill me.”
I laughed because that was the truth. His wife was not to be trifled with even though she was just a slip of a thing.
“Elena’s got it too,” he continued as if picking up the thread from a conversation we’d been having before.
“What?”
“What it takes to bedonna.”
I blinked because even though Elena had been on my mind, in my fucking blood, for weeks, I hadn’t thought hard about our future. Maybe because I knew logically we couldn’t have one.
She was too proper, too upstanding and moral. Too disgusted with the details of work that made up my entire existence. There was no way we could ever have a…relationship beyond the walls of my apartment, beyond the scope of this case.
Yet the idea of giving her up made me mad. Crazed as a beast gone feral, foaming at the mouth.
I was the only man who had ever made her come.
The one to make her curse and make her beg.
The one she allowed to care for her even though she hated to seem weak.
How was it possible there could be a time when she didn’t seem likemine?
Butdonna.
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 orderingsoldaticoolly, efficiently.
She would be fucking magnificent.
“Love’s made you foolish,” I finally told him, trying to shrug off the fantasy, let the idea of it roll off my back. “I live in the real world.”
“You live in the world you create,” he corrected. “That’s why you’re the boss.”
A growl worked in my throat, part frustration, part something else.
Triumph maybe, at the thought of corrupting her so fully. At the thought of having a woman like her stand beside me.
“If this plan doesn’t work out, we won’t be here to worry about that,” I reminded him.
Because I was capo.
