My fighter.
Lottatrice mia.
Even angry, I had to admire her. “If you’re at my side, Elena, those bullets people sling at me could end up in you. You want to risk your life to be with me, huh?”
“I’m willing to take a life-altering risk for a life-altering reward,” she told me steadily, her flames cooling to ice-cold surety. “I don’t know what love means to you, but to me, it means loving someone no matter what baggage they come with for as long as they’ll let you love them and as hard as you possibly can. The only risk I fear is one where I lose you. You fell in love with a fighter, Dante. Let me fight with you.”
We stared at each other under the dappled gold light filtering through the lemon tree branches, the breeze whistling through the leaves, the long grass swaying around our ankles. I could hear both our breaths, harsh and fast with passion.
I wanted to throttle that beautiful long neck for thinking she could get out of loving me alive. I wanted to beg God or whoever might be in charge of fate not to take her from me the way They’d taken my mother. I had seen too clearly what happened to her after being caught up in Noel’s dark world.
I couldn’t fucking bear if that happened to Elena.
She read my face, eyes tracking every minute expression until finally she softened, the starch leaking from her mouth on a sigh. She came to me, wrapping her arms around my torso, pressing her cheek to my chest, on top of the cross necklace beneath my shirt, on top of my erratically thudding heart.
“I’m not your mother,” she murmured. “I was born in this world. I might not have liked it as a girl, but now I know it was for a reason. It was so when I grew up and met you I’d be ready to face the reality of life loving a mafia Don. I know what to expect, Dante. The assassination-attempts in the middle of the night, car chases across Staten Island, kidnappings. I know and I’m ready. Because between all of the chaos, there’s you. And to me, there’s nothing better in this world than you.”
I stared down at her as she held me tight, her face tipped up so her mercurial gray eyes could meet mine. There was so much honesty in her expression, her heart flayed open and exposed for me.
How many more times would I make her prostrate herself until she proved to me she wanted this?
Wanted me.
Not just the Duke’s second son with the money and prestige.
Not just the mafia Don with the edgy dangerous sex appeal.
Me.
Edward Dante Davenport Salvatore.
Realizing that felt like a baptism, a spiritual rebirth. I hadn’t even known I felt unworthy and afraid of love until I fell for my fearless gladiator. It was only when she seemed impervious to my flaws, uncaring of my dangers, that I realized I’d been expecting her to run away scared at the very least or hating me at the very worst.
She did none of those things.
Shooting her father, carrying the body of a man I’d knocked out cold into a basement then watching me interrogate him with a blowtorch and spoon, Elena hadn’t run scared once.
She’d barely even fucking blinked.
It occurred to me that if she was right about being born for me and the life I could give her then maybe I’d been born for him. Only my history could have prepared me to understand how it felt to be unloved by your family, to be ostracized by them and then to do it to yourself because you wondered how you could possibly be good enough if even your family didn’t believe in you?
Maybe every bad thing that had happened to us, maybe every single time we’d been made to feel like the villains of our own life story, we had been moving farther along the path to this.
To us.
Two broken and battered people made whole by love.
Not sweet, sugary, happily-ever-after cazzato.
No.
This love was all teeth and claws, fight and passion.
Light was easy to love.
This love was dark, it was night as black as my eyes and as stormy as hers, it was seeing the shadows in each other’s souls and being drawn into their abyss. It was knowing we would never understand each other, not fully, and it was loving that challenge as much as the mystery.
This was what happened when two villains fell in love.
And it was as beautiful as anything I’d ever known.
“Say yes.”
She blinked up at me, her mouth red as a flower I wanted to pluck with my lips.
“Scusi?”
“Say yes,” I told her, holding her so tightly I could feel the bones beneath her skin. “I’m going to ask you to trust me because I’m going to tell you a nightmare, but then I’m going to hand you a dream.”
“Dante…” she murmured, a wary question.
“Dimmi si,” I repeated in Italian this time.
“Okay,” she said simply, melting into my arms even further so I was almost carrying her, trusting me with her body as well as her mind. “Yes, Dante.”
“There is going to be a wedding between Mirabella Ianni and me,” I told her slowly, ready for her flinch. She tried to pull away, but I held her close and let her struggle fruitlessly. “Marco’s in the hospital fighting for his life. He could be the mole and even if he isn’t, there is someone out there who is and they’re helping the di Carlos come for our family, Lena. We have to do something. We won’t get support from the Italian Camorra without this wedding. It’s how things are done in the Old Country, I don’t have to tell you that.”
“You’re marrying Mirabella Ianni,” she said coldly, the ice queen back in such force she was almost too cold to touch. “After everything.”
“No.” The word was a bullet piercing her through the heart. “No, cuore mia, I would never marry Mirabella, but there will be a wedding and I need you to trust me even though it might seem like I’m betraying you.”
“Just tell me the plan,” she insisted.
“I can’t. Mi dispiace,” I murmured against her forehead. “I don’t exactly know yet how I’m going to pull it off, but I will. I promise you that.”
Her heavy sigh feathered against my neck. I felt her lips there when she finally spoke. “I thought about it a little while ago. If there could be love without trust. And I decided there could be. I loved Daniel, but I didn’t trust him. I haven’t trusted anyone in so long… not even my family.” She tipped her head back, her hair cascading over my arms around her back, her eyes as depthless as the sky above us. “But I trust you. So, yes, Dante. Whatever it is, I trust you and I believe you when you tell me you’re going to give me a dream one day. I haven’t had one of those in so long, I’m happy to wait a little longer for it.”
I’d never been a lucky man, but standing there with Elena in my arms in the only place that had ever really felt like home even with enemies all around us, I felt like a fucking God.
Eleven
Elena
“I’m taking you out.”
I was lying in the sun beside Tore’s lap pool on a chaise lounge that felt like a cloud. In my haste to catch Dante’s plane, I hadn’t packed a bathing suit, but when I mentioned that fact to Dante, he’d disappeared for a few hours and returned with armfuls of shopping bags.
“I got bored so the lady picked out some of it,” he admitted as I rifled through the Valentino, Versace, Intimissimi, Prada, and Dolce & Gabanna branded bags. “But I got you three swimsuits I heartily approve of.”