Page 130 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet
To show him I understood, I extended my hand to him and watched as relief moved over his face. He stepped away from the body and tucked me under his chin as he ordered Frankie, “Clean up and burn it down. Leave the bodies.”
“You’re bleeding,” I whispered as he tugged me into his body, and I caught sight of the bubbling wound to his left shoulder, just beneath his collarbone.
“I’m fine,” he assured, punctuating the words with another savage kiss I felt in my numb toes. “Andiamo, lottatrice mia. It seems I have to thankyoufor saving my life.”
“I think it was a team effort,” I said on a giddy, mindless laugh as my adrenaline started to fade.
Dante held me to his side as we climbed the stairs, walking over the odd dead Irishman as we left the house. Frankie stayed behind downstairs, and I caught sight of Marco with a canister of gas in the living room on the main level.
By the time we made it to the car at the curb, flames were already flickering from inside the house.
There were no neighbors in the streets. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood with park committees and neighborhood watch.
Chen was in the driver’s seat when we got in the black SUV, and he tipped his chin up at me in the rearview. “Sorry it took a minute.”
Another reckless laugh galloped from me. “That’s okay. I knew you’d come.”
A minute later, after two figures ran from the house into another waiting car, we took off, and I finally took a breath.
And then another.
Each inhale bringing more panic than it had before.
Dante held me against him, turning despite the pain in his shoulder so that he could face me head-on and cup my face in his hands.
“You’re okay,” he said in that British-Italian accent I’d once hated. “Io sono con te. I am with you now,si? You are safe, Elena.”
I blinked at him, falling into those night-dark eyes, finding solace in them when I used to find immorality. My hands moved over him, touching whatever I could just to reassure myself that things hadn’t ended differently in there. That he was alive and Seamus hadn’t succeeded in taking yet another thing from my life.
And I knew it then.
What it was to truly be in love with someone, body and soul, everything else be damned.
Because I’d known as I picked up the gun, heavier and hotter than I would have imagined, that I’d raze every single one of my morals and mandates to the ground if it meant keeping Dante alive and at my side.
I’d happily follow him to Hell if it meant being with him forever.
I opened my mouth to tell him as much when he pressed his forehead to mine and admitted, “I have to go.”
My heart stopped.
“I’m sorry, Elena, but we disabled the ankle monitor to get to you. They’ll notice within twenty-four hours.”
“You can’t go to jail,” I said instantly, fear pulling the words from me.
I’d just got him, just realized I even wanted to have him.
“No,” he agreed slowly, his thumbs rubbing the length of my cheekbones, gently over the abrasion my father had left on one. “I’m running.”
I blinked.
“I have a private jet out of Newark. It leaves in…” He checked his watch. “Just over an hour. I have to go. You know I didn’t kill Giuseppe di Carlo, and I had a plan for that too, but…” He shrugged. “This was more important.”
Youwere more important.
I didn’t know what to say or do. My entire world had turned on its axis in the past twenty-four hours, and I couldn’t see straight anymore. All my life, I’d run from the dark, only now I seemed unable and unwilling to escape Dante’s shadowy embrace.
“I don’t want you to leave,” I said pathetically.
