Page 50 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet
The laugh that erupted from my throat was all fire and smile, burning up my lungs and scorching my mouth. I laughed bitterly, a little manically at the thought.
“How can you take yourself seriously?” I asked, genuinely interested. “You haven’t cared about any of us in years.”
“I care,” he countered, his features flickering like a bad TV connection between placid tenderness and curdled anger. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”
“Say what you have to say, then.” I waved my limp hand at him as I was hit by a wave of exhaustion.
Was this it?
Was this to be the pattern of my life forever?
Men fucking up my happiness?
No, not even that. I’d never been truly happy. They’d kept me from even obtaining it for longer than a fleeting moment.
And it all started with Seamus.
For the first time in my life, I understood cold-blooded violence, the desire to murder someone who felt like nothing more than a trivial decision akin to taking out the garbage.
Seamus was trash, and he deserved to be taken out.
If I’d had a gun, instead of a canister of mace, I might have.
He read the violence in my eyes, but instead of taking it to heart, he seemed challenged by it. His eyes went dark as steel bullet casings.
“I heard you were working for the Salvatoreborgata,” he drawled, too casual, a fox lying still in wait.
I barked a hollow laugh that hurt my throat. “Did you?”
He cast me a sidelong look. “The entire underworld knows now that you’re the Camorra capo’s lawyer. It puts a target on your back, Elena. How could you be so reckless?”
My mouth gaped in furious wonder. “How you can ask me that with a straight face is beyond me.” Wrath ate at my incredulity, fueling me to stalk toward my dad once more, each step punctuating my hard-bitten words. “You sold my sister to repayyourdebts to the Camorra. I am representing a capo becauseyouinvolved us in the mafia before we were old enough to speak. You donotget to tell me I’m reckless when all I’ve ever tried to do is get out from under the mistakes you’ve made that nearly ruined our family.”
Anxiety had plagued my entire childhood, wondering when the men with black eyes would come calling and I’d have to hide my siblings from their vicious intent. Hours spent cramped in the hiding space beneath the kitchen sink. Holding Giselle as she cried once when huddled in our shared room while someone beat Seamus in the living room for taking money he’d never be able to repay.
“You didn’t have to work for thebastardo. I had nothing to do with that,” he argued even as I reached for him and shoved a hand hard into his sternum, pushing him into the wall. He hissed at the impact, then leaned forward into my face to snarl, “Everything I do, I do for my family.”
“You don’t know the meaning,” I snapped. “Spare me the fatherly bullshit. I can fight my own battles.”
“Clearly, you cannot,” he countered, a smile twitching his upper lip. It wasn’t an expression of joy but one of calculated satisfaction. “How would you like to know that it’s your dad keeping the Irish off your back, Elena?”
“Let them come for me, then, dear old Da,” I mocked, my red lips pulled back over my teeth. “I’d sooner trust Dante Salvatore to protect me than you.”
Hurt flared through his features before he carefully stowed the expression behind his mask. His hands went to my shoulders, fingers curling into the trench coat and the flesh beneath it with a painful bite.
“You want to die, huh?” he demanded coldly. “Because there are worse monsters than the Italian mob in New York City, and all of them have their eyes on Don Salvatore and his crew. Andyou. They’ll take you and crack you open like a fucking piggy bank to find whatever treasured intel they can get on the Camorra.”
“I don’t know anything. I just represent him in court,” I said, but it lacked conviction because it honestly hadn’t ever occurred to me I could be risking my life for a man I hardly knew just by doing my job.
Seamus knew my face well enough to read the fear at the pinched corners of my mouth. “You should be afraid,cara. You’re in my world now, and the people who inhabit it are fucking cannibals.”
I wrenched from his hold and took a massive step away from him. I’d heard enough. Seamus was every bad part of me, the pride, the explosive temper, the inability to forgive, and the tendencies toward superiority. He lived in me more than enough. I didn’t need his presence in my life for him to take a toll on me, and I was done giving him the benefit of the doubt.
He would never love me.
I might not have understood adoration all that well, but I knew whatever Seamus claimed to feel for us was the antithesis.
“Don’t contact me again,” I told him in a deep voice that emerged from somewhere dark and low in my gut. “You do, Seamus, and I swear to God, I’ll kill you if that’s the only way to get rid of you.”
