Page 97 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet
“They crashed,” I croaked, my throat so dry the words hurt.
“Keep driving,” he commanded.
I drove.
Dante coolly instructed me through the neighborhood streets to Staten Island Expressway, which took me over the Verrazzano Bridge into Brooklyn. A black sedan peeled in front of me from an onboard ramp at 92ndStreet, and I instantly tensed, air hissing between my teeth.
“Calmarsi, Elena,” Dante soothed. “It’s just Adriano. You can follow him home,si?”
I nodded again.
“Talk to me,” he ordered gently.
“Bene,” I whispered, then cleared my throat. “Okay, I’m good.”
“That’s my girl,” he told me, the warmth of relief and pride in his tone washing over me through the speakers. “Adriano will see you home. I’ll be waiting.”
“Don’t get off the phone,” I hastened to say, too shaken to be embarrassed by my need. The shaking in my hands had traveled up my arms into my shoulders and chest. I vibrated like a second engine in the driver’s seat. “Stay with me.”
There was a silence that felt like a hand cupping my cheek, holding me still for one long, deep breath.
“Bene, Elena,io sono con te. I am with you.”
I followed Adriano home on autopilot, my brain still under fire in the aftermath of the chase.
Logically, distantly, I recognized I was still in shock. There was a numb cold in my limbs in the wake of the fiery adrenaline, a kind of muffled quiet in my head as I slowly recognized that I was safe and alive.
It wasn’t the first time a criminal lawyer had been caught in the crosshairs of their client’s ordeals, but it was my first, and it had a profound effect on me.
Only, not the way I would have imagined.
As I clued into my body methodically, atom by atom, I realized that what I felt was not horror and weakness but exhilaration and victorious rage.
Thosestronzihad come at me, trying to intimidate me perhaps or kidnap me at worse, using me as a pawn against Dante or to send a message to the Camorra in general.
But they hadn’t succeeded.
For the first time in my entire life, I felt as if I had come out on the other side of the conflict with the mafia as the winner. I felt as if the entire organization could come at me the way they had come at my family in Naples, and I could take them head-on in that fight. I could show them what it meant to battle a Lombardi, what it meant to face a woman at the end of her rope.
What had happened was more than just a car chase.
It was a pivotal point in my life.
One where I could make the conscious decision to take ownership of my flaws—the anger, the violence, the ruthlessness—of my circumstances—Dante, the Camorra, this game of corruption—or I could succumb to them—return to what I had always been before, unable to stand the heat of this new existence compared to my prior deep freeze.
I could give up the idea of being a hero and rise up the villain beside a man I was beginning to understand was so much more than that.
He was the kind of man who called his seven-year-old niece the love of his life and watched episodes of some cheesy vampire show to give a lonely woman some comradery. He was the kind of man to rip someone apart with his bare hands for wronging him or his, but he was also the kind of man to take the fall for a woman’s crime because she was the sister of his heart.
He was everything I’d feared and everything I’d never consciously known I longed for.
And all that, six-foot-five inches, two hundred thirty pounds of British-Italian man, could bemine.
All I had to do was be brave enough to reach out and take it.
Coraggio.
By the time I pulled onto Dante’s street in Manhattan, my breath was coming fast for an entirely different reason than it had been before. Almost blindly, I followed Adriano into Dante’s private parking garage beneath the building.
