My Dark Ever After (My Dark Mafia Romance #2)

Chapter One Guinevere

Chapter One

Guinevere

Wind whistled across the icy peaks of the Huron River and cut through the streets of Ann Arbor, buffeting me like a secondary gravitational force as I fought through the early snowfall across the University of Michigan campus.

Bundled in layers of cashmere, swaddled in a thick scarf pulled up over my nose, with a beanie protecting my ears and forehead, I had only a thin swatch of skin exposed to the stinging bite of the brutally cold October day, but I was still frozen.

If I was being honest, I had been since I got off the plane from Italy two months ago.

It was as if all the warmth in my blood had been left behind in that godforsaken country. My warmth, my happiness, and half my heart.

My boots crunched through the freshly fallen snow as I walked from my yoga class back to work in the State Street District fifteen minutes away.

Only locals and the slightly insane voluntarily walked outside in weather like this, but I was desperate for anything to distract me from my current state of affairs.

I was back home in Michigan, working for a father who’d barely spoken to me since I’d broken his trust by going to Italy despite the vow I’d made never to set foot in his mother country.

My mother, as always, had taken his side, so although I had to work with him and saw her at our mandatory Sunday family dinners, I’d never felt so distant from my family.

To make matters worse, the few friends I’d made at college seemed so far away from me after my summer abroad.

I found myself uncharacteristically furious at them for their petty complaints.

My sister dropped dead at twenty-six, I wanted to scream at them.

The man I fell in love with is a stone-cold killer, I wanted to divulge.

How can you think this is the be-all and end-all in safe, quaint Ann Arbor? I wanted to demand.

Instead, I stayed quiet while they talked about their lives, retreating deep inside myself to a place I wasn’t sure I liked. A place filled with seething shadows that clutched at me, hooking beneath the flesh like talons and threatening to drag me even deeper into my own darkness.

I was sick of the mundane. Routine and schedule and predictability.

It made me feel like I was losing my sanity.

When I’d returned home, my father had given me the job he’d threatened to take away for staying in Italy against his wishes, saying that it would ground me, and all it had done was drop the bottom out from beneath my feet so I felt like I was in a free fall.

I’d tasted freedom and passion, the sucking black hole of despair, and the shivering bite of terror, alongside the heady mead of lust and a veritable bacchanalia of sin.

How could I go back to water, having become drunk on wine?

Before Raffa, I’d always felt that pull, a low-grade weight in my belly that hungered for sin, for the rough edge of sex, for the bright pain of anger followed by the blood-warming satisfaction of revenge.

I’d read books like The Count of Monte Cristo, watched action movies filled with violence, and read erotica on a private web browser in the dark of night, alone in bed with my hand between my legs.

It had been enough.

Or at least, I hadn’t known then what a shallow form of satisfaction it was.

And now I did.

All the things I had accused Raffa of being—a cold, merciless killer, a skilled liar, a vengeful villain—they were the very things I’d gravitated toward in literature and film and fantasy my entire life.

The hypocrisy kept me up at night, even though I told myself fiction and reality were two totally different mediums.

Killing a man for trying to hurt me was not romantic.

Raffa had taken Galasso’s life without a qualm. And even though Galasso was a predator, he was still something to someone.

He should have been turned over to the proper authorities, right?

But the authorities never would have found the man who’d threatened me and, most likely, countless other women in his past.

I growled under my breath as I reached the revolving doors of the Beaumont Building, which housed my father’s firm, stomping my feet free of snow before pushing into the warmth of the marble foyer.

I was distracted from my thoughts by the sight of a man sitting in the waiting area before the security turnstiles.

There was nothing remarkable about him, and normally I might not have noticed him at all.

But discovering your lover is a mafioso after weeks of thinking he’s Prince Charming opens up an awareness in a person that is hard to quell.

Something almost like paranoia.

And I knew I’d seen that man before, not just earlier that day, loitering outside the coffee shop beside our offices, but also the day before, jogging through the park on a parallel route to my own.

I knew he was the same man because he had dark hair buzzed nearly to the scalp, with an oval patch of silver just above his right ear.

It wasn’t exactly distinctive, but again, I’d taken pains to be more observant since the summer, and I knew this was my third time in two days crossing paths with him.

In a small city like Ann Arbor, it wasn’t unusual to run into people you knew—it happened almost daily—but something about this suited man with his stern countenance tripped an inner alarm.

He looked, almost, like Carmine, Raffa’s associate back in Florence. Suave, suited, and inexplicably dangerous despite the veneer of civility.

Without thinking it through, I veered toward him.

He glanced up with a surprised blink when I stopped just before the seat where he was scrolling through his phone. A quick peek showed he was looking at food reels on social media, and I wondered if I was being unduly suspicious.

“Hello, I think I saw you here this morning. Is there something I can help you with?” I asked sweetly, but one hand was curled inside the mouth of my purse, around the can of pepper spray I’d started carrying.

He blinked again, his face utterly expressionless in a way that made me shiver. And then, suddenly, he smiled. A bright, wide grin that could have been handsome if I’d found anyone attractive since I’d met Raffaele Romano.

“Are you Ms. Stone?” he asked, standing and swiftly buttoning up his blazer in a move that was utterly seamless and reminded me, as most things seemed to, of Raffa. He offered a square-fingered hand. “Your father mentioned you this morning, actually.”

“My father did,” I echoed, taking his hand reluctantly. Noting the calloused ridges not typical of a wealthy man.

“In our introductory client meeting,” he elaborated in a flat American accent. “My name is Tom Kirkpatrick. I just moved here from Washington, and your firm comes highly recommended.”

My spine softened slightly at the information.

A prospective client.

It would explain why he was around the building. And really, it wasn’t unusual for people to run through the many parks in the city. It was one of the appealing aspects of living here.

I let out a long sigh and smiled back at him. “Well, why don’t we go up together and get to know each other a bit. If you decide to do business with us, we will be working together closely.”

“I hope so,” he said a little too baldly, then ducked his head with a wince as if he was embarrassed by his enthusiasm.

Last year, I might have blushed and tried to flirt with the handsome older man. It would have flattered me to know he was interested, that he thought I was pretty.

Now, his attention moved through me like a cold draft, emphasizing the emptiness within me.

It lingered as we stepped into the elevator, his voice a dull drone in my ears.

It was late, and the glass walls of our twentieth-floor office were black reflective mirrors highlighting the fact that I was seemingly alone. Everyone had long since gone home for dinner, to their families or friends.

I didn’t really have either at the moment, so I stayed.

Burying myself in work because even when everything else went to hell in a handbasket, I was good at my job.

The best, second only to my dad.

He’d trained me for this since I was a girl.

While most girls doodled in coloring books and played with dolls, John Stone gave me puzzles and taught me to play chess.

When I was older, we spent weekend mornings racing to finish the New York Times sudoku puzzles and playing math games over pizza at the dinner table.

Gemma and Mom had left us to it happily, focusing on their shared love of food, wine, and fashion. It wasn’t that Gemma wasn’t smart enough to participate, but her skills lay in languages and sensory disciplines.

If sometimes I watched Mom and Gemma cooking and laughing in the kitchen and wanted to join them, I never acted on the impulse.

I gritted my teeth as the pencil in my hand broke, a splinter of wood lodging in my forefinger. A bead of blood pooled, and I brought it to my mouth to suck it clean.

“What are you still doing here?”

I snapped my head up to see Dad standing in the doorway to the conference room.

Even though it was long after hours, his suit was still totally immaculate, cuffs buttoned, tie perfectly flat against his chest and knotted close to his throat.

You never would have known he had old, faded tattoos beneath the silky fabric, only a handful of symbols and Latin words along the backs of his shoulders and the base of his throat.

Even at home, he never went shirtless, always covering the marks as if they were scars instead of art.

John Stone gave buttoned up new meaning.

But God, I loved him.

He’d been my hero when I was growing up.