She glared at me with those stormy eyes, shifting and swirling like grey clouds into angry formations. “Prove it.”
“I won’t have you goad me into ruining your reputation,” I barked, finally losing my cool.
There was too much.
Marco, Bambi, the di Carlos.
Rocco, Mirabella Ianni, the entire fucking Camorra.
I lost it.
“Fuck my sterling reputation,” she snapped, the flames of my rage catching on her edges and igniting her entire body. “I worked so hard for that and it got me nowhere. Unhappy and alone. I don’t care what anyone thinks any more. No one but you and the family we love.”
“What about the law? You want law enforcement agencies around the world to know you’re an associate of one of the most notorious mafiosos in America?” I demanded, plucking a lemon from the tree and fisting it tight in my palm. The fruit exploded, pulp running down my fingers. “There goes your legal career.”
“Mafiosos have lawyers,” she retorted mulishly, crossing her arms and bracing her feet like a soldier about to do battle.
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.