He wheezed painfully after I abruptly released him and stepped back.
“This isn’t about me,” Elena continued calmly, as if I hadn’t just strangled a man for insulting her, but I could see the way her thighs squeezed together and I wondered with sudden heat if she liked my heathen aggression. “This is about Mirabella. You want her to be happy. Maybe, Dante can make that happen.”
Umberto scowled fiercely at her for a long moment before something in his twisted mouth softened just slightly. His eyes flickered to mine in a gesture that was all question marks and reluctant hope.
“Forsa,” I drawled, maybe. I used the edged of the serrated spoon in my hand to scrape some dried blood off my palm. “But this bastardo tried to kill me. I don’t take that lightly. He endangered you, lottatrice, and that means, he needs to be punished properly.”
“So take his eyes,” Elena said with a little shrug, but there was that calculating gleam in her eyes.
I felt a surge of pride watching her, sitting prim like a principessa with the mind of a fighter, using her skills as a lawyer to manipulate this man into giving us what we wanted.
This was the magic of my woman, her mind was just as arousing as her gorgeous body.
“Wait,” Umberto asked. “Cazzo. Fine. What did you have in mind?”
Elena looked up at me then, wickedness tucked between her full, smiling lips and trust shining from those grey eyes. “I’m sure Dante has a plan.”
In that moment, I didn’t think I’d ever felt such profound love and gratitude for another human being. It was heady to know that a woman as smart and capable, as careful and thoughtful as Elena trusted me whole-heartedly. I’d dragged her into the underworld and instead of being resentful, regretful, even scared, she was boldly walking at my side, holding my hand in support and offering her love without judgement.
Fuck me.
I’d never been a lucky man.
A serial killing psychopath for a father. My mother stolen too young. My own brother turned against me.
I had been fundamentally alone most of my life, before Tore took me under his wing, but even then, he had his own kids and preoccupations.
I’d never had someone who was just wholly and happily mine.
For the first time ever, I wanted to eschew my duty and bury myself in her warmth. Fuck her for hours until she was swollen and soaked, every inch of her possessed by every inch of me.
Instead, I shot her a burning look that promised I’d fuck her into oblivion at the next chance, and turned back to Umberto.
“I have a plan,” I agreed. “And if you don’t like it, you can find out what it’s like to be a man without balls.”
Eight
Elena
I was the kind of little girl who didn’t dream about the future so much as I planned for it. No one had ever told me I deserved the best or that anything close to that was attainable, but I’d had this deep-seated conviction that if I worked hard, anything could happen. I could get out of the stinking hell that was Naples, move to some civilized city like London, or Toronto, or New York and become the kind of woman I read about in books and saw in magazines.
That seed was planted in the fertile soil of my heart but no matter how I watered it, tended to it by achieving dream after dream––a long-term partner in Daniel, a job at a top law firm, a beautiful home I could be proud of––that seed didn’t sprout into more.
For years, I’d wondered if there was something wrong with me. If I lacked the inherent ability to be satisfied with life. With myself. I was intrigued by everything I thought I wanted but satisfied with nothing. My happiness was a façade I grew to wear so well, I forgot the mechanics of what went on beneath the mask.
And now I knew.
I didn’t know how to grow because I’d numbed myself to the point of intolerance. I didn’t allow myself to feel or experience life. It had hurt me so much, I didn’t trust myself to survive it anymore. It made my life bearable, but hollow.
To think, for so long I’d never known true happiness. How foolish I’d been to think I could carve life up into parts and parcel them into neat little boxes on a shelf. I’d massacred any hope of joy, slaughtered newborn happiness before it could ever grow legs and stand tall. I’d condemned chaos thinking it was the antithesis of everything a proper young woman should work for. Yearn for.
How wrong I’d been.
Dante had dragged me into the dark depths of his anarchic life and shown me the pleasure to be found in the shadows, the exhilaration of living on the knife’s edge of danger, and the headiness of power unfettered by morality or laws. Those tidy boxes of emotion and memories I’d kept so neatly organized came tumbling down and among all that disorderly chaos, I found that seed again.
I’d found it because finally, after so many years, it had sprouted and grown leaves. It was still such a small, fragile thing in my chest, this new hope and direction after moving around blindly for years. But it was there and it was so beautiful it made me want to cry.
But it also made me feel fierce and powerful, totally unafraid.
I was a lawyer, curiosity was my trade, so of course, after helping Dante move the body of the intruder down to the basement, I’d snuck back down to see what he would do with him.
The sight of Dante with a blowtorch in one hand and a spoon in the other, a detached, almost feral grin on the same mouth that spoke such beautiful words to me and did such wondrous things to my body did strange things to me.
I wasn’t horrified.
Oh, I knew I should have been. Watching my lover torture a man was a scenario I’d never thought up for myself. I’d always wanted a quiet, steady, wealthy lover who worked a quiet, steady job.
Not a mafioso who was astoundingly creative with his torture techniques.
I tried to remind myself how awful it had been for me when Seamus returned home broken and pulled apart by the Camorra for his unpaid gambling debts. How scared and upset I’d been.
But it didn’t have the same bearing anymore.
Now, I couldn’t forget that Seamus had somewhat deserved such treatment. He’d continually borrowed money from the outfit when he had little luck and no back-up plan. The only thing that got him to pause his activities for any length of time were the particularly brutal beatings they doled out every once in a while, to remind him that they weren’t afraid to take payment in the form of his life.
If Seamus deserved it then, didn’t this Umberto Arno deserve it now?
He’d blindly decided to assassinate Dante because he hadn’t like Rocco’s plans for his cousin. It was sheer instinctual idiocy. If he’d used his brain for a moment, he could have questioned Dante’s motive in the scheme, wondered if the visiting Don would be happy about the idea of marrying some local Italian girl with a tarnished reputation.
But no.
Men.
Always acting as swiftly as they reacted.
So, I didn’t respond the way I would have even a month ago.
Instead, a felt the heat of desire and righteous fury flow through me thick and hot as magma. I enjoyed watching Dante scare him the way most people might have enjoyed watching a well-acted play. I was engrossed and more than a little proud that that man, the one with all the power, the diamond bright and hard-cut mind, and massive, threatening physique was all mine.