Chapter Twenty-Eight Guinevere #4
“He tried to keep her a secret, but I knew he was going soft. Traveling to Albania more than was necessary, suddenly questioning why we had to destroy the Romanos to take what should always have been mine.”
Mine, not ours.
A slip that revealed his dangerous narcissism.
“Why should it have been yours?” I demanded. “The Romano clan has held this territory for generations.”
“And for generations the di Conte family has supported them,” Tonio snarled.
“We used to be princes of Italy, and now we are reduced to common foot soldiers. I thought when Raffa refused to enter the family business, when my continued efforts to lead him to university and civility paid off, that we would finally have our opportunity. Aldo swore an oath to make Leo his heir.”
A muscle under his eye twitched manically as he looked into old, sour memories.
“He lied,” I surmised.
“He lied,” Tonio agreed. “In fact, he made fun of me one night when we were in Pisa to confer with the Pietras. The first day’s meeting had ended, and Aldo had too much grappa.
When I spoke of Leo joining us on the tour of the territory we took each year, he laughed.
” There was a pause riddled with the palpable electric energy of his rage.
“He told me Raffa would be his heir if he had to drag him back from that British isle kicking and screaming. He had a willing, capable man who wanted the throne, and he still refused to see beyond his own nepotism.”
“You were the one who killed him,” Dad said slowly as he put the pieces together. “You always blamed the family for what happened to him, but Ginevra told me Gaetano swore he never touched the capo, even though he was the one accused of murdering Aldo Romano. It was you, wasn’t it?”
Tonio flicked an invisible piece of lint off his thigh.
“It was an accident, really. Grappa always brings out my baser urges, and I could not stand to look a minute more on that smug Romano laughing at me. Luckily, it was fairly easy to lay the blame at the door of the Pietras, given the history of distrust between the two families over the centuries. The two most powerful Northern Mafia families at war? It was too salacious not to be believed.”
There was a flicker of shadow in the light pooling in from the open door to the hall. I tried not to pin my gaze obviously over Tonio’s shoulder, but I kept track in my periphery as the shadow detached from the wall and loomed just beyond the frame.
Someone had come.
My heart leaped into my throat, hope so bright behind my eyes it threatened to blind me.
Raffa.
But the man who slipped into the room with a silver handgun in his grip, trained on the back of Tonio’s head, was not the man I hoped to see.
Leo di Conte looked terrible.
Heavy bags drooped beneath his eyes, and his normally golden hair was covered in a fine layer of soot that stained his white dress shirt and trousers as well. His gaze flicked up to mine, a warning to stay quiet implicit in his gaze as he tried to angle himself behind his father.
Something in my expression must have given him away, because before he could shoot, Tonio was lurching out of his chair, grabbing for me where I stood beside the desk and wrapping his arms around me in a tight bear hug.
I’d been so focused on Leo, I didn’t have time to counter Tonio’s attack, and before I could think to move, I was caught in his grip, the cold kiss of a gun at my temple.
“Ah,” Tonio sighed sadly, breath moist against my cheek. “I see the explosion did not take you with it.”
Leo bared his teeth. “You fucking bastard. Gemma didn’t deserve that.”
Beside us, Dad lunged for me, but Tonio clicked his tongue and shuffled us away from him, grinding the gun into my head.
“Not so quick, Pietra. You only have one daughter left now. You wouldn’t want to lose her too.”
“Gemma was alive?” I whispered, looking at Leo. “All this time?”
Those devastated blue eyes flickered to mine, then back to his father.
“Yes,” he ground out. “It was how Tonio was keeping me in line. Gemma was the one who sent the man at the bell tower in Impruneta with her necklace. She was trying to get you to help her without putting you in danger. If either of us had tried to tell you what was going on, Tonio had the house he was keeping her in rigged to explode.”
People will die if I tell you, Philippe had sobbed before Raffa killed him.
Gemma.
Tonio had staged her death and kept her locked up for over a year to use her as a tool against his own son, to take down Raffa in his quest to become capo dei capi himself.
And now, because of him, both my beautiful sister and the love of my life were dead.
“He died with her?” I asked with the rest of the breath left in my body.
Leo nodded tersely. “When I arrived, they must have been in the basement with her. The car was outside, and the tripwire for the bombs was at the top of the stairs.”
I closed my eyes against the brutal wave of pain that wrapped me in its viselike hold, crushing me from the inside out, bones and sinew ground to dust, veins bursting open.
“I didn’t want to hurt him,” Leo said quietly, and when I opened my eyes to look at him, tears were rolling through the dirt on his cheeks. “But Tonio had me by the balls.”
Tonio’s chuckle filled my ear. “You and Raffa were never very good at chess.”
“So what now, vecchio?” Leo demanded. “Raffa’s dead, but here we are, and I do not intend to let you out of this house alive.”
“You’re a wanted man, Leo. All I have to do is call the soldati to us, and they’ll come running to end your life,” Tonio replied calmly.
“Even with you holding Raffa’s fiancée at gunpoint?” he countered.
Tonio was quiet for a moment. “Pietra, move to the side wall and stand still.”
I watched from the corner of my eye as Dad obeyed, his gaze fixed on mine. It was calculating, and I was reminded that he had been born a mafioso, not a financial adviser, and he might be able to see a way out of this better than me.
“Sit,” Tonio ordered seconds before shoving me into the desk chair.
“You have access to Romanos’ accounts through Lupo Nero and the outfit.
I want you to transfer funds to me. I know I do not have to tell you my banking information because you were stupid enough to go snooping where you do not belong. ”
“No,” I snapped.
Tonio’s response was to shoot at my dad.
The bullet embedded itself in the wall an inch from his head.
Dad didn’t even flinch, but I did.
“At least let Dad check on Martina?” I asked quietly. “Then I promise I’ll do what you want.”
After a brief hesitation, Tonio agreed, and Dad bent to check Martina’s pulse.
“It’s there but slow and weak,” he announced.
Fuck.
“Get to work,” Tonio urged me, sticking the gun against the swell of my skull.
Slowly, my fingers moved on the keys.
“Don’t think about it,” Tonio said a moment later, and I looked up to see that Leo had inched forward, probably to take a shot at his dad.
Tonio crouched behind my chair so only his head was visible, still too close to mine for a clean shot.
Leo gritted his teeth, but when I locked eyes with him, he shuttled his gaze toward the window on the wall to my right.
I followed it, maneuvering the cursor across the screen to scroll through records as I wasted time, and studied the vista outside.
The hill sloped up slightly before falling into the vineyard, and out among the greenery I caught a metallic glimmer.
The dead weight of my heart stuttered like a failing engine as I narrowed my eyes and looked closer through the leaves.
There.
Hair that shone like burnished copper in the sunshine.
Raffa.
As if sensing my gaze, he crept forward through the vines until he was just visible through the window.
If Tonio looked up and over, he would see him.
“So you got your best friend and your love killed,” I said to Leo, letting the echo of my pain suffuse my voice. “Your cowardice took my fiancé and my sister from me.”
“I’m sorry,” Leo said, and there was true agony and contrition in his voice, a wealth of it I could not even begin to process.
He had done so much wrong, all in a bid to save Gemma.
Could I blame him?
Wouldn’t I do the same thing for Raffa in a heartbeat?
Our conversation successfully distracted Tonio, who laughed cruelly. “Love makes idiots of everyone.”
My gaze clung to Raffa as he approached out the window. He was covered in soot like Leo, but his shirt was torn open along one side, bandages evident over his ribs. Something had torn through his eyebrow, blood crusted along his nose and cheek.
It was obvious he had been in the explosion Tonio had set, but somehow he’d escaped relatively unharmed.
I just had to hope the others—Gemma!—had too.
“For love, a fawn can become a huntress,” I told Tonio before I shoved the rolling desk chair back hard into his legs and dropped beneath the shelter of the desk.
A moment later, a violent crack pierced the air, followed by the shattering of glass and a heavy thwack. I spun around to witness Tonio slipping down the wall with a slack, open mouth, a bullet drilled through the center of his brow, his brain blasted across the red walls behind him.
Glass tinkled as more fell, and then the crunch of boots on the debris-strewn floor.
Raffa had climbed through the window, stalking toward us with his huge gun trained on Tonio.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
I watched as he drilled three more rounds into Tonio’s already-dead body, the corpse jumping from the impact.
Blood sprayed my front from my close proximity.
If Raffa had miscalculated the shot by even two inches, I would have been dead instead of his uncle.
But then again, we both could have died today, and the thought of that, of the life-ending anguish I’d felt believing he was dead, rocked through me like an earthquake.
“Raffa,” I said, standing tall to face him.