Chapter Ten Guinevere #2
He shrugged. “I am what some would call a progressive capo and what others would call un’idioto. I have female capos in my organization who are more frightening than most of the men in the outfit.”
“Are you going to make this about equality?” I asked, a little burst of shocked laughter stuttering up my throat. “Really?”
He arched a brow. “I am not making it about anything. I am merely saying that, as you have observed yourself, gender does not matter to la mafia. If you are involved, you have equal opportunity to die.”
“So you have killed women?” I persisted.
Raffa rolled his eyes. “Guinevere, I have three sisters and a mother. I have not killed a woman before, but that does not mean that someone somewhere in my organization has not. As capo dei capi, I am responsible for them all.”
I thought about it for a moment and nodded curtly. “Okay, I suppose that’s fair.”
He inclined his head magnanimously, and I couldn’t help but laugh as he meant me to. It was crazy, really and truly, that he could make me laugh the morning after I’d ended a life, but there we were.
“You feel better this morning,” he noted, gaze trailing over my skin like hot fingers.
“I do. You . . . you helped last night. Thank you for taking care of me.” Even though I didn’t necessarily mean the orgasm he’d given me, I couldn’t fight the blush that bloomed beneath my skin.
The edge of his mouth pressed into a firm line to fight his knowing smile. “It was my pleasure, Guinevere. As I told you, whatever you need, I will see done.”
“Tell me . . .” I hesitated, swallowing thickly. “What was his name? The man I killed.”
Raffa sighed. “He was Federico Mancini. A cook from Venice. He has a brother we are trying to secure in order to question him about why Federico might have been all the way over here in Tuscany to abduct you, but he is proving hard to find.” He paused before admitting, “His girlfriend filed a missing person report on him a few weeks ago.”
“You think he is involved too?” I asked, even though I knew the answer. “That he might come after me as well?”
“I will not let him,” Raffa said with an arrogant shrug. “You are safe so long as you remain here in my home, under guard.”
I didn’t relish the idea of being trapped at the villa, beautiful as it was, but I nodded because I knew Raffa would not budge on that point. He was an overprotective mafioso; there was only so much room for negotiation.
So I tried my hand at an easy ask. “I want to join the harvest.”
“Eat the rest of your breakfast first. It is serious work,” he ordered, watching me until I lifted my fork and resumed eating. “Now, before we join the others, can you tell me any details about last night? I know it might be difficult to speak of it, but I need to know.”
My fork dropped with a clatter. “Oh! God, I can’t believe I almost forgot.
He had my sister’s cross.” At Raffa’s furrowed brow, I quickly explained, “When he came up the tower stairs, he lunged for me, but when I evaded him, he told me that he was only there as a friend. He said that ‘the Venetian’ wanted to see me, and he’d been told to show me something.
It was Gemma’s cross, the one my father gave her when she turned sixteen. ”
“Are you sure it was the same?”
I was already nodding. “It’s very specific. Twisted, delicate gold filaments and a two-carat diamond at the center of the cross. I would know it anywhere. I was always a little jealous that she was the one to get it. It’s the only family heirloom we have.”
“It wasn’t returned to you when Gemma died?” Raffa said as he folded the paper up and exchanged it for the phone lying on the table, typing away quickly.
“No, my dad was upset about it, but the authorities said it wasn’t on her person when they found her, and it wasn’t among her possessions in the flat she was renting.
That’s all we got back of her. A box of trinkets and clothes, along with this ugly black urn she would have hated.
The local authorities had her cremated before they could find and contact us. ”
Raffa paused in whatever he was typing to look up at me with bright eyes. “Did she die in the States?”
I shook my head. “No, I think I might have mentioned she was living abroad in Albania. It’s where my mother’s people are from originally.”
He hesitated a moment and then put the phone down to lean over the table, gathering one of my hands to hold tight in his own. “Where exactly?”
“Durres,” I said. “She was there to study at one of the top wineries on the coast.”
“The port of Durres also happens to be the main point of drug exportation for the Albanian Mafia,” Raffa told me slowly. “Did your sister . . . did she take drugs recreationally?”
I blinked at him as my stomach clenched into a hard knot. Memories seeped through the locked box I kept shoved to the back of my mind. Gemma returning home from a party in eleventh grade with a nosebleed, giggling too loudly and practically bouncing off the walls.
“What did you do, Gem?” I’d asked her when she came crashing into my room, happy that our parents were still out on a date night.
“I had fun, Jinx,” she’d told me as blood dripped onto her sparkly shirt. “You should try it sometime.”
The day Mom had found a bag of marijuana stuffed in the back of Gemma’s underwear drawer and a bag of white powder stuffed into a bundle of socks, she had argued that she was only hiding it for a friend.
It became clear who that “friend” was on our next family trip to Gun Lake, when Gemma and her boyfriend, Sam, had gotten so high they crashed the speedboat into the dock and had to be taken to the hospital.
After the colossal fallout of her actions, Gemma had seemed to quit her partying and focus on her dream to become a winemaker and study at the famous Dukeshes Winery.
“Yes,” I whispered through the clogged emotions in my throat. “She had a bit of a habit for a while, but it was more that she partied too much and didn’t know when to stop. She went to rehab before moving to Albania.”
Raffa’s lips rolled under his teeth as he considered something and then retrieved his phone again to dash off another few messages.
“Do you really think she went to Albania to study wine?” he asked me.
“It was her passion,” I argued. “She was always closest to my mom, and they shared a love of wine and the old country. I think she went with honorable intentions, but I can’t say what might have happened if she met the wrong person. She tended to choose the wrong kind of guy.”
“The irony,” he murmured, clearly indicating the situation I found myself in now with him.
I cracked a smile even though my mind was reeling. “You think Gemma had something to do with the Albanian Mafia, and that’s why she died?”
“It’s a possibility. The Albanians did business with us until last year, when I decided to pull back from the drug-trafficking game because it was too hot and we have countless other options for investment.
When I asked you for help with the shipping manifests, it was to uncover who had taken over their operations in Italy, because we knew whichever clan was involved was likely the same coming after my life and my seat of power.
The Greco family also had ties to Venice.
” My eyes widened at the link. “Yes, one of the capo’s daughters married into the Tancredi family that rules that city.
The Venetian has been terrorizing my organization, and you, for months.
When your flat was broken into, they left a winged lion figurine with a wolf in its mouth. ”
“The symbol of Venice and the symbol of Rome,” I murmured as the wheels turned. “I don’t suppose the Romano family originated in Rome?”
“Tombola,” he said. Bingo.
“Wow,” I breathed, both fascinated and chilled by the fact that threats and mind games such as these were Raffa’s reality. “So this isn’t just about power, then.”
Raffa tilted his head, a lock of wavy hair falling like a comma across his forehead. My fingers itched to push it off his golden skin. “What makes you say that?”
“Using metaphors, sending threats, going after your girlfriend?” I ticked the items off on my fingers. “It seems pretty obvious to me. They want revenge against you for something.”
The smile that earned me was wide and bright, those sharp teeth glinting. For a moment, I thought he might actually slow clap for me.
“Bel lavoro, Vera,” he praised warmly. “Si, I believe they are after Clan Romano and not me specifically. My father, he was not a good man even by Camorra standards, capisci? Era cattivo. Rotten. He cheated on my mother, ignored my sisters because they were women, hit me or blackmailed me when I did not obey him. I have no doubt he killed women and children if it could not be helped. It is because of Aldo Romano that there are enemies at the door.”
“What happened to him?” I asked.
Raffa had never spoken about his father before, and it was obvious from the twisted knot in his brow and the bitterness in his tone that he harbored a deep hatred for the man.
“He was killed,” Raffa told me, utterly emotionless. “The Pietra family killed him over four years ago now.”
“So you became capo,” I murmured, trying to reconcile the man who could treat me and his family so kindly with the one who had killed so many men he did not bother to keep track.
Raffa’s mouth flatlined. “Si può fare tutto, ma la famiglia non si può lasciare.”
It took me a moment to translate it because he spoke so quietly, and by the time I did, he was shoving out of his chair to take my plate to the kitchen sink.
You can do anything except leave your family.
I thought about Gemma leaving us for Albania and never returning home. I thought of my dad and mom back in Michigan, separated from me not just by the Atlantic Ocean but also by the sea of lies and secrets stacked up between us.
The phrase seemed entirely suitable for what I knew of Italian families and their makeup, but I wasn’t sure it applied to my own, however much I might have wanted it to.