Chapter Five Raffa
Chapter Five
Raffa
Seven weeks. Five days. Twenty hours.
The excruciating length of time I had lived through without seeing Guinevere.
As much as I had wanted to refuse to let her go back to America, and then as much as I had wanted to fly to her side to convince her to return every day after she had gone, I had managed to restrain myself.
At first, it was a simple matter of respecting her decision when I was made to acknowledge I had not respected her enough before to divulge my truths. If she did not want me, the rejected and aching part of my mind declared feebly, then I would not force myself upon her.
Especially when doing so could be dangerous.
And there came the rub.
A man had entered my home, somehow slipping past security, in order to come after not just me but also my woman.
That was unacceptable.
It did not matter that the would-be assassin’s brains had been blown out all over my walk-in closet. The threat had not passed.
Even if I wanted to bring Guinevere back—bring her home—how could I do so knowing I would be putting her life in danger again?
Therefore, there was only one course of action to be had.
Find the people who were after me and mine and end them in no uncertain terms.
Not just their leaders but also their foot soldiers and informants, their women and their fucking children. I wanted to eviscerate them all for daring to go after the one woman who had ever touched my soul.
For her, I would burn down all of Firenze.
I set the Sala brothers and Ludo on the matter exclusively, because if anyone could root out the enemy, it was Renzo, Carmine, and the best hacker this side of the Mediterranean Sea.
We interrogated everyone in our own clan with access to and knowledge of the palazzo who could have passed information along or helped the intruder inside.
Our search yielded nothing.
My men and women were loyal because I did not take them on without extensive trials and experience. I had not doubted them, not really, but it did not explain how someone could have entered the palazzo so effortlessly.
Unless we had another mole like that fucker Bruno who had tried to assassinate me in Rome, just days before I’d met Guinevere on that lonely stretch of Tuscan roadway.
The only thing we knew was that this San Marco character seemed to be puppeteering everything.
The assassin had been wearing a traditional Venetian mask, Bruno had admitted he had been introduced to the Pietras by this man, and when we looked into the dead assassin’s identity, the man was revealed as Iacopone Basti, a supposed glassblower out of Venice.
It didn’t make sense.
Neither I nor my father had history with Venetians, especially because he had overseen the Mafia outfit out of the Venetian port for decades.
Our local capos there, under the supervision of Donatella Verdi, had been happy with the status quo when Carmine and Renzo went to do the rounds.
In fact, Donatella was unwaveringly loyal to us because we had backed her play for capo over her idiot brother years ago when her father passed.
The idiot brother was not the problem either.
Donatella had ended his life with his own gun.
It had to be someone closer to home, but who I could not say, no matter how I searched.
The Grecos had taken over the Albanian operations in Livorno, and they had clearly expressed interest in expanding their power base, but our successful sting operation using the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia (DIA) and its overzealous deputy director, Sansone Pucci, had razed their operation to ash.
While Pucci was too morally high-minded to be corrupted, the arrests had earned him national acclaim and a pay raise, and we both knew I had been the one to help him.
With his attentions fixed on hamstringing Clan Greco and the rival family facing prison and a systematic dismantling, I did not think they had the power to continue to come for me.
Which left the Pietras and their hatred of our leadership.
They had killed my father, so I had personally killed Gaetano Pietra’s two oldest sons.
He was an old man now, in his mid-eighties, without an heir to his underworld throne, and he was grasping at power and revenge by colluding with this San Marco to come after me.
I did not view him or his people as a serious threat.
I knew where each one of them lived, worked, and bedded their mistresses.
I knew how to kill each of them without drawing the attention of the DIA. Poison, a staged car accident, a fall down the slippery stairs, or a drunken accident off one of Genoa’s many docks.
But there was no point in killing the messengers before I could get to the man using them to send the message.
Despite the acute frustration of hitting dead end after dead end, I could breathe easy knowing that Guinevere was safe from harm in quaint little Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I knew that because I had made a deal with Dante Salvatore to watch over her.
“I will not ask why you need this favor,” he had said over the phone in that strange accent that was accounted for by his upbringing in England and time spent in Italy. “Because I am a man very much in love too. And like yours, my heart was taken by a fierce woman who made me work for her.”
My laughter was a bitter cough. “This woman is almost impossible to win back.”
“Ah,” he’d said, and the sound of children’s laughter could be heard in the background. “What is it they say? The night is always darkest before the dawn. I will keep your woman safe, Romano, no questions asked.”
And then, weeks later, to wake up in the middle of the night to my phone ringing, with Dante Salvatore’s name flashing on my screen . . . my blood had run cold.
There was no hesitation in leaving.
Not even with a potential mole in my ranks, not even with my mother and sisters in Tuscany, well guarded as they were, not even with the proverbial wolves at my door.
Nothing mattered as much as getting to Guinevere before any harm could come to her.
And I had failed.
By the time I landed, Dante was on the phone with me again, announcing that his man had been taken out after checking in to say they were watching her office building.
Abject terror had pierced me like a blade, slicing from head to toe until I radiated with restless agony. I had nearly pulled a gun on Tony for stopping at red lights in our race to reach her.
My fawn had been alone and unwittingly trapped in a cage with predators who would know exactly how to ensnare and, perhaps, murder her to get to me.
For as long as I lived, I would never forget arriving at the Beaumont Building to see an unmarked limo careening out of the garage, knowing that my girl was probably inside on her way to be raped, tortured, or killed.
I had held the gun to Tony’s head and demanded he ram into that car so they could not get away.
The ensuing firefight was over before I broke a sweat. The men were trained, but not well, not compared with me and the four of Dante’s men who had met me at the airport.
In the vibrating silence that followed, I had no idea what I would find.
Was she hurt? Scarred or crippled? Tied up and gagged, violated?
Bile surged up my throat as I walked to the broken car and tugged the dead body out from the entryway to the back seat.
And then, there she was.
La cerbiatta mia.
Pressed to the opposite door of the car, bracing a gun on her knees, eyes squinted as they stared through her own blood down the barrel at me. Ready to end whoever might come for her.
If I had not loved her before, I would have loved her forevermore after witnessing the tableau she made in that dark interior.
My innocent Guinevere covered in blood and trembling, but facing off fearlessly against her probable death.
Dio mio, she was brave.
Gorgeous and sublime.
Too good for me even to look at, let alone touch.
It rocked me further to see the way relief broke through her fierce expression like sunlight through a storm cloud, completely transforming her entire countenance as she dropped the gun and threw herself into my arms.
Like I was her hero.
It was bizarre to admit that it was one of the best moments of my life, knowing that even after everything that had happened, the ways I had let her down and betrayed her love, she still trusted me to save her.
I tried to hold that feeling close to me as I sat on the plane to Firenze, on the opposite side of the cabin from where Guinevere had settled herself as soon as I had uncuffed her.
She had curled up in one of the big cream leather chairs and promptly fallen asleep as if I did not exist.
Maybe she wished I did not.
I watched as she slept fitfully, lids jumping, limbs twitching, the odd whimper getting stuck in her throat.
It was almost impossible to stay away from her, so eventually I gave in and moved to the seat across from her.
When I reached out to cup her foot as it kicked out, she froze and then softened back into a more comfortable sleep.
In sleep, it seemed, her body recognized mine as friend instead of foe.
It was when she woke that she would distance herself from me again.
Rightfully so, maybe, but it still felt like a dozen knives stuck through every one of my ribs like a pincushion.
It did not matter that she hated me, I told myself. What mattered was that she was under my purview again so I could actually keep her safe.