Chapter Fourteen Guinevere #2
It wasn’t my first time in the archives.
I’d visited once with Ludo in the summer, so I knew where to go to find the documents from the early seventies, when my father was born somewhere in the region.
There were no other people in the stacks with me, but I couldn’t help feeling on edge, as if someone might come across me at any second and arrest me for my curiosity.
At worst, they would make me leave.
So why did it feel like I was on the edge of a cliff, staring down at the churning sea below, my toes hanging over the rock?
My fingers trembled as I came across the year 1973 and then caught on the section of surnames starting with P. I took the entire file out of the metal drawer and carried it to a table in the back behind stacks of utilitarian shelves.
Piazza, Piccola . . . Pietra.
There were only four births in the region that year with the last name Pietra.
And one of them was Mariano Giovanni Gaetano Pietra.
Born March 3, 1973, outside Pistoia, Tuscany.
My pulse boomed in my ears like thunder after the lightning strike of new information left me paralyzed.
“Oh my God,” I whispered as my fingers shook the paper too hard for me to read it.
I didn’t need to read the information again to know.
This man was my father.
Setting the papers carefully aside, I pulled out my phone to do some digging. I was no hacker like Ludo, but I had been trained to investigate companies we wanted to invest in thoroughly enough to bank on their return, so I had more than enough skills to find what I needed.
Especially because I remembered the name Pietra from discussions Raffa had with his soldati.
A family in the Camorra that ostensibly worked under the umbrella of Raffa as capo dei capi, but that had, lately, been rebelling against him. They had bad blood, he’d said, because they had killed his father.
Bile rose in my throat at the implications and settled, bitter enough to make me gag on the back of my tongue.
“Please, no, please, no,” I whispered as I searched deeper and deeper through the internet, checking Italian forums and newspaper archives until I found what I had hoped so deeply not to find.
Gaetano Pietra welcomed his third son on March 3 with his wife, Giulia; named Mariano Giovanni after his paternal and maternal grandfathers. He will be baptized next Saturday at the Cathedral of Saint Zeno.
My head thunked against the table as my spine suddenly lost its rigidity.
Someone who was very thorough had gone through and scrubbed most mentions of the mafioso’s third son from digital existence, but this article in a small local paper remained, with the announcement of his birth.
I killed his two eldest sons in retribution, Raffa’s words echoed back to me.
My lover had killed my uncles.
My father’s family had killed Raffa’s father.
What were the odds?
My mathematician brain tried to calculate them and found it wasn’t as far fetched as it should have been.
I had come to Florence because I knew Tuscany was where my father had been born.
Of course, meeting Raffa had been incredible serendipity, but the odds of meeting someone associated with the Camorra who might have known my father’s people didn’t seem unlikely.
If Raffa had six hundred people working for his outfit, not including the dozens of capos who operated in other regions of the north, there had to be hundreds of cogs in the machine that would lead me back to the Pietra family.
But still.
My vision blurred as I exited the internet app on my phone and dialed a number I knew by heart.
“Hello?”
“Dad.” The word fell out of me like an anchor, dragging me down, down, down into panic. “Dad, I need to know . . . are you related to a man named Gaetano Pietra?”
The silence that echoed back at me was colossal. I had the sudden, incredibly surreal feeling of being alone in the Arctic tundra, surrounded by ice and endless quiet.
“Where did you hear that name?” Dad said finally, voice textured with weariness.
“Cazzo,” I breathed.
“Modera il linguaggio,” he barked out of habit, only this time the parental admonishment was said in rusty Italian.
“Dad, what the fuck?” I said, ignoring his warning to watch my mouth. “Were you a part of the Italian Mafia?”
It made so much sense I felt ill and dizzy with it. The metal edges of my phone cut into my fingers from how hard I was holding it.
His sigh seemed endless. “I left that behind when I was a much younger man.”
“So yes,” I surmised. “How . . . ? God, I have so many questions I don’t even know where to start.”
“Start with how you discovered this at all. Is it because of that man, Raffa Romano?” His words lashed at me through the phone.
“You are in absolutely no position to be high and mighty about Raffa when you were in the Camorra yourself, Dad,” I snapped back.
“So he did follow in his father’s footsteps, then.” He made a noise at the back of his throat like a dying animal. “Fuck, Guinevere. When I saw that photo of you in the paper with him in August, I did some asking around, and everyone said he was clean.”
Despite the circumstances, I grinned, a feral expression to match the wicked pride I felt that Raffa was so good at his job.
“This isn’t about Raffa. It’s about you having lied to me my entire life. No wonder you didn’t want me to come to Italy.”
“Yes, no wonder,” he shouted. “You do not know how dangerous it is for you to be there, Jinx. With your luck, someone could figure out who you are related to. Raffa Romano could find out! And you do know what he would do to the granddaughter of one of his rivals? Your mother and I would never see you again.”
“How could you let me exist in the world not knowing something this big?” I demanded. “Even if I had just been traveling through France and England, how could you have known I wouldn’t run into someone who might recognize me?”
“It was incredibly unlikely anyone would recognize you out of context and based on looks alone, even if you did bump into someone who once knew me. The odds were minuscule. I calculated them,” he said with a scoff.
Of course he had, just like I had tried to.
“Only, you betrayed my trust by doing the one thing I ever asked you not to, and you spent the summer in Italy. You met a fucking mafioso, for Christ’s sake, Guinevere. I thought I raised you better than that.”
“I didn’t know at the time,” I seethed. “Though if I’d had all the information about my family and my background, maybe I would have recognized the signs.”
My mind was reeling like I’d gone for a spin on a merry-go-round and couldn’t get off, the wheel just spinning faster and faster until all my thoughts swirled into a chaotic muddle.
“If Romano is in the Camorra, you need to leave him. Now,” Dad was saying, urgency vibrant in his tone. “I’ll buy you the next flight out of Florence. Come home, and we’ll figure out how to keep you safe. He obviously found you once before, but—”
“He saved me once before,” I corrected. “Raffa wouldn’t hurt me, even if it meant saving his own life.”
I knew as soon as I spoke the words that they were true. Raffa would move heaven and earth to keep me safe and happy, despite the fact that, recently, I hadn’t done anything to deserve that kind of devotion.
God, I thought, I had judged him so harshly when my own father was just like him.
“How can you have raised me on this intense rhetoric about being good and kind in a world that is anything but? When you know its dangers and atrocities better than almost anyone? Instead of arming your daughter, you declawed her and left her vulnerable to predators.”
“Predators like Raffa Romano.”
“No. Never Raffa.” Dark, bad, and dangerous to know he might be, but Raffa would never hurt me, and more than that—more than my dad—he wanted me to be both his cerbiatta and his cacciatrice. His fawn and his huntress. “He is the only one who wants to help me make myself a weapon.”
“You don’t need to be a weapon, for fuck’s sake. You’re just a girl. Your life is in America as a financial adviser. You have a serious chronic illness, Guinevere! Come home, and I’ll protect you.”
“I am more than just my illness, Dad. How many times do I have to say that? I’m not some frail princess you can stuff away in a tower,” I argued, fury building inside me, turning the confusion and despair into something actionable.
“I should have known the truth so that if anything came for me, I could defend myself. Now, you’ve left me in an impossible situation, and I’m playing catch-up.
If anything happens to me, Dad, it will be your fault for not trusting me with the truth. ”
He made a sound like I’d run him through with a blade.
“I don’t know if I can forgive you for keeping this from me,” I whispered through the mass of emotion in my throat, which was clogging it like debris in a drain. “This is just . . . too much.”
“We can speak about it when you get home. I’ll tell you everything you want to know,” he promised, and I could feel his desperation through the phone. “Just come home—now.”
“No. You can’t keep me safe there. They already got to me once before.”
“The break-in,” he murmured. “The police said it was a disgruntled employee from the Enrich Company, but I should have recognized the shoddy cover-up. It must have been Romano’s business catching up to you.”
“Maybe, but how can you be sure it wasn’t yours?” I countered.
“They haven’t found me in two decades,” he said shortly. “There is no way.”
“Well, apparently the Pietra family has reignited the feud with the Romanos, so who knows. Maybe they’ve been searching for the long-lost heir to the throne for a long time now, and they’ve finally found you to bring you home.”
“I will never set foot on Italian soil again,” Dad spat like a curse.
“Good, then I won’t have to see you for a while,” I said calmly before slowly ending the call and blocking his number.
When Mom called minutes later, I muted hers too.
I sat in the enormous, mostly empty archive room for a long time after that, just staring into space as my brain worked.