Chapter Seventeen Guinevere
Chapter Seventeen
Guinevere
I woke up because someone was jostling me none too gently. Even though my head felt stuffed with cotton and pounded like a pillow beneath the fists of a restless sleeper, memories came back to me instantly.
I lashed out even before I forced my sticky lids open, my fist landing in the throat of the man who carried me.
Philippe let out a crackling grunt, his grip loosening so I slid from his arms onto my own two feet. I landed in a crouch and immediately sprinted away from the people in front of me waiting around the front door of an actual castle.
I didn’t get far before someone tackled me hard into the dirt road. My chin hit the packed ground, and the sharp edge of a canine tore through my lip.
Still, I did not stop fighting.
Raffa’s voice in my head urged me on.
La cerbiatta diventa la cacciatrice.
The fawn becomes the huntress.
I managed to kick out, happy I’d worn boots that day, landing the heel in the chin of the man who’d caught me by the legs.
It gave me space to roll onto my back, even though he kept hold of one ankle.
When he reared over me, I went for his eyes with my thumbs, digging into the inner corners with my nails until I felt the thin membranes pop and warm, wet blood sluiced down my forearms.
The man howled above me, tossing his head back with the yowl of pain. It gave me time to squirm out from under his weight, but by then, like wolves called to the hunt, more men surrounded me.
“Basta!” someone ordered in an old, creaky voice that still managed to hold serious authority.
For just a second, I found myself frozen as well.
When I tried to get up again, one of the suited men stepped forward to press the mouth of a gun to my forehead, a cold kiss.
I stilled.
The bodies around me parted to reveal an old man stalking toward us with the use of a gold-tipped cane.
Where he had once been tall, he was now stooped over, the joints and bones beneath his silken, loose skin like the gnarled roots of trees.
Even in old age, there was something beautiful about him, almost majestic, like one of those paintings you saw in old British manor homes and museums of white men who had ruled the colonial world.
He was swarthier than that, with deep-olive-toned skin and eyes like black olives between knitted, scowling brows.
It was obvious that this man was John Stone’s father.
Gaetano Pietra.
He did not stop until the tips of his black leather boots were pressed into the side of my belly. With him looming over me, the shadows of night thick on his face with the blazing lights of the house at his back, I thought he might actually kill me then and there.
A man so ready to kill his daughter’s lover would not draw the line at his estranged granddaughter.
But then he was offering his hand down to me, each finger glinting dully with the metallic shine of heavy rings.
“This is my granddaughter you tackle into the dirt,” he said in that scratchy Italian. “Touch her again like that, and I will let her gouge out your eyes to the root.”
I blinked up at him, shocked by his vehemence.
Irritated with my hesitancy, he bent down to grab my hand himself and leveraged me to my feet. Given the cane and his knotted bones, I was not expecting his strength.
He turned me with one hand so that the light from the house spilled over me before taking my chin in his hand to lift it to his.
“You look like him,” he said after a long minute of scrutiny. “Pretty, but like him very much.”
“A compliment,” I said, tipping my chin higher in his grip.
A fleeting smile struck his face, there and gone so fast I almost thought I’d imagined it.
“Inside,” he called to everyone in the courtyard, at least ten soldati and my aunt lingering on the periphery.
As one, the group moved toward the house.
Even though curiosity ate at me, I knew I would use the first chance I got to escape. These people were strangers even if we shared the same blood, and they had a deep, dark history with the only man who did matter to me.
Raffa.
Somewhere out there going mad knowing I had been taken.
Gaetano’s hand was an iron vise around my biceps, and he took me inside what was clearly a small castle.
It was grander than Villa Romano, with marble floors and curling staircases to the second level.
Old walls had clearly been taken down to make the main floor mostly open, built around the two central staircases.
In the back, stone had been taken out to allow for a huge panel of windows to let in natural light.
Under other circumstances, I would have fallen in love with it.
The house was filled with people, at least a dozen, all of whom were staring at me.
What the hell was going on?
“Famiglia,” Gaetano said in a voice that boomed and crackled like sound over speakers. Everyone held still to listen, a vibrating anticipation echoing throughout the room. “Ci è stata restituita.”
My family, he said, she is returned to us.
Um . . .
What?
I blinked as a few women started to cry, and everyone else clapped somberly, as if after a particularly resonant eulogy.
“What is going on here?” I whispered, only because I didn’t have the breath in my lungs to speak louder.
Gaetano turned me to him by the shoulders, a grin folding the skin back away from large white teeth. “I am sorry it took us this long to retrieve you.”
“Retrieve me from where, exactly?” I asked, completely dumbfounded.
A frown pinched the skin between his thick brows before he looked beside us to my aunt, who winced slightly.
“You were held hostage,” he said almost soothingly, rubbing my shoulder. “By those cretins the Romanos.”
I blinked once, twice, before slightly hysterical laughter bubbled up my throat. I tried to cup it in my hands at my grandfather’s worried expression, but it just kept spilling between my fingers.
“I think we better talk privately before we celebrate,” my aunt stepped forward to say, placing a gentle hand on my back to push me toward the hallway to the right of the open-plan area.
Gaetano nodded, speaking rapid-fire Italian to a few men, who instantly converged on him while my aunt led me down the dark hall toward the back of the house.
We stopped at the door to an office, where I was pushed unceremoniously into a high-backed leather chair before a palatial desk.
Unlike Raffa’s offices in the villa and palazzo, this was chaotic, stuffed with books, files, and loose papers trapped under lamps, empty plates, and oddities like a skull painted with laurel leaves and a trophy of a man fishing.
It was dark and seemed cramped because of the mess and the old, chestnut-stained furniture, but there was something comfortable and charming about it that put me more at ease than the modern, open-concept house had done.
I wondered if my father had sat in this chair as a young man, and tried to make sense of the surreal reality unfolding around me.
It took a few minutes for Gaetano to join us, the tap of his cane heralding his progress down the hallway, but no one spoke a word until he filled the doorway and made his way behind the desk.
“I wasn’t kidnapped by the Romanos,” I said as soon as he sat down, sitting straight in the chair, hands folded as if they’d take me seriously because of my prim bearing. “If anything, Raffa Romano saved me. More times than I can count.”
My aunt scoffed. “That bastardo would not save a cat from drowning.”
“He saved this American girl from a sexual predator,” I snapped at her. “You do not know him.”
“Nor do you,” Gaetano said, folding his hands and propping his elbows on the desk to peer at me over them.
He spoke English beautifully, with that same gramophone warble that came from old age but that gave his speaking voice a resonant quality.
“You are just a child in a foreign land with foreign ways. You do not know of what you speak.”
It was my turn to scoff. “I know that Raffa Romano is the capo dei capi of the Northern Italian Camorra. I know that therefore you should not be acting against him, but one of your family killed his father without provocation.”
“Shut your mouth,” my aunt ordered.
“Ginevra.” Gaetano silenced her with a raised hand. “Let her speak.”
“Thank you. As I was saying, I know more than I should if I was merely a captive of the Romanos. When Raffa found me, I had no money, no clothes, and no identification. He took me in, and . . .” I faltered for the first time, my damp fingers playing with the hem of my silk shirt.
“I fell in love with him because he is a good man.”
“Tell me,” Gaetano urged, a kind, grandfatherly smile on his creased face. “Did you know he was Il Gentiluomo? Il mafioso?”
I frowned at the moniker but nodded. “I did. Eventually.”
His smile thinned. “Not because he wanted you to.”
“Are you trying to tell me that Raffa Romano somehow found out I was related to your family before I entered the country and then, knowing I would arrive exactly when I did on the side of the road, he hit me with his car so we could meet ‘by accident’? I don’t think so.”
“Stranger things have happened,” Ginevra opined.
“Yes, like being kidnapped by my own aunt.”
“I saved you,” she argued, her expression the very same one I’d seen so often on my father’s face when he was being particularly obstinate.
“You took me from the man I love,” I declared, staring down my nose at her before leveling the same look at Gaetano. “Why should I believe you over the man who has shown me nothing but kindness? When you have tried to kill me more than once?”
Gaetano reeled like I had slapped him. “No matter what you think of Il Gentiluomo, you cannot believe that after losing so much of my family I would order the death of my own granddaughter.”
“Maybe you did it before you knew who I was,” I suggested, crossing my arms.
If I had been standing, I would have braced my feet apart. Raffa’s power stance.