Chapter Four Guinevere
Chapter Four
Guinevere
“Absolutely not,” I declared, yanking my hand out from between Raffa’s. “I’m not just going back to Italy with you.”
“You are not safe here,” he reminded me, his entire body taut and poised like that of a predator about to pounce. “How can I keep you safe when you live across the world from me?”
“We broke up!” I shouted. “Exactly so I would not have to be involved in this kind of mess. I’m not going back to Tuscany with you to become ensnared in it further.
I think it’s fair to say you can’t keep me safe even when I’m in your bed, given an intruder almost blew my head off on my last night spent in your home. ”
Oh, he flinched. Like I’d slapped him full across the face. No, like I’d punched him, closed fist, all my weight behind it. The skin of his cheeks flushed, surprisingly visible in the dark interior of the car, as if I really had hit him.
I watched as his throat worked around a hard swallow and his eyes clenched closed for a single second before he fixed them on me again.
When he spoke, it was in the voice of a capo, a made man of the Italian Camorra.
“You will come home with me until I put down the dogs who stalk us both, Guinevere. In this, I do not care about your opinion. You can rage. You can call me the devil. You can think this means every awful thing you have imagined about me since you learned I am in la mafia is true. I do not care. Your safety comes before anything.”
“Even if it means I despise you?” I seethed.
“Even then,” he agreed with a solemn head tilt.
“Be reasonable,” I tried to suggest calmly, though I couldn’t believe his audacity. “I have a life here. A job. A family. And both of those are entangled. I can’t just disappear without people worrying about me.”
He shrugged one shoulder. “So call them. Make something up.”
“It’s not that simple, Raffaele,” I snapped. “My father still won’t talk to me properly after I defied him and went to Italy the first time. You’re asking me to irrevocably damage my relationship with my father.”
One slow blink of those annoyingly beautiful lashes. “Better a damaged relationship than mourning his second daughter, no?”
“I’m not going to Italy with you,” I repeated firmly. “Please, take me back to my apartment so I can get cleaned up.”
“And then what?” he demanded, shifting closer, teeth glinting in the orange light spilling in from outside. “You can protect yourself from all the things that go bump in the night? You are a fawn, not a huntress. They will eat you alive.”
“You think I came home after almost being shot in the head and thought, meh, I’m fine being defenseless?” I scoffed, but my belly tossed and churned. I felt sick with fear and anger and the impossibility of going to Italy and remaining in Michigan. “I’ve been taking MMA classes twice a week.”
Something like a smile seized Raffa’s mouth before he bit it off. “You think two months of MMA is going to stack your five foot nothing, a hundred ten pounds soaking wet against a trained mafioso?”
A noise of frustration bubbled up my throat. “I think I could take you by surprise.”
“Oh?” The word was a curl of smoke through the space between us, heady enough to drug me. “I would like to see you try.”
Lust pulsed between us in time with our heartbeats, tangible enough to feel, to touch.
I sat on my fingertips to keep myself from reaching out.
With a suddenness that made me gasp, Raffa lashed out with one hand, palming my entire throat, fingers folding around my pulse point with just enough pressure to make me feel the drag of breath through my airway.
There was a knife in his other hand, sparking in the passing streetlights like stop-motion film as he lifted it from somewhere hidden to press it featherlight against my cheek.
“You think because I am a made man that I have no rules or morals, but you are wrong. I am Rex Infernus, and in the world that I rule, I am the one who makes the rules as I see fit. No one acts against me, little fawn, not without serious consequences.” The knifepoint skimmed the ridge of my cheekbone and moved down to the corner of my mouth, where he pushed the flat of the blade into the center of my lower lip as if testing its plushness.
“You have unmasked me, so there is no point in pretending any longer that I am not the kind of man who would make any man suffer magnificently for any second of pain they gave you. I would skin them with this knife. Butcher their organs into mash. And keep them alive until the very last moment so they could feel every second of agony.”
I was breathing too hard. The sound of air rushing through my lungs was like that of the ocean churning violently through rock. It should have been fear coursing through me, or anger.
But it wasn’t.
Arousal moved hot and slow through my veins, volcanic. If he’d pressed his tongue to my lips beside the skin-warmed edge of that blade, I honestly might have erupted.
“I am who I am to keep those I care about safe.” He was whispering now, a husky drawl that steamed up the knife between us. “You are one of those people, whether you like it or not. And I will keep you safe, even if it is from yourself.”
“I’m not going with you,” I said, but the words were threadbare, my conviction buried under drifts of lava at my molten core.
The edge of his mouth curled into a cruel little smile as he dropped the hand from my throat and moved the hand holding the knife into my hair.
He kept the blade away from the strands as he threaded them between his fingers to tug my head back so he could duck down to nose at the thrumming pulse point in my neck.
“I would rather have you alive and hating me than dead. So hate me if you will, Guinevere, but you are going back to Italy with me, and there is nothing you can do about it.”
I yelled at him.
Which was strange because I don’t think I’d ever yelled at anyone before in my life.
But when you realize that you’ve fallen in love with a man who seems like an angel only to discover he is the absolute devil, it’s only fair to lose your mind a little.
The anger, though, didn’t get through to him.
It was only when I exhausted myself, the last of the adrenaline drained from my shocky, weak limbs so that sorrow and helplessness could seep through me in their wake, that Raffa seemed to care.
Men can never withstand a woman’s tears, my sister Gemma had told me one night after she returned home tearstained but euphoric from a date. Her college boyfriend at the time hadn’t wanted to take her to her silly high school prom, but the moment she’d started to cry, he’d capitulated.
It was shocking to see Raffa’s steely resolve waver as he watched me dash a hot tear from my cheek as I twisted toward the window to look at anything other than him.
“I have to take you,” he said quietly. “How could I live with myself if you died because of me?”
It was a fair question, but it did nothing to mitigate the fact that abandoning my life in Ann Arbor was reckless and foolish and potentially life ruining. What would I have to return to when all was said and done? An estranged family and no career.
I mentioned that to Raffa, but he merely gave me one of those minuscule shrugs and said, “You are very smart, with two degrees and work experience. You might not work for your father again, but you will be able to find other employment. If not, I will help you.”
I shuddered to think what Raffa’s offer of “help” might entail.
“So once again I’ll be in Italy without any of my things,” I muttered, thinking of the dishes I’d left in the sink that morning, the half-read copy of Virgil’s The Aeneid on my bedside table, my medications.
At last, this seemed to give him pause. “Will that be a problem? We were able to get your medication just fine in Firenze last time.”
“I’m on a new protocol,” I admitted, my lids scraping over my dry eyes as I blinked. “It’s an injection to lower the oxalate in my blood.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Raffa pull out his phone. His fingers flew as he researched, asking me for the name of the drug.
A sigh hissed though his clenched teeth before he leaned forward to press a button and say, “Tony, change of plans. Take us to 1211 Burns Avenue.”
“How do you know my address?” I asked and then realized, around the same time that Raffa slanted me a look, that the answer was obvious.
Raffa was rich and powerful enough to know anything he wanted about me.
“We can grab some of your things,” he allowed, “but we must be quick.”
I sucked my bottom lip between my teeth to keep from thanking him and nodded tersely.
Happily, it only took us ten minutes to get to my apartment building, but I had to wait as Raffa and his two goons secured the perimeter of the building before he let me out of the car.
He tried to help me through the snow because I’d lost my shoes in the chase at the Beaumont, but I’d literally rather have walked through ice than accept his hand right now.
Still, he walked close behind me, and I caught the way he had his hand raised just in case I slipped.
The apartment building was dark and quiet at this time of night, so no one interrupted us as we took the stairs to the sixth floor. There was an elevator, but I decided after one quick glance at it that I was not ready to get inside one of those again.
Raffa let me unlock the door to my apartment before pressing me gently by the belly to the wall so he could enter alone, gun raised as he checked out the space. When he came back into sight, there was a crooked grin on his face and a photo pinched in one hand.