Chapter Three Guinevere
Chapter Three
Guinevere
The car was silent but for the shush shush of snow under the wheels and the faint strain of classical music someone had playing in the front seat of the massive black SUV Raffa had bundled me into immediately after catching me up in his arms.
I was still there, in his arms, even though I knew I would have to leave the false serenity of that embrace before long.
There were too many questions to ask and issues to be solved for me to pretend that all was well between us.
But for now, I was desperate for some peace, however short lived. So I’d been silent and pliable as he’d handed me water to swirl the taste of blood out of my mouth, then as he’d carefully inspected the bullet graze on my temple and declared it had stopped bleeding.
The scent of Raffa—oak and moss and burning firewood—suffused my senses as I curled into his strong chest, one hand wrapped in the fine silk weave of his suit jacket, smearing it with blood.
He was warm and solid, a living shield I knew, even after our acrimonious split, would shelter me from anything.
Though that just reminded me that he might have been the reason I was in danger in the first place.
“Why did they come after me?” I asked, my voice cutting up my sore throat so badly that I winced. “Was it because of you?”
It was Raffa’s turn to wince. It was so faint I only noticed the gesture because I was in his arms. “I am not sure, though I would have to suppose that yes, they came for you to get to me. Things have . . . escalated back home.”
“Because they were undermining you?” I surmised, staring out the window at the icy landscape, unseasonably early in the year, and feeling the echo of that cold deep in my bones.
“Because they attempted to hurt you,” he growled, the words rumbling through his chest and into me.
Reflexively, his hands tightened around me almost to the point of pain.
When I whimpered softly, he relaxed, smoothing a big palm down my spine.
It was unconsciously done, and there was something beautiful about his instinct to soothe me.
Something I wanted to lean into even though everything was so fucked up.
“So more violence and death as an answer to violence and death,” I concluded, pulling away slightly to look into his face.
God, it was a good face.
The nicest one I’d ever laid eyes on.
If it was possible, he’d grown more handsome in the last two months.
The dark stubble that usually only appeared at the end of a long day was thicker now, almost long enough to be called a beard.
It emphasized the steep cut of his cheekbones and the hollows beneath and highlighted the unique pale maple of his irises.
His mouth looked soft amid the bristles, a smooth and pale pink I wanted to deepen into red with lascivious kisses.
I dreamed of kissing him every single night. Literally. My sleeping hours were filled with erotic dreams I couldn’t escape from. I woke up every morning hot and bothered and angry with myself for being so turned on by the memory of a man who had deceived me.
Now that mouth and the man attached to it were so close we were breathing the same breath.
I could count the striations in those cool metallic eyes and the lashes fanning out thick and dark around them.
I could press a kiss to the scar on the edge of his chin and ignore the fact that it was probably from some Mafia misdeed.
In this moment, so close to me, he was just a man, and I was just a woman. Nothing else existed if I focused on the beat of his heart beneath my palm and the murmur of mine rushing in my ears.
I realized then that love didn’t die. You could shoot it in the face the way Raffa had shot the man in the closet, but it didn’t drop dead. No, love bled out like a nonfatal wound, sluggish and painful, over time, even when you wanted it to stop stone cold.
Two months wasn’t enough to bleed out the love I had for this man.
Two years, two decades—I wondered if any length of time would drain his existence from mine.
He was staring at me as intently as I was him, and he seemed to find something in my gaze that had that full mouth curling.
“You are not as opposed to violence as you wish to be, I think,” he noted. “When I broke that man’s finger for insulting you, I saw the flush in your cheeks. The way your pupils blew to black. You looked . . . hungry, Guinevere. Not disgusted.”
My heart knocked against my breastbone as if desperate to allow Raffa inside.
“No,” I said, but it lacked conviction.
I had lain awake too many nights struggling with that truth to discount his words now.
“Si,” he argued, tipping his head so that he could ghost his mouth along my cheekbone. “I think there is some bloodlust in you. I think I would not feel this way about you if there was not.”
“Which way?” I dared to ask, holding still so I wouldn’t give in to the urge to bare my throat to him.
“You fought back against those men. Oh, you think I did not notice the scratches and teeth marks? You may be a little fawn, but perhaps under the right conditions you can be feral.”
“I was fighting for my life,” I countered.
“Si, and you would fight for others this way too. I know you, Vera.”
His words popped the bubble around us like a knifepoint. I wrenched myself out of his arms with a wince and took my own seat next to him, turning my face to the window.
“Well, I don’t know you,” I rebutted softly.
He had nothing to say to that.
Or maybe he did, but I was shaking slightly as the shock wore off, and my head was aching as if the bullet that had grazed me was lodged deep inside my brain, and I knew he wouldn’t press if I was unwell.
I touched my hot forehead to the cold glass. “Did you know these men?”
“I did not recognize them, no. I took their phones, though, and if they are not burners, we should be able to get something from them.”
“But they’re probably burners.”
A small hesitation. “Yes.”
I sighed, my breath fogging the glass. “I’m not safe, even an ocean away from you.”
“It would seem that way,” he admitted. “I am sorry, Guinevere. Even though it is not a good enough excuse, this is the reason I did not tell you the truth about who I am. This is why, though I could no longer imagine my life without you, I did not ask you to stay. Your safety is more important than my happiness.”
“Yeah, well, honesty is more important to me than my happiness or my safety,” I said, and found it was true. “I am a grown woman, capable of making my own informed choices.”
“Capisco,” he said. I understand. “But you have to understand what it does to a man to know that his own actions could put someone he loves at risk.”
I thought about my father and wondered if he had done something horrible in Italy, something that had echoed across years and continents to place Mom or me in danger. It was the only reason he would keep something from me like this.
If it was a matter of my safety.
If he felt guilty because he was the one who had put a bull’s-eye on my back if I ever went back to his motherland.
“My father has been keeping secrets from me his whole life about why he left Italy and never wanted me to visit. Then, I take a chance on something for myself, to find out who I truly am in a new setting entirely of my own choosing, and I find this man. He’s kind and thoughtful and gorgeous, and most of all, he makes me feel seen.
Like everything I am and everything I’m still discovering about myself is precious and wonderful. ”
I glanced up at him, and our gazes clicked like magnets aligning. Neither of us could have looked away if we’d tried.
“And then I discover that everything I thought I knew about him is a lie. It’s not just about the love I had for him. It’s the way that deceit taints the love I’d started to feel for myself and this new version I’d been working on that whole time I was falling in love with him.”
“The man you fell in love with is not the lie,” he insisted, the words a sibilant hiss.
“How can you not see that it is everything else that is the lie? The man I am with you is the truest me in every sense. The man I wish I could be if circumstances were different. The man I am inside the heart I gave to you.”
“I gave it back,” I reminded him coldly, because every atom of me was yearning to hold him and kiss him and love him even though he was more monster than man, more stranger than lover, really.
There was so much I didn’t know and couldn’t understand.
“I don’t want to talk about us. I want to know why they came after me when we broke up months ago and I live in a different country.”
Raffa sighed, a furious rush of air that ruffled my blood-stiff hair. “I am sorry they were able to get to you at all.”
“Wait,” I said, fighting through the myriad of emotions and the probable concussion making my thoughts blurry to realize something important. “How are you here? How could you have possibly known I was in trouble?”
Something shifted in those light-brown eyes like bodies stirring in a shallow grave beneath the earth.
“You had me watched?” I asked, more breath than voice.
A tic of muscle in his square jaw was my only answer.
“Jesus, Raffa. Are you serious?”
“Be happy that I am, or else you would have ended up dead or worse at the hands of those bastardi.”
“Be happy? That you were essentially stalking me?” I asked incredulously.
But deep inside that locked box at the center of my being where light couldn’t reach, something thrilled at the thought.
“Si,” he said curtly. “I had you watched. You think it is because I did not respect your decision to leave me? Cazzate. I had you followed because there was no other way to keep myself away from you. How could I live without knowing if you were all right? How could I breathe?”
The silence between us bloomed like a bruise, painful right through to the bone.
“Did you know something like this might happen?” I asked, the starch gone out of my tone because how could I yell at a man who said things like “How could I breathe” about not knowing if I was safe?
“No, truly. If I had thought they would come for you, Renzo or Carmine would have been here to oversee things himself. One of my top soldati.”
“If it wasn’t one of your men, who was it?”
“I had the capo of the New York Camorra send someone,” he admitted. “He is a good man and did not hesitate. In fact, he and his wife offered to shelter you in New York if anything should happen.”
“How did you know to come?” I pressed, because Raffa was good at providing information adjacent to what I really wanted to hear.
“His man noticed someone tailing you two days ago. He tried to track them down but lost them somewhere on campus.”
“And so you came?” I said, a little stupidly, staring over his shoulder into the dark and neon blur of the passing nightscape. “Just like that.”
“Guinevere,” he said, all exasperation and heat, his fingers gently pinching my chin so I was forced to meet his gaze. “I would have been on the next plane out if you so much as broke your little toe.”
“Feeling guilty, eh?”
A subvocal growl purred at the base of his throat, and his eyes looked so dark then, devoid of light as we passed under a bridge. “I would have taken any excuse to see you. It was the hardest thing I have ever had to do, keeping myself in Italy and away from you. Do you not understand that?”
“No, I guess I don’t,” I murmured, prying my face away from him.
It was so easy to say the words, those sweet Italianate phrases of love and affection that seemed to roll off his tongue with uncharacteristic ease.
It was much harder to illustrate love and trust in action, and Raffa had proven he didn’t trust me, and therefore, I honestly felt, he could not love me.
At least not like I had loved him—did love him.
A sharp exhalation ruffled the side of my hair. He took my limp hand in his, rubbing a thumb along my bloodstained skin as if it didn’t bother him.
“If you do not want to believe that I love you, then at least believe this: I would do anything to keep you safe. And yes, that means I would happily take a red-eye to America. Yes, I would rip a man apart with my bare hands for so much as leering at you. Yes, I would raze this whole city to the ground if it turned against you. No one is safe from me but you,” he vowed darkly, eyes deep enough to swallow the world.
“If you believe anything of me, believe that.”
Looking at him in the dim interior of the car, shadows cutting his handsome face into something stark and terrifying like a death mask, I could believe it.
He had shown how violently he felt about me before—the rude driver, Galasso, the intruder.
It was a ferocity that I inspired in him that was never aimed my way. As if I was his dark muse.
I shivered, but it wasn’t from the cold.
It was from the feeling it gave me—like a key fitting into the lock of the darkness at the heart of me and slowly clicking open.
I opened my mouth to say something—Thank you, maybe, or I hate you for making me feel this way, like violence is a love letter—but the partition in front of us whirred as it lowered, distracting me.
“The plane is ready for takeoff, boss,” a man said from the front seat. “We should be there in twenty.”
“Plane?” I asked, blinking owlishly. It suddenly occurred to me to question, “Where are you taking me, Raffa?”
His hand tightened around mine, his calluses catching on the curves of my hand, fingers metal bands around my own. When I looked up into his eyes, they were the color of the inside of a flame, a pale yellow so bright they burned.
“Home,” he declared. “I am taking you home.”