Page 137 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet
When Villains Rise
Loving him wasn’t the end of everything.
It’s funny they always make it seem that way in the books and movies.
Loving him was just the beginning.
In a way, it was the death of me.
The woman of before, the cold, calculating, stubbornly moral lawyer with a layered life and carefully constructed personality, was buried six feet beneath the earth in New York City.
This new being, born from the ashes of a fire ignited by one man, was reborn on a plane somewhere over the mid-Atlantic Ocean.
I was newly born, as blank as a white sheet of paper, my future hovering over it like a poised pen.
I only knew three things.
Fleeing the country with a known criminal made me a felon by association, so for the first time in my life, I was officially on the wrong side of the law.
We were returning to my homeland, a place I had sworn five years ago that I would never go back to willingly. More than that, we were going into the belly of the beast. Naples. The stinking cesspool that was the heart of the Camorra mafia. The villains of my entire youth.
And thirdly, most importantly, I was indisputably and irretrievably in love with a mafia Don, a man who could and most certainlyhadkilled people with his big, bare hands. A man by the name of Dante Salvatore. A man who had changed my entire world.
It was the only positive thing on my short list, yet it seemed the most all-consuming, the only true thing that mattered.
I was in love with Dante.
I’d loved before.
So, why did this feel so different, so strange?
Even at the height of my affection for Christopher and Daniel, I’d felt solidly independent, removed enough from my emotions to operate logically and efficiently.
With Dante, I felt my edges blurring, my whole being smudged like a watercolor painting into the edges of him and his.
I didn’t want space or logic.
Dio mio, I’d fled the country and my entire life to be with him. Clearly, I wasn’t thinking logically.
But that was the craziness of it all.
I didn’t care if I was acting outside of my own interests, that I was being impulsive and reckless and passionate to a fault.
I didn’t care so much I felt like roaring with giddy, manic laughter.
I was unhinged, ripped from the caged structure of my previous life by Dante’s ruthless grasp.
I felt free.
So free.
For the first timeever.
“Lottatrice mia.”
The low purr of his British-Italian accent hooked through my gut and pulled my focus from the oval plane window and the night ocean beyond to the very man I was thinking about.
Dante sat in the butter-soft leather seat the way he sat in anything, big body sprawled out, thick thighs spread, heavily muscled torso sunk deep into the plush cushions. He should have looked lazy and even insolent in such an easy pose, but it somehow only served to make him look more powerful. As if that relaxed façade could coil and strike at only a second’s notice.
