Chapter Six Raffa #2
“No,” he declared imperiously. “I think Carmine, you, and me should go have a boys’ night. You can take me for gelato in the piazza.”
I laughed, swinging him into my arms as I got out of the car. “I promise we will have a boys’ night soon, but I think your mother and aunties would be very angry with me if I left without even saying hello.”
He pouted, but also shook his head. “They’re kind of demanding like that.”
I was still laughing when I stopped beside Guinevere where she was frozen at the side of the car, hugging herself as if it was cold. Without thinking, I placed an arm around her shoulders, balancing Maxi on my other hip as I led us toward my waiting family.
“Ciao, mamma.” I greeted my mother first, stepping away from Guinevere to kiss her on both cheeks and then doing the same down the line of sisters waiting for me. When I hit Leo and Ludo, I exchanged back-slapping hugs. “You saw fit to create a welcome committee, I see.”
“We were eager to meet your American friend,” Carlotta said with a sly smile. “I’ve been very jealous that Delfina got to meet her and we didn’t.”
“I told you, it was a coincidence,” Delfina said with a roll of her eyes before stepping up to Guinevere. She grabbed her by the shoulders and pressed a kiss to each cheek. “Hello again, friend. It is nice to see you.”
Whatever frostiness Guinevere had dredged up for me, she could not do the same for my sister.
My fawn was a naturally warm, open woman with a big heart who had spent most of her life feeling lonely and shuttered away.
It was no wonder she yearned for connection, and something in my chest ached at seeing the way she flushed and smiled shyly under Delfina’s attention.
“Ciao di nuovo,” she said in Italian.
My sister’s grin almost split her face in two.
I knelt to deal with my swarm of nephews and an enthusiastically barking Aio, keeping an eye on them as she led Guinevere up to meet the family.
Even though part of me yearned to do the introductions myself, I knew it would only make things more awkward.
I had called ahead to tell my family I was bringing a female guest to visit, and Stacci, who had been the one to answer, had crowed with delight when I confirmed it was “my American girl.” There was no doubt they would treat her kindly, with the kind of overenthusiastic warmth characteristic of the female Romanos.
“Che bella,” my mother exclaimed, opening her arms wide for a hug. “Vieni.”
Guinevere hesitantly stepped into the circle of her embrace and then laughed breathlessly when Mamma squeezed her tight.
“Welcome to Villa Romano,” Mamma pronounced, punctuating the words with a kiss to each cheek. “We are very happy to have you.”
Dinner at the villa was always a production.
Guinevere seemed almost in a daze as my mother and sisters press-ganged her into helping in the kitchen, placing her before a crate of melons and prosciutto to make the antipasti and then shuffling her to the other end of the kitchen to cut the homemade bread Mamma made each day.
A happy daze, though.
I watched through the archway in the dining room as Leo, Ludo, and Carmine updated me on developments in the last two days.
“The Grecos and Pietras aren’t really working together,” Carmine was telling me. “Apparently, they both have issues, but Alfonso Greco and Gaetano Pietra hate each other.”
“Who told you that?” Leo asked, updating his notes on his tablet.
Carmine glowered at Leo. A level of professional competitiveness would always exist between them. Leo was my oldest friend, and his father had been my father’s consigliere, but Carmine and Renzo had been with me in London. They knew the man I was now in ways Leo did not.
“Does it matter? It is from a reputable source.”
“It does not matter,” I agreed. “What does is finding out who sent the funeral chrysanthemums and the assassin. Tell me we have a lead on that.”
“I got something,” Ludo grunted, raising his hand like we were in a classroom.
It was a gesture that would have endeared him to Guinevere even more.
She had once told me that she found Ludo—the best hacker in the Italian Mafia—adorable.
“You remember Angela Greco was married to a Tancredi? Well, Iacopone Basti, the assassin? He’s listed as going to school every year until graduation with Mario Tancredi. ”
Tombola!
That was the connection we were looking for.
“So it was the Grecos who sent a man into my house,” I said darkly, fury moving hot and slow like lava beneath my skin. It was hard to harness that power until the right moment, until the right people were in my vicinity, so I could unleash all that volcanic rage to the ultimate consequence.
Leo frowned. “Are we really going to base our conclusions on something so tenuous? I want to eviscerate the people who threatened us just as much as you do, but going to school with someone is not exactly telling. Cazzo, Raffa, you and I went to school with two judges and one of the heads of the DIA. Doesn’t mean they are corrupt. ”
One of them was. The money I had funneled to him had bought him a charming mansion in Mallorca last year.
But Leo had a point, as he usually did.
“Besides, we both know the Pietra family has a much better reason to want you dead than the Grecos do,” he added.
“Look into it further,” I told Ludo. “In the meantime, Carmine, set up a meeting with the Albanians. I want to talk to someone in the Shqiptare inner circle about their dealings with the Grecos. See what they know.”
“On it,” he agreed. “Renzo and Martina are waiting for you at the palazzo. They have some more things to go over. Martina heard a rumor about the Pietras, but she said she wouldn’t tell anyone but you.”
“I’ll leave after dinner,” I said, then caught sight of Leo’s face. “What is it?”
“You just got here, fratello. Your family misses you. At least stay the night. If you need someone to go to Firenze tonight, let it be me. You are tired and much missed.”
A wan smile claimed my mouth as I stepped forward to a clap a hand to Leo’s shoulder. “You are a good man, Leo di Conte.”
“And you,” he told me. “Stay and see your woman settled and your family happy. I’ll go see Martina.”
I nodded my thanks, squeezing his shoulder. “Could you also be eager to leave to see that woman you are sleeping with?”
Leo blinked. “How the hell did you know?”
A shrug. “I recognize the look of a man in love, maybe. Tell me, what is her name? When do we meet her?”
His mouth twisted, but he rubbed his hand over it after to massage out the kink. “Not yet. Soon, though. We are still . . . figuring things out.”
“Tell me about it,” I said dryly, my own smile just as mangled.
From the kitchen, an explosion of laughter. Even amid the tangle of sound, I could parse out Guinevere’s lovely laugh.
It made me ache to hold her. To eat that happiness off her tongue.
I had missed the taste of it.
“Ragazzi,” Mamma called. “Dinner is served!”
If Guinevere was overwhelmed by the chaos of a Romano dinner, especially after running for her life yesterday, you could not tell.
She laughed with Lando, Carlotta’s husband, about the first time she tried a tripe sandwich with me at the Mercato Centrale and asked Emiliano questions about how to hunt boar, given that we were eating a pasta sauce made from one of his successes.
She fielded questions from my eager sisters as if she was used to holding court, evading the more invasive inquiries by offering an interesting story or asking her own questions.
Luckily, the heavy sweep of her dark hair hid the bullet graze over her temple, or else I was sure we would have faced a furious barrage of questions about how I could have let Guinevere get hurt.
I already felt enough guilt and grief as it stood.
The candles lit amid the various platters of food on the table cast her in sepia tones that made her seem otherworldly, transcendent.
My fingers itched to test her skin, feel if it was flushed and real against my own.
I wanted to brush out that long, dark hair until it shone and braid it back away from her face before folding her into fresh sheets and tasting every inch of her to see if it was as ambrosial as I remembered.
I would have settled, though, for a single glance from those long-lashed doe eyes.
Instead, she spent the entire three-hour repast smiling and engaging with everyone who was not me.
She had cast a spell over the table, even Leo, who regarded her with solemn eyes, that odd quirk in his mouth that said he was reluctantly enchanted.
“She’s lovely,” Mamma told me when some of us started to clear away the dessert plates and empty glasses.
Leo was popping the cork on a dessert wine that he insisted Guinevere sample, and Zacheo was asleep in Carlotta’s lap, drooling on her dress.
It was a tableau I had been a part of countless times, but never with Guinevere at its heart, shining brighter than any of the candles on the table or stars winking above us in the clear night sky.
“Yes,” I agreed as I carried the plates inside to the kitchen, where Stacci and Ludo were washing up.
“I can understand why Carmine says you were instantly infatuated. Un colpo di fulmine.”
A lightning bolt.
The Italian phrase for love at first sight.
“It was not that simple, Mamma,” I replied.
Guinevere had been hit with something the moment we met, but that something was my car.
At the sink, Ludo snorted.
“Perhaps that is when it started,” I admitted with a glare at my soldato. “But does a lightning strike alter your DNA? Does it carve out space for something so big in your chest that you cannot breathe around it?”
“Si,” Mamma said, reaching up to cup my cheek. “It does, ragazzo.”
I was not so certain. Surely an actual lightning strike would not hurt so much as the pain of Guinevere’s rejection.