Chapter Sixteen Guinevere
Chapter Sixteen
Guinevere
By the time I left the Uffizi, I knew three things.
The first was that all those late-night, dark-coded cravings I had experienced my whole life had a root cause. I might not have been born into la mafia like Dad or Raffa, but clearly it was part of my birthright and part of my destiny.
It was impossible not to believe I’d met my fate when Raffa hit me with his car that night on a lonely, random Tuscan road. That forces beyond our measure had orchestrated our meeting because we were meant to be.
Even when I’d fought it, my heart had been inextricably his from the moment he curled me into his bare chest and read to me from Dante’s Divine Comedy when I was sick.
I brought out the best in him, I thought, and that did not necessarily mean I brought out the good in him.
It meant that I made him happy after years of turmoil and loneliness.
It meant that I gave him a safe place to play the hero he’d always secretly wanted to be but had never been given the chance to play.
And he brought out the best in me too. Again, not the good by its most basic definition. He made me fiercer and more honest. He gave me the freedom and security to be who I truly was and go after what I really wanted.
Raffa had added spice to the banality of my life, the heat I had been longing for since I was that sick girl daydreaming in her hospital bed.
So why had I condemned him for it? How ridiculously hypocritical of me to crave the burn and say I was unable to stand the intensity.
What a stupid lie I’d force-fed myself to maintain the image my parents had drummed into me. How ironic that they were liars too.
My entire world as I’d known it had been eviscerated, and in its wake, I was determined to rebuild myself from the ashes in exactly the image I wanted.
Brave and bold, like Gemma had always encouraged me to be.
A huntress instead of a fawn, like Raffa knew I could be.
Someone who pursued her pleasure, societal judgment be damned.
Which led to the second thing I had decided.
I wasn’t going home.
Even if things did not work out with Raffa, my heart and soul had imprinted on Italy.
I knew in my bones there was no other place for me in this world.
The vibrant people, the food and culture, the history, the very smell of the cypress trees, and the view of endlessly rolling grapevines intermixed with golden fields of hay and thickets of olive trees.
Fate had led me here, and I was not going to spite it again by leaving.
And the third?
I could not live happily in a world where I was not with Raffa.
He was not a Prince Charming, but hadn’t I always turned my nose up at those heroes? Two-dimensional, shallow expressions of female fantasy.
Raffa was so much more than that.
He was troubled and dark, but he had a moral code, even if it was skewed.
He put his family before everything and stood by his friends no matter what.
He’d killed Martina’s abusive, piece-of-shit husband because in his mind that was the punishment for putting your hands on a woman he loved.
He’d broken a man’s finger because he had called me a whore.
I understood now, after killing someone to save Ludo and myself, that sacrifices were called for in the life he’d been born into, and there was no escaping it unless you wanted to roll over and die yourself.
With stakes that high, it was no wonder that violence bled into non-life-or-death situations as well.
It was a punctuation mark on an order. An oath someone unwittingly wrote in blood not to fuck with you again.
Whenever I’d read about antiheroes or fantasized about deviant, toe-curling seductions, I had been thinking about Raffa.
Before I even knew him, a part of my heart had hungered for him.
To deny the part of myself that longed for violent delights was to deny myself the love of a man who was not by any definition good but was wholly good for me.
Perfect for me.
The only hard question that remained was this.
Was I good enough for him?
“Andiamo,” I said to Philippe as I strode through the exit, the Italian stumbling behind me in his haste to catch up.
“Did you find what you wanted?” he asked me as we walked down to the parked car together.
I was surprised because Philippe was not the kind to make idle conversation.
Like most of the other soldati at the villa, he was there to protect and serve, not to socialize.
Only the core four, Leo, Renzo, Carmine, and Martina, seemed to hold a higher standing, doing as they wanted and interacting with the family as if they were key components of it.
“I wouldn’t say I wanted to find it, but yes,” I said with a little smile as he beeped open the door of the Maserati Levante and held the door for me to get inside.
When he took his place in the driver’s seat, he peered at me in the reflection of the rearview mirror. “What did you discover?”
I frowned, but answered smoothly. “I was curious about my ancestry. Apparently, I am distantly related to Petrarch.”
Most likely, I wasn’t, but Petrarch’s real surname was Petracco, which was a derivative of Pietra.
“You look like them,” he surprised me by saying.
“Excuse me?”
Philippe smiled, a slightly goofy grin because it was crooked and he had a chip in his front left tooth. “You look like the Pietras.”
A shiver ran down my spine like a needle point.
“How do you know the Pietras?” I asked calmly, even though there was no way he should have known I was related to them. He hadn’t been with me in the archives, and no one else knew.
“My boss does some work with them,” he explained with a shrug.
Which could have been a fair thing to say, but his wording was strange.
His boss.
Why not just say Raffa did work with them?
Unless his boss was someone else entirely.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked, because I knew the city well enough to realize we were not heading south, back over the Arno to the building where Raffa was having his meeting with the Albanians, but north.
“The train station. Boss said to meet him and the others there since you took so long. They’re already done and waiting for us.”
“Va bene,” I murmured, slipping my phone out of my pocket so I could text Raffa to confirm.
In the right-hand corner, a small symbol denoted I didn’t have service.
Impossible.
We weren’t in the countryside but in the cosmopolitan hub of Florence.
Unless . . . unless Philippe had done something to the reception in the car?
Porco dio, this was not looking good.
I searched the back of the car for anything I could use to defend myself if I had to and found absolutely nothing. Trying to leash the panic daring to break free and run rampant through my body, I focused on the best course of action.
Act calm, like I was as stupid as he clearly thought I was.
“I can’t wait to get back to the villa,” I said mildly. “I could sleep for a week. Grape harvesting is hard labor.”
Philippe smiled that crooked grin, and I was shocked by the lack of malice in the expression. How could he betray Raffa and take me toward some no-doubt-horrible end and look so . . . amicable?
“Saw you dancing with Leo. I basically grew up with him. He’s a good guy. Better than most of the rest of us.”
“I could say the same thing about Raffa,” I said carefully, just to test his reaction.
It was a swift lowering of his brows. “Yeah, he’s a good guy too. He deserves more than his lot, though, you know? He never wanted this.”
“He told me. But he is what he is, and I think he’s made some kind of peace with it,” I offered. It was true—even when Raffa could have told me the circumstances of becoming a reluctant mafioso, he hadn’t. Instead, he’d insisted again and again that he enjoyed what he did.
The lying, the stealing, and even, when necessary, the murder.
“There are always other options,” Philippe said with a shrug as he pulled into a parking lot. “We’re here.”
This was my opportunity to run. I just had to time it right, because I was quick, but Philippe’s legs were twice the length of mine, and he was built leanly like a runner and not thickly like Ludo, who was slower than me.
My heart panged thinking about Ludo back at the villa. He hadn’t wanted me to go into town without him, but he was still recovering from the bullet wound he’d gotten at Impruneta, so Philippe had been assigned to me instead.
He was going to be almost as pissed off as Raffa when they discovered me gone.
When Philippe opened the door for me, he took my arm and wedged it through his own.
“Rush hour,” he explained. “It gets busy.”
Merda.
I smiled at him. “Right. I’ll stay close.”
He tugged me into the crush of people heading toward the station, moving quickly without rushing. I kept my eye peeled for a police officer or somewhere I could give him the slip, but the open area around the station was too exposed.
There was no room to operate as Philippe dragged me through the turnstiles and onto the platform, and he held me pressed tightly to his side as we walked toward our train car at the end. Overhead, an announcement claimed there were two minutes to board before departure.
“Hey, stop that,” I said suddenly, a little too loud.
A couple waiting for the train across from ours turned to stare.
“Stop touching me,” I said again as I struggled away from Philippe, who was scowling at me. “I said stop!”
“Hey.” An older man with a German accent stepped forward. “Hey, you should not be touching her like that.”
“Please, help. He won’t let me go,” I begged.
The man in the couple to my other side started forward to help, and two women joined him, converging on us.
For the first time since I’d left the Uffizi, Philippe looked alarmed.
“Take your fucking hands off her,” one of the women demanded. “I’m going to call the police.”
“Do it,” someone else agreed. “He’s harassing her.”
“Let go!” I demanded, leveraging all my weight against Philippe.