Was trust the same thing as love?
Because I loved him.
Lord knew I loved this man with the olive-black eyes and golden heart better than I’d loved anything else in my life.
But trust? I hadn’t trusted anyone new in so long I wondered if I even had the capacity for it anymore.
I sucked in a deep breath through my teeth and nodded slowly. “I trust you. Io sono con te.”
I am with you, I said, echoing the words he’d spoken to me during that horrific car chase on Staten Island. And I was. For better or worse, I was with Dante Salvatore, mafioso and wanted fugitive.
Now, I just had to discover what that made me.
“Bene.” His face broke into that broad, magnificent grin that stole the breath from my lungs.
Satisfied, he got back into his seat, attached his seat belt, and turned to speak in low Italian with Frankie.
I tuned them out, staring down at my thighs where the strap of the holster was barely discernable through the fabric. The cold metal of the gun was warming slightly against my flesh. It should have made me nervous to have a concealed weapon on my person. It was illegal in the States and I’d never in my life had a weapon stronger than pepper spray on my person.
But the weight of it felt good.
I was heading into the lion’s den and I needed all the weapons I could get. Not just to defend me, but to defend Dante, even to defend Frankie and the rest of the ragtag team of criminals in Dante’s crew who had become something like family to me over the past few months.
Dante’s love had razed me to the very ground of my soul, demolishing all my preconceived notions of right and wrong, even of my own identity and desires. I was going to step off this plane a new woman and for the first time in my life, I was excited by my lack of foresight and structure.
So, when the plane landed smoothly a private runaway outside of Naples, I took Dante’s offered hand with a wide smile that made him blink.
I was still smiling when the attendant opened the door and I stepped into the blinding sun of a mid-morning winter’s day in my hometown. It was that very same sun that blinded me for just a moment.
In that moment, I heard a series of mechanic clicks like locks sliding into place.
I frowned as I blinked away the sunspots, but Dante was already pulled me hard back into his chest then slightly behind his body.
Finally, I understood why.
The clicks weren’t a series of locks turning.
But a series of guns loading.
“Ciao, Don Salvatore!” Someone called warmly in Italian, a man who stepped out from the congregation of armed soldati to stalk toward the stairs leading up to the plane.
Dante didn’t move a muscle as the short, portly man with diamonds in both ears lumbered up the stairs and came to a stop before us. He had small dark eyes, wet black like an oil slick and just a greasy. With a jovial grin, he lifted a massive handgun in his left hand and pressed it as high as he could reach on Dante, right on the soft underside of his chin.
“Benvenuto a Napoli.”
Welcome home.
Three
Dante
Rocco Abruzzi was a typical Made Men. In it for the cash, the girls, and the power. He had two ex-wives and a current one, each younger than the last, as well as two mistresses he kept housed on opposite sides of town. One was classy, the other trashy, a staple of Piazza Garibaldi where the seedy side of the city thrived. He’d grown up in deep poverty the way many Camorra soldati did, but the reason he thrived and rose in the ranks when so many didn’t was because Rocco had a mean streak a mile wide. He loved to hit his wives, see out his own hits even though Dons never carried out their own kill orders as a rule, and he was known as ‘Rocky Rocco’ by his street thugs because he’d been known to beat a man just for looking at him wrong.
He was dangerous, not because he was clever, but because he was not.
He was bad tempered and quick to react as a startled rattlesnake. He was feared, not revered, but in Naples, that was enough to secure you a fuck ton of power.
When Tore and I left for New York, we’d promoted ‘Bon Bon’ Flavio Marconi as capo dei capi.
Two months later, Bon Bon was at the bottom of the Bay of Naples and Rocco Abruzzi, a capo known for his cruelty and profitable gambling operation, was sudden king of mafia kings.
This was not good for me.
Rocco never liked Tore. He thought he was soft because he tried to protect the Lombardi women from Seamus’s gambling debts and resulting punishments.
Rocco hated me.
I was younger, fitter, and next in line for the underworld throne. Once, years ago, Rocco had put a cigar out on my hand during a poker game. I’d been twenty-something, young and still wet behind the ears after joining Tore’s operation.
I hadn’t flinched and I hadn’t snitched.
Instead, I beat Rocco at his poker game and left with a circular burn mark in the meat of my thumb to remind me of another debt he would pay one day.
I still intended to extract my retribution, but my entire plan hinged on getting Don Abruzzi’s good favor.
So when he pressed a gun to my forehead and smiled like a madman up into my face, I didn’t snap his neck for threatening me and frightening Elena the way I wanted to. Instead, I let my hands fall from Elena’s tense form and moved forward slowly, but deliberately to kiss Rocco on one flaccid cheek and then the other.
“Ciao, fratello mio,” I murmured to the older man as I respectfully greeted him. “It is a pleasure to be back on Italian soil. What a warm greeting you’ve arranged for us.”
Rocco’s eyes narrowed so they nearly disappeared under his sagging brow. “You mocking me, Salvatore?”
I blinked innocently. “I’m many things, Don Abruzzi, but an idiot has not been one of them for a number of years.”
He studied me for a long moment then looked over my shoulder at Elena, his features going slack at the sight of her beauty.
“Who do we have here, huh? A present for your host?” he dared to ask.
I forced a deep breath through my nose, my hands shaking with the urge to throttle his fleshy neck. “No.”
“Not gonna introduce me?” he demanded, his look souring as his gaze swept back to me. “I got a right to know who’s in my territory.”
There wasn’t time for deliberation. I cursed myself for not talking about it with her on the plane, but I hadn’t wanted to overwhelm Elena when the last forty-eight hours of her life had consisted of being abducted, shooting her father, and running away with a fugitive.
This was why love could make a man weak.
I had put her comfort before her safety and now I was paying a price.
“My wife,” Frankie asserted from behind me.
Shocked, but schooled enough to hide it, I turned in time to see him sling an arm around Elena’s waist and press a kiss to the very hickey I’d put on her neck only minutes before. Elena’s eyes were pinned to mine, but she let Frankie touch her.
Smart girl.
One slip-up and we’d be dead on the hot asphalt beneath the plane.
“Thought you married a Sicilian girl,” Rocco muttered skeptically, staring hard at Elena’s dark red hair. “The girl barely looks Italian.”
“Te assicuro che sono Italian,” Elena promised in fluid Italian, her voice distinctly Neapolitan. “Frankie got rid of the old bitch and traded up for me.”