Chapter Nine Raffa
Chapter Nine
Raffa
I was meeting with six of my most trusted capos in a restaurant in Siena when my phone vibrated in my pocket.
Usually, I would not have answered during such a meeting, but I had set a special tone for Guinevere that thrummed like a heartbeat against my thigh.
There was very little that could have made me ignore a call from her, and it certainly wasn’t half a dozen of the most powerful men (and one woman) in Italy.
“Scusate,” I murmured to them as I stood, buttoned my blazer, and stalked out of the closed restaurant dining room into the back hall to take the call. “Guinevere?”
The sound of a scuffle came through the phone line, punctuated by a vicious, almost metallic thud.
“Guinevere!” I snapped as my heart tripped inside my chest and broke into a sprint. “Vera!”
When she did not answer, I stormed back into the room, where Renzo waited by the front door.
“Call Ludo and Carmine. Find out where Vera is,” I ordered, the phone still at my ear so I could hear what was going on.
Then I turned to my capos and said, “Thank you for your time, friends. Something has come up. I trust you will do as we discussed. There is a healthy bonus for whoever unveils San Marco.”
“Do you need help with this emergency?” Pamina Riva, the only female capo in the northwest, known infamously as La Vampira for her bloodthirsty ways, offered with a sharp grin.
“No, grazie, Pamina,” I replied just before a voice came through the phone.
“I am not here to harm you,” a male voice said distantly. “I am a friend.”
A growl worked itself up my throat like something rancid and bilious.
“The car is out front,” Renzo told me, his own phone in his hand, fingers flying.
I made for the door without further comment until I heard Pasquale, the son of capo Ernesto Ricci, mutter, “Never thought I’d see the day Il Gentiluomo was under the thumb of a woman.”
Without pausing in my stride, I called out, “And I never think you can get any stupider than you already are, yet you constantly find ways to prove me wrong. You will double your dues to the family for three months for your son’s insult, Ernesto.”
A sound of outrage exploded from his mouth, but Renzo was already opening the door for me.
I turned just enough to let the light hit the side of my face, highlighting the vicious grin curling one side of my mouth. “Next time you think to speak about my woman, I will take out your kneecaps, understood?”
Ernesto reached over to clamp his meaty hand around his son’s forearm and answered over his squawk. “Capisco, capo. I apologize for my son. Let me know if I may be of assistance.”
I jerked my chin before the door swung shut behind me and listened to the phone as I raced to the curb and got into the town car Martina had idling out front.
“They’re in Impruneta for the wine festival,” Renzo told Martina as he got into the passenger seat, and we took off with a squeal of tires into the twilight streets.
“Go,” I barked, even as I heard the unknown man say to Guinevere, “The Venetian wants you.”
Porca Madonna, that fucking Venetian.
“It will take us fifty minutes to get there, boss,” Martina told me.
“Break every speed limit.”
“That is with breaking every limit,” she countered.
Gunfire exploded on the other end of the phone line. My hand gripped the phone so tightly the metal edges cut into my flesh, spilling blood across my palm.
“Where the fuck are Ludo and Carmine?” I demanded of Renzo.
“Ludo isn’t answering his phone, but Carmine is on the way. He was watching your sisters across the piazza. He said ETA is three minutes. He left Michele and Philippe to protect your sisters.”
Three minutes with Guinevere alone somewhere with an unidentified shooter.
Fear turned my blood to battery acid, bitter enough on the back of my tongue to make me gag, burning in my veins until I thought I would catch fire from the inside out.
“Why the fuck did they even leave the estate?” I asked.
Renzo winced. “They were with Ludo, Carmine, and a handful of men who kept to the shadows. It seemed extremely unlikely they would find trouble.”
My family calls me Jinx because I’m so unlucky, Guinevere’s sweet voice came back to me as she explained her idiosyncratic ability to find trouble wherever she went.
“Cazzo, I never should have left her,” I snarled, as more gunfire sounded and a female cry exploded over the airways.
I’d never believed in God, even though I was born and raised a good Catholic Italian. It did not make any logical sense to me to appeal to an entity we had no science to back, no actual data on.
But I sat there in the car as the countryside blurred around us, and I begged whatever God might prevail that he would keep Guinevere safe from harm.
And then when that did not seem like enough, both because I doubted his existence and because I doubted even more that I deserved to be heard by him, I appealed to the devil, offering him my cold soul in eternal damnation in exchange for Guinevere escaping this alive.
My heart stopped when the gunfire ceased abruptly and silence followed.
“Guinevere!” I bellowed, hoping she would hear me—could still hear me and wasn’t dead.
If she lived through this, I would not spend a moment more battling guilt and the inane idea that being away from her was ever a good idea.
I would sew myself to her side if I could, pocket her against my chest in the inside of my suit jacket so that I might always feel her against my heart.
Insane, overpossessive—I no longer gave a fuck.
Even if she could not accept me as her lover once more, she would live with me as her shadow whether she liked it or not.
No harm would ever come to Guinevere Stone again.
The words rang truer in my thoughts than prayers to God or deals with the devil.
I was the only authority that mattered.
Over the line, a gasping, choking sob that was soon muffled. A minute later, a cacophony of clatter and raised voices.
“Someone answer this goddamn phone!” I shouted.
Finally, someone did.
“Raffa?” Carmine asked, panting heavily.
“What the fuck is going on over there?” Even though I had never been a creative person, my mind was imagining all the dire ways Guinevere had been maimed or killed. “Is Guinevere okay?”
“She’s okay,” he said immediately, but there was an edge to his voice like he didn’t want to confess what came next. “I mean, she is healthy but for some bruising. It’s Ludo who took a bullet to his side. He’s on his way to the hospital now.”
“Put Guinevere on the phone.” I needed to hear her voice before my insides could unclench.
“Um, I don’t think that is the best idea right now, boss,” he admitted. “She’s hysterical.”
Hysterical?
I flashed back to the look of abject terror on her face, bits of bone and brain matter flecking her nightgown and skin in the aftermath of the assassin’s death.
“Do not let her run,” I ordered through gritted teeth, adrenaline like acid in my veins as I sat caged in the car with nothing to do. “Carmine, do you hear me? Whatever happens, do not let her run again.”
“It’s not you or us she wants to run from,” he explained. “If she could, I think she’d be running from herself.”
“What the fuck happened? Stop being cryptic with me. I need to know how to help her,” I bit out.
“He’s dead.” His words were heavy enough to land like blows against my ear. “The man who shot Ludo and tried to take Guinevere? She killed him.”
The family had been put to bed by the time I reached the villa, but warm light greeted me as I stormed inside and found Leo sitting with his head in his hands at the kitchen table.
A sweating glass of amber liquor—his preferred whiskey, probably—sat untouched by his right elbow.
He looked up at me as if I was the Grim Reaper come to deliver his death.
I was not far off from doing exactly that.
Ludo had already briefed me that Leo was the one to suggest Guinevere take in the sight of Impruneta and the surrounding valleys of grapes from the bell tower, and though he had gone straight to Ludo to tell him where Guinevere was, those few minutes when she was on her own had been enough to endanger her life.
Such carelessness with the woman I loved and breathed for made my very bones quake with suppressed fury.
“I am so sorry, Raffa.” Leo’s heavy voice punctured my thoughts and drew my attention back to his hangdog expression. “Honestly, I was trying to bond with her, not endanger her, when I offered up the suggestion. I feel . . . I feel absolutely sick that I was the one to put her in harm’s way.”
“You should.” My voice was a death knell, hollow and dark.
Behind me Martina hovered, perhaps waiting to see if this conversation would end in bloodshed.
“I already apologized to Guinevere,” he continued, eyes glassy as he looked out the dark window and then back to me. A thin smile flickered at the end of his mouth. “She told me what she saw of the view was lovely.”
Warmth cut through the cold anger burning up my gut.
“She is the most resilient woman I have ever known,” I agreed.
Leo’s mouth pressed into a firm line as he looked down at his palms. “A woman must be if she wants to live this life with us.”
It was true, of course. A reality I had been wrestling like a giant beast for almost the full length of time I had known Guinevere.
Now that my worst fears had come true, both in Michigan and now closer to home in Impruneta, it settled something in me to know that my cerbiatta could hold her own until help arrived.
This did not mean I was willing to forgive Leo, not when he had been rude to her since the beginning. Perhaps if it had been Carmine, Renzo, or Ludo who had put Guinevere in that position, I would have forgiven one of them more easily.