Chapter Seven Guinevere
Chapter Seven
Guinevere
Raffa was gone when I woke up the next morning.
I knew before I even left the gorgeous room he’d placed me in. It was something in the air, or maybe I was back to being too fanciful.
My body was still sore from the escapades in the Beaumont Building, but it felt good to stretch it out in the big, soft bed.
The bullet graze to my temple was already scabbing over, a superficial injury that had bled so much because it was a head wound.
The room smelled faintly of lavender, and as I unpacked my suitcase, I realized it was because each drawer was filled with little sachets of the dried flower.
Even though the house was hundreds of years old, they had spared no expense on the upgrades.
The en suite bathroom housed an enormous tiled walk-in shower with such amazing water pressure I moaned the entire time I stood under the spray.
It felt incredible to get clean. I brushed out my hair, moisturized my body with the olive oil–based products on the sink basin labeled with “Romano Toscana,” and did a full skin-care routine.
Even the pinch of the needle when I injected myself with my medicine didn’t ache as much as it usually did.
The self-care routine made me feel human again, so when I reentered the bedroom, I finally noticed the box on the side table beside the door.
It was a new smartphone with fancy card stock attached to the box with a piece of tape.
To call home.
You have your space and your time, Vera.
I will return in a week.
—Rex Infernus
Even when I hated him, he looked after me.
I huffed out a frustrated breath and took the box with me to the bed, where I flopped back with a groan as my muscles twanged.
In the absence of my Raffa dilemma, I was faced with another.
Calling my parents.
The phone was already programmed when I opened the box, my wallpaper set as a photo Martina had taken of Raffa and me on the day we took the boat out in Livorno.
We were both wet, hair slicked back, droplets like diamonds where they caught the sun on our cheeks and lashes.
Raffa was smiling that closed-lipped, private expression of deep joy, and my teeth were bared in the widest grin I’d ever seen on my own face.
We were so happy together.
It felt both good and bad to see evidence of it, like pressure on a knotted muscle.
The only contacts he had inputted were Ludo, Carmine, Renzo, Martina, Leo, and himself.
My thumb hovered over his contact information and then pressed down to open a new text thread.
Guinevere: Thank you for the phone.
Guinevere: And the space.
He didn’t respond, but then I didn’t expect him to. He was probably busy doing whatever it was mafiosi did all day.
Besides, I was just delaying the inevitable.
The phone ringing sounded like a death knell.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Mom,” I said.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, then louder but angled away from the speaker, “John! John, it’s Guinevere.”
There was a cacophony on the other end of the line, and then both of my parents started to speak over each other.
“Guinevere, where the fuck—”
“Honey, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said loudly, cutting them both off. “I mean, well, I’m okay now.”
“There was a break-in at the offices,” Dad said, voice gruff but discernibly relieved. “The night guard was killed, and there was blood in the staircase. They found two men dead outside the parking garage who seem to be the culprits, but when you didn’t answer your phone . . .”
His exhale was shaky, so much pain in a single breath I could feel it through the phone.
“I’m fine, Dad,” I said softly, cradling the cell to my ear like it was his hand. “I was still there when they broke in, and they tried to hurt me, but a . . . a friend ended up saving me.”
“A friend?” he said flatly.
Silence echoed between us like the aftermath of a nuclear bomb, poisonous and impossible to breathe through without wanting to gag.
“A friend,” I repeated, quiet but intractable.
“Where are you now, honey?” Mom asked, and I knew she had her arm on Dad as if she could physically restrain him.
I paused, wincing as the words came out of my mouth. “I’m back in Italy.” Then, over Dad’s blustering, I added, “I had to come back. I know you won’t understand, but when I left Tuscany, I left a piece of me behind.”
I figured it wasn’t truly a lie. I had left half my soul in Italy, not just behind Raffa’s breastbone but in the streets of Florence, in the fabric of Tuscany. It was easier to sell my parents on an epic love story than it was to tell them the truth.
The man I loved was an Italian capo, and the dangerous men who wanted to kill him had set their sights on me, so this was the only way to keep me safe.
“And your job?” Dad demanded. “I taught you better than to just walk out on your career, Guinevere. You’re leaving your clients and colleagues in the lurch with this stunt.”
And me, he was no doubt thinking but didn’t say.
That wasn’t why he was mad, really, but I addressed it all the same.
“I’m more than willing to work remotely while I see out my two weeks’ notice.
I know it was irresponsible of me, but I was scared.
I almost died two days ago. Not because of any illness but because of violence.
And my . . .” What did I call Raffa? My boyfriend sounded too juvenile, my partner too platonic.
“My man makes me feel safe. When he offered to fly me out on the next plane, I was still in shock, and it seemed like the only place I would be okay.”
“Jinx,” Mom breathed, devastated. “You’re safe here with us.”
“It hasn’t felt that way lately,” I admitted.
“And part of that is my own fault for lying to you about coming to Italy in the first place. Whether or not you respect my choices, this is where I am meant to be for now. Gemma always followed her heart, and you never had a problem with it. I’m asking now for you to let me follow mine. ”
“Gemma ended up dead at twenty-six,” Dad snapped harshly.
The silence that bloomed was acrid, like smoke from a dying fire.
“John,” Mom scolded quietly.
“At least she lived before she died,” I countered.
“She traveled, she fell in love, she made mistakes. She was the most alive person I’ve ever known, and she made me realize how pathetic I was to let the fact that I’d survived being sick be enough for me.
Surviving isn’t good enough. I want to thrive. ”
“You can thrive here, baby,” Mom coaxed. “Come home. You can move in with us again if you’re scared. We haven’t touched your bedroom.”
“Come back,” Dad said, his voice as raw as a bleeding wound. “Please, Guinevere. I know you think you’re safe there, but I promise you aren’t.”
“I’m staying,” I said firmly. “But the offer still stands, Dad. You tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine.”
Another long pause, this one stale.
“At least tell us who you are with,” Mom asked. “I ought to know the name of the boy my daughter is in love with.”
I winced a little at the word boy, given that Raffa was eleven years my senior.
“Raffa Romano.”
“What does he do?”
“H-he runs a multimillion-dollar business,” I admitted, which was true. It just wasn’t entirely legal.
“Oh,” Mom said over the sound of her clapping her hands together. “A wealthy, handsome Italian? I should have known nothing less would entice my romantic girl.”
“Mom! You don’t even know what he looks like.”
“Is he handsome?”
My pause made her laugh.
Dad was conspicuously silent.
“How long will you be there, though? Is this a vacation or . . . You aren’t planning to stay there forever, are you?” she asked.
And I didn’t have an answer.
How long would it take Raffa and his soldati to hunt down the enemy? How long could I be forced into his proximity and survive with my willpower intact?
“I don’t know, Mom.”
“Well, okay.” Her voice was velvet soft with sadness. “I expect you to check in every day, okay? Or else your father will worry.”
“Okay, I will.”
“Give us a minute, Elizabeth?” Dad asked, then waited until the door clicked shut to sigh heavily into the speaker. “Does Raffa Romano have any affiliation with Clan Romano? One of the biggest Mafia families in Italy?”
I blinked in surprise at the ceiling and then sat up as my heart kicked into a trot. “Um, no. Why would you even assume something like that?”
He grunted. “I read up on him some when I saw you pictured in the paper with him. There was an article about his father being associated with the Camorra. That’s dangerous stuff, Guinevere.”
“No kidding,” I said, shocked by how easy it was to funnel my past self’s woeful obliviousness. “You know I wouldn’t be with someone like that.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Lately, I’m not sure I know you as well as I thought I did.”
As he’d intended, the words hit the mark, puncturing something in my chest so I had to suck in a sharp breath or drown in my own blood. All my life I’d wanted to make my parents, especially my dad, happy. It seemed incredibly unfair that pursuing my own happiness directly countered his.
“That was your choice as much as my own,” I reminded him. “I’ve got to go, or I’ll miss breakfast.”
“Be safe.” The words were sudden, edged with desperation. “I wish I’d taught you more about protecting yourself . . . but please, Jinx, stay out of trouble.”
“I always try,” I told him.
“And yet it always finds you,” he murmured before hanging up without another word.
It should have surprised me to find all the clothes I had left behind at Raffa’s Florentine palazzo in the walk-in closet of my new bedroom at Villa Romano, but it didn’t.
It was just utterly like him to go overboard for me.
I could admit that seeing the familiar designer clothes we’d bought together my first week in Florence warmed my heart, and I knew that had been his game plan.
After switching my pajamas for a long dress and cardigan, I walked downstairs to the cacophony of voices, startled into almost falling over when a toddler ran headlong into my legs.