Page 134 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet
I barely noticed him leaving. I just flipped to my back and stared at the ceiling.
I’d shot my dad.
Together, Dante and I had killed him.
I knew it wasn’t something I was going to get over anytime soon. I knew I’d need endless rounds of therapy to even begin to make sense of the tangle of relief, justification, anger, and despair I felt about the act.
But I didn’t regret it for one second.
He’d threatened Mama, Giselle, and Genevieve.
He’d destroyed our lives in Naples and sold Cosima into sexual slavery.
He’d nearly killed Dante.
And even if none of the other things had happened, I knew in my heart that would have been enough reason for me to kill him.
I couldn’t bear the thought of knowing I existed in a world where Dante didn’t.
And he had done the same for me.
I’d always known Dante was a killer.
You only had to look at those massive hands quilted with muscle, ribboned with tendons and veins that popped beneath his deeply tan skin to know that there was sheer murderous power there.
But this was different.
Knowing that Dante had killed for me, that he had risked his freedom to search for me and helped end the life of a man who had made me suffer the entire length of mine, resonated somewhere deep inside.
It was the same place that burned when he touched me, when he taught me what to do with his body and what to do with mine. It was the same place that stirred whenever my family had been threatened in Naples and I’d stood up to protect them.
Because they were mine to protect.
Just as it seemed, now I was Dante’s to protect.
It was a place of instinct, a primal impulse in my gut that transcended thought and even feeling.
Dante was mine.
How could I just let him go?
I jumped to my feet and froze in my living room, gazing at the furniture and art I’d collected from another life with another man. It seemed ridiculous to me now that I’d held on to it for so long.
I’d stopped grieving Daniel a long time ago. The truth was, I never loved him the way I should have, and obviously, he’d felt the same way about me. What I’d mourned from that loss for years wasn’t the man, but the woman I’d thought I had been with him. No, more than that, I lamented those last shreds of hope I’d retained then lost when he left me for Giselle.
I missed my capacity to love, my propensity to have faith in people and mostly, in myself.
Dante had taught me how to love myself again.
He’d taught me how to let someone in again.
How could I possibly give that up?
“Beau!” I screamed as I started to run from the room down the hall back up to my bedroom. I took the stairs two at a time. “Beau, I have to go!”
When I careened to a stop in my bedroom door, Beau was already beside my bed, calmly folding clothes into an open Louis Vuitton suitcase.
“I know,” he said, smiling sadly at me. “Of course, you do.”
