Chapter Nine Raffa #3
Even then, I knew, in a way that settled the panic I’d felt for months, that there would never be a time I did not watch her from afar and care for her however I could get away with.
Guinevere’s unluckiness had come to an unnatural end the day she met me.
Any lottery she entered, she would win. Any dream she aspired to, I would help her attain.
Any future monsters who might come for her would find me there to scare them away.
I was, quite clearly, born to love her.
So after weeks of being unable to express it, I let all the love I harbored for her in my black heart spill over into the simple act of bathing her.
I went to my knees, placed her foot on my shoulder, and used both hands to sweep over her lightly muscled thighs straight down to her calves and the oddly lovely bones in her feet. She shivered still, but this time not from the shakiness of adrenaline giving way to horror.
Gradually, the flush of heat from the too-hot water was replaced with a different kind of warmth beneath her skin.
When her hands slowly sank into my hair, tangling in the strands and tugging gently, I looked up at her through wet lashes to see her pupils blown wide with desire.
“Do you want me to clean you up with my tongue?” I murmured against her skin before licking a droplet of water from the crook of her groin.
She nodded immediately, swaying a little into my mouth.
I hid my smile against her skin and then trailed my lips to the top of her mound, pressing a chaste kiss to the bare skin above her clit before I started to enjoy her in earnest. Even with the water still beating down on us, I could taste the sweet sluice of her arousal against my tongue when I delved between her lips to play at her entrance with my tongue.
She gasped, legs quaking with a mixture of lust and exhaustion.
I moved my hands to her pert ass and lifted her against me, moaning in approval against her pussy when she wrapped her legs over my shoulders and clung even tighter to my hair for balance.
I shifted slightly so she could lean back against the travertine tiles if she needed to and then devoted myself wholly to the task of feasting on her gorgeous cunt.
I ate like a man starved, and I was. For two months I had assumed I would never get to touch her like this, taste her like this, love her like this again.
The idea of sex without her felt bleak, sepia toned where I had once had vibrant technicolor, and my previously voracious sex drive had diminished astonishingly unless I was thinking of Guinevere.
The way she moaned in these breathy little gasps like she did now, writhing on my tongue as I fucked it inside her clutching heat.
The way she fisted my hair too tight and dragged her nails down my shoulder, marking me in the most primal way as hers.
I was so hard beneath my wet, painfully constricting trousers that I throbbed fiercely, but I made no move to adjust myself.
This was about her.
Sucking the toxin of self-hatred out and replacing it with soothing caresses full of all the love I had for her.
When she came, it was with a sigh that spun out like a ball of yarn, long and loose, her muscles tightening around me before going completely lax so that just my hands on her ass and her back against the wall kept her from falling over.
I lapped at the delicious spill of cum until her swollen folds tasted only of water, and then I pressed another kiss to the top of her mound.
Carefully, I adjusted her legs so they slid from my shoulders, down my arms, and to either side of my hips before I gently rose to my feet and carried her out of the shower into the slightly less steamy room.
I perched her on the closed toilet so I could remove my sopping-wet suit jacket and grab a towel.
Almost asleep where she sat, limbs warm and malleable, Guinevere let me dry her.
Once she was dry, I frowned at her mass of wet hair and searched the cupboards for her hairbrush.
When I came back to her with it and a hair tie, her eyes widened for a moment, lips parting.
I wished I knew if she remembered the first time I had done this for her, braiding her hair when she was too ill to care for herself.
She was not sick now, not physically, but the mental strain of realizing that you have ended another life is something even more insidious.
I secured a towel around my waist and settled behind her on the back of the toilet to start combing through her wet hair.
She only moved to lean forward so I could get to the long ends.
I worked in silence, only our shared breath and the rhythmic tap of water droplets against the shower floor filling the space.
“I killed someone today,” she said finally in a wooden whisper. “Did they tell you?”
I hummed, working a tangle out of her dark hair. “They told me you saved Ludo’s life and yours by acting quickly and bravely.”
She was quiet for so long, shoulders slumped and head drooping, that I wondered if she’d fallen asleep with my soothing fingers and the brush in her hair.
“Sono un’assassina,” she said, her voice more resolute, shoulders snapping straight like those of a soldier called to attention. “I am a killer.”
“There is a difference between killing for pleasure and killing to protect yourself and others,” I told her. “You are not a killer, because your heart is good and your motivations were honest. Non sei un’assassina; sei una cacciatrice.”
You are not a killer; you are a huntress.
“A hunter kills only to provide for the family or to protect their village,” I lectured as I pulled her hair into three parts and began to braid the damp strands. “They do not teach you this in school, Vera, but there is a price for saving a life, and that is often paid in the taking of another.”
“It’s too easy to believe you,” she admitted, leaning back slightly so I had to pull the tail of her braid up in order to finish it off with the elastic. “It’s always been too easy to believe you.”
“You have slept beside me for many nights,” I reminded her. “Do I have trouble sleeping? Now you know I am a killer too. Does that surprise you? Does that make me a callous man in your eyes?”
There was bitterness in her voice when she asked, “Are you saying every life you took was to save another?”
“Yes,” I responded instantly. “Unequivocally yes. If I did not kill the men who came for me, they would kill my brothers-in-arms and eventually my family. Stacci, Carlotta, Delfina, Mamma, Zacheo, Nico, Mattia—”
“Basta,” she snapped.
Enough.
“I understand,” she continued, hunched into herself, pulling her feet up to rest on the closed lid beneath her so she could hug her knees once again. “But it is too general an excuse to use so often when you could just . . . stop putting people in a position where their lives are at risk.”
“Life is so simple in your eyes,” I said, even though I knew she would recoil, bunching tighter like a wood bug, ready to close off completely and roll away from me. I fought the urge to pull her close. “Sometimes you are not born into a position where freedom is a viable option.”
“You don’t like being a mafioso.” It wasn’t a question. “I’ve thought back on our conversations, and you always seem so . . . reluctant to play your part. So why do this? Why kill and steal and lie? It . . . it doesn’t suit you.”
Just as killing doesn’t suit me, she didn’t say, but I could hear the thought clearly enough.
I could have told her that I had cut ties with my father and banished myself to London.
I could have explained that when he was killed, I had no choice but to take up his mantle because the wily bastard had not named another heir, and Camorra tradition dictated that a new capo dei capi outside the family should kill the previous family members to eradicate any contestation about their reign.
I could have explained all that to my sweet Guinevere, and she might have felt empathy for me, might have even let herself love me again, a little.
But what was the point in that when the truth remained?
I was who I was, a stone-cold killer running an underworld empire. No matter how I had arrived here, it was who I was and, more importantly, what I was good at.
My sigh shuddered out of my lungs like steam from a failing engine. I climbed down from my perch and rounded Guinevere so I could crouch on her level to look into her eyes.
“But it does suit me,” I explained patiently.
“I am good at hiding money from the authorities and slipping beneath their notice. I am clever enough to play games with the power-hungry capos just waiting for me to fail and ruthless enough to put them down when they act against me. Like the moon, I have a dark side of my heart too. I just so happen to love you with all of it, the shadowed soul and the light.”
“You’re saying that you’d love me enough to kill for me,” she countered, a cruel edge to her tone, a sneer on her pretty mouth. “And that makes it okay?”
“I am saying I have killed for you, cacciatrice mia,” I corrected, cupping the entire side of her face in one big palm.
“I would kill for you again until the streets of Florence ran red with the blood of your enemies. And when it was all over, I would pull you into our bed at night, slake my lingering bloodlust with your body, and fall asleep as easy as a babe with you in my arms.”
“That’s psychopathic,” she told me primly, but her eyes were dark and hungry, enormous black pools I could fall into for the rest of eternity.
“That is the reality of my life,” I argued. “To me, that is the highest form of love.”
She scoffed, biting her lip as she wrenched her gaze away from me.
“Tell me this,” I said with a soft hiss, hoping the words would slip through the crack in her armor against me.
“If it had been you alone on the tower, would you have resorted to sacrificing yourself and going with that bastardo to keep the family safe from him?” I paused to let the words register, to watch the way her shoulders tensed with wariness, sensing a trap.
“It was only when Ludo had been shot, when it was no longer only yourself in danger, that you killed him. You did it because you love Ludo and you could not stand to see him die.”
Her silence was answer enough.
“Love.” I punctuated my point quietly but clearly.
“In this life, violent delights often beget violent ends. To love so much is to do anything to keep your people safe.” I hesitated and then added, “You can say it is because I am a mafioso. That I was raised habituated to brutality, trained in the language of blood and death, that you are an American girl from Michigan with no such background, and you can deny it all you want, but I see you, Guinevere. I see you, and I know you love just as savagely.”
She raised a shaking hand to scrub it over her face as if she could wake herself up from a nightmare. When her hand dropped, her expression had been rubbed raw, mouth sagging open like a puncture wound, eyes weary and ancient.
“I judged you for being a murderer,” she said softly. “Only to become one myself. It’s a horrible kind of karma, I guess.”
“You are twenty-three years old,” I allowed with a thin smile. “You have a lot of time left to learn about the kind of person you are. You just have to be brave enough—like you were tonight—to ask yourself the truly hard questions.”
“Like what?” Her lids were fluttering, too heavy to keep open. She was slumped back against the toilet now, a bruise blooming along one shoulder from her scuffle with the dead man, her face pale and clean and so young looking it made me ache inside.
“There are three types of people,” I said, sidestepping her question momentarily.
“Those who run from danger, those who would give up their lives to save others from it, and those who would stand and fight against it.” Her gaze found mine, eyes filled with questions and yearning.
“Most people never have to answer the question of which type they are except for in the abstract, in a philosophy or ethics course, maybe. In the life I lead, the one I led you into, you have to answer the question in a very real way. Even though I believe I know which woman you are, it is up to you to decide. When you are ready, you will tell me.”
“What if I don’t give you the answer you want?” The words were so quiet they were more breath than sound.
I could feel the awkward pull of the wry smile on my mouth. “Do you not understand yet, stella cadente? Whatever wish you make, I will see done.”
“Even if it’s not what you want for yourself?” There was desperation there, but I could not tell how she wanted me to respond, so I gave her only the truth.
“There will never be a day that I will stop loving you,” I confessed with a blasé shrug, as if that love did not dictate every beat of my heart. “So yes, even then. There is nothing I would not give you. Nothing I would not do for you.”
“Even murder,” she whispered, eyes drifting closed for a slow blink I was not sure she would wake from.
“Especially murder,” I agreed easily before standing to collect her into my arms.
As soon as her body pressed into mine, she curled into my chest, cheek over my heart, and promptly fell into a deep doze.
The sensation of pride her trust and comfortableness instilled in me was cataclysmic, a shifting of tectonic plates in the very foundation of my life.
“I love you,” I couldn’t help but tell her as I carried her into the cool bedroom and tenderly deposited her beneath the sheets. “Even if you are not brave enough to be Regina Inferna.”