Chapter Eighteen Raffa
Chapter Eighteen
Raffa
We were too late.
The train had already left by the time Renzo pulled up onto the sidewalk outside the train station and we all spilled out of the car into a sprint.
But the beautiful thing about modernity was that you could find records of everything.
Including footage of the platforms.
Two hundred euros greasing the right palms, and we were crammed into the security room with the adviser, watching in black and white as Philippe dragged Guinevere up to the train.
Pride blossomed like a night-blooming flower in my chest when I watched my cacciatrice call for help and slip out of his grasp, only for an icy draft to obliterate it the moment I saw Philippe escape the crowd and get onto the train himself.
“Pezzo di merda,” I cursed, hitting the side of the small television so the image spasmed with static. “How the hell did Philippe pass inspection when we went through our ranks?”
“He’s known us since we were boys,” Carmine said quietly, his gaze still fixed on the screen, shock wide in his eyes. “He was never even on the short list.”
“Fuck,” I shouted because English curse words hit differently, and anger was roiling through me like a cyclone. “Call Ludo. I want Philippe found now.”
“And Guinevere?” Martina asked softly.
“Ludo is on Philippe. The rest of us do not sleep until we find where they have taken her,” I ordered.
And sleep we did not.
The first night Renzo and Martina tracked down passengers who had been on the same train, using the CCTV footage and Ludo’s facial recognition software.
A German man claimed he had been one of the few to try to help Guinevere get away from Philippe, and when Philippe had followed her onto the train, the German, Karl, had followed him too, even though it was not going to his destination.
He had followed him through the cars until he reached the end and watched as Philippe sat beside Guinevere and an older woman who looked like her mother.
“She did not even blink when the man sat down with them,” Karl had admitted with some confusion. “So I watched for a few minutes, but they chatted calmly, and then the girl settled in to take a nap. I figured I had interrupted a lovers’ quarrel and left them. Was I wrong to have done so?”
“Yes,” I shouted when Renzo relayed the information.
How could he have left her with a man she had tried to run from? I did not care for his logic, and my gums and fingers ached as if I could sprout fangs and claws and eviscerate him for his poor decision-making.
When it was I who had made the critical mistake.
But I could not understand Philippe.
He had been boyhood friends with Renzo, Leo, Carm, and me. We had played in the vines and pelted each other with olives. We had gone to school together and been pimply-faced teens.
How did someone like that turn on me so viciously?
Abducting the key to my heart right out from under me.
I felt like half a man knowing Guinevere was somewhere out there with the enemy.
“They won’t kill her, boss,” Carmine said quietly on day two while we watched hours of CCTV footage collected from every stop the train passed through, looking for Guinevere as she left the train with her captors.
“They could’ve done it on the train, and they didn’t.
They could have done it in the street. They wanted her alive. ”
“To manipulate me,” I growled.
Later that day, the demand came by way of a hand-delivered envelope. The courier, when pressed, explained it had been dropped off at the reception area of his firm, and he had no idea who it was from.
Fatti trovare alle due in Piazza de Miracoli, vieni da solo e sii puntuale, altrimenti la ragazza perde un occhio.
Two o’clock on Saturday in the Square of Miracles. Come alone and on time, or the girl loses an eye.
Fury blinded me, white-hot rage eviscerating my insides. I sat very, very still so that it would not split my skin and explode everywhere. Giving in to wrath would help no one. Calm, cool heads reigned supreme, especially in this world where hot-blooded men abounded.
“The Venetian and the Pietras have at least one man who truly knows me,” I said as I sat in my office at the palazzo with Martina, Carmine, and Renzo late the second night. “So I need to do something they would not think me capable of.”
“Leave her with them?” Martina asked, then held up her hands at my glower. “I’m just saying they would not expect that.”
“That is not an option, obviously.”
A cacophony outside the closed door prompted all of us to reach for the weapons we had been wearing since Guinevere was taken. When the door swung open and hit the opposite wall with a bang, it revealed Ludovico, panting hard and wincing, with a hand pressed to his healing side.
“Ludo.” I dropped my gun back into its shoulder holster and stalked toward him. “What takes you from Villa Romano? Who is watching the family?”
“Leo,” he promised, sucking a breath in through his clenched teeth. “I had to come. This should not be said over the phone.”
“What is it?”
He lumbered over to the desk, and Renzo stood so he could take his seat. Once settled, he checked his white shirt to see blood coming through the bandage. Martina got up to fetch the medical kit from the cupboard along the wall behind me.
“You asked me to find out who Mariano Giovanni was,” Ludo said finally, pulling his leather satchel from his shoulder gingerly to retrieve his computer. “Well, I finally found him.”
Renzo and Martina crowded behind me at the desk to peer over my shoulder at the screen Ludo swiveled my way.
It showed a photo of a young man with thick dark hair and large eyes framed with almost feminine lashes.
I would have recognized those eyes anywhere, in any face.
They were occhi di cerbiatta.
Guinevere’s doe eyes.
It was a photocopy of an old driver’s license from 1989 that read “Mariano Giovanni Pietra.”
Pietra.
“Dio mio,” Renzo breathed, struck dumb for the first time in his life.
I echoed the feeling.
Could this be possible?
That Guinevere was the granddaughter of Gaetano Pietra, the man who had feuded first with my father and now with me?
It seemed so wildly implausible, so absolutely absurd, that a small part of me felt like laughing.
But then my brain kicked in, puzzling the pieces together that I’d had all along.
Guinevere’s father had fled Tuscany before her birth and forbade her from entering the country. Such an extreme aversion for him to have merely disliked what Italy stood for or its governmental policies. No, this was much more personal, obviously diabolical.
It was for her safety, he had said on the phone with her that day in the bathroom with me when he had discovered she was in Florence. She had to leave at once for her safety and never return.
Because if the Pietras discovered who she was, they would never let her go.
The family had been growing weaker for years. Even before they killed my father and I went after their two eldest sons, they had lost a son to a drunken bar fight.
Mariano Giovanni.
Only, he had not died.
He had relocated to the US and changed his identity.
Given birth to Gemma and Guinevere Stone, who’d spent their entire lives not knowing that their bloodline was one of the oldest in Mafia history.
“I am a friend,” the man from Impruneta had told her when he tried to take her away.
Somehow the Pietras had found out exactly who was living in my house. Not just a tool to use against me, but one they felt they were owed.
A granddaughter returned home.
“Cazzo,” I muttered, staring hard at the image of her father. “The woman on the train was Ginevra Pietra. The German said she looked like her mother, and if she looks anything like John Stone, né Mariano Giovanni Pietra, then it had to be her.”
“They wouldn’t hurt their own blood,” Carmine said, but he didn’t sound so sure.
Gaetano Pietra was of a school like my father’s.
Cold and ruthless as the edge of a blade.
“You don’t think she knew . . .” Martina whispered like she could hardly stand to suggest the words.
“Assolutamente no,” I said, voice rough as I spoke through the weight of this new information. “She was not the kind to keep secrets, especially not after her father and I kept some egregious ones from her.”
“She could have been frightened to tell you.” Martina continued to speak gently, as if that would soften the blow of her implication.
“No. She did not know, and she did not enter into our lives as some kind of ruse to bring down the Romanos.” I shook my head.
“I told Guinevere the other day a quote by Dante, ‘Do not be afraid; our fate cannot be taken from us. It is a gift.’ Maybe this was John Stone’s karma, that his daughter would find love in the country he hated because he never saw fit to tell her why he hated it.
Maybe it was Guinevere’s destiny all along.
She came to Italy to find herself, and in so many ways, she has.
There was always this side of her that liked the darkness in me, that was called to it. ”
“We all saw it,” Ludo agreed with a grunt. “But now she is with the wrong family, and we have to get her back.”
“The Venetian will expect me to show up at Pisa’s Piazza dei Miracoli on Saturday because he believes I love her enough to die for her.”
“Do you?” Carmine asked, head cocked.
The rest of my soldati—my friends—peered at me in much the same way.
“Yes.” It was the truest truth I had ever uttered.
Would I die for Guinevere?
A hundred times over.
But I was not willing for either of us to die when we’d had so little of this life together. There were still things I wanted with her, things I had never hoped to dream of until she had appeared in my life like a fairy-tale mirage.
My worst nightmares and hers had come true with this kidnapping, but I would devote every moment of the rest of my life to making it up to her and wooing her to the dark side. Failure in either was not an option.
“I would die for her, but I will not play the sheep led so easily to slaughter. I am the wolf, the head of this family, and capo dei capi. If the Venetian wants what is mine, he will have to try much harder to outsmart me, because blunt force trauma will not take me down.”
“So what is your plan?” Carm asked.
“First,” I said, as something outlandish started to form in my mind.
“Nothing we speak of leaves this room. Not even to Leo. Let us hope Philippe was our only mole, but until we know for sure, our circle of trust is the four people in this room. I have an idea, but I have to admit, I am not sure it will work.”
“What is it?” Martina asked impatiently.
I sighed even though I knew this was the best course of action to get Guinevere back.
“I am going to call her father.”
They left me to make the phone call, going into the kitchen to eat and discuss how best to approach the Pietra castle near Pisa.
I sat in my chair, looking at the painting on the wall behind my desk, which I had purchased after Guinevere had left for Michigan.
It was John Collier’s portrait of King Arthur’s Guinevere, crowned queen and resplendent with flowers riding a white horse.
It appealed to me for many reasons, not least because the image depicted the scene in a legend where the queen is kidnapped, but her portrayal is of a serene, noble beauty ready to take on the world.
She reminded me of my Guinevere. The peace and stability she brought to my life, her elegance despite her youth, and the sincerity of her curious, insatiable mind.
I had taken to staring at it when I was lost in thought. The two framed photos on the desk I had of Guinevere and me together—one the very same selfie she had kept back at her apartment in Michigan—were too hard to look at for long. Painful reminders, like an urn kept on a mantel.
I dialed the number Ludo had given me and listened to the monotonous ring, which had never sounded more portentous.
“Hello, John Stone speaking.”
His voice was stripped of Italy, flat and almost nasal like Midwest accents could be.
“Hello,” I said. “My name is Raffaele Romano.”
“What’s happened to her?” he asked almost before I was finished rolling the second R.
I wished I could have proven his assumption incorrect, but there was no getting around the truth.
“It seems your family, the Pietras, have taken her.”
The pause that followed did not feel like true quiet. It came down the phone line like a silent scream, something with force that hurt my ears even without sound.
“When?”
“The day before yesterday—”
“And you are only just calling now?” he bellowed.
“I did not know until fifteen minutes ago that Guinevere was related to them. How could I when she did not know herself?”
I found myself holding my breath, because there was a chance I could have been wrong about it all. Her knowing, her role in my life.
Leo’s suspicions when he’d first met her echoed back at me.
“Fuck,” John Stone cursed viciously. “Fuck! She only found out the same day she was taken. I’m still not sure how.”
Ah.
We had tracked the GPS on the Maserati Philippe had been driving, so I had known they went to the Uffizi, but I had assumed it was just to pass the time viewing some of her favorite pieces while I was meeting the Albanians.
But the Uffizi archives were just the place she would visit if she had an inkling about the truth.
Unbidden, my lungs collapsed, punctured by my continued ache and longing for this brilliant slip of a girl who could see rhyme where there was barely any reason.
“Something must have triggered her to finally put it together. She and one of my men had been searching for some time for answers about her ancestry.”
John snorted rudely. “There was hardly anything left to find. I scrubbed most of my identifying records when I left that godforsaken place. How did you discover the truth if she didn’t tell you?”
“I have a talented sleuth on staff. When this is all said and done, he will help you remove even those trace amounts, but for now, I need your help.”
Another pause, this one a vacuum, as if John had reared away from the phone.
Finally, he said, “A Romano asking me for help. I never thought I would see the day.”
“Nor did I,” I snapped, impatient and at the end of a very short, very frayed rope that tied me to Guinevere. “Now, will you do as I ask to save your daughter from those vultures you call your family?”
Even though Guinevere had always spoken highly of her father, going so far as to rave about him, I had not seen a glimmer of anything in my own observations to warrant her praise.
Until, without hesitation, he said, “Anything for her.”
Finally, something to bond over.