Chapter Nineteen Guinevere #2
I swallowed thickly but gathered my bravado around me like a shield. “Which are you? The loving grandfather happy to meet his granddaughter for the first time, or the Mafia don wanting answers from me by any means necessary?”
“Can’t I be both?” he asked, and it gave me chills because he was utterly sincere. “I do not want to hurt you, but I will if it means ending this mess once and for all.”
“By killing me, you mean?”
“No, of course not. Why would I kill one of my only remaining blood relatives?” he asked, irritated with me enough that the thin, loose skin around his neck wobbled. “There are many stages between life and death, Guinevere. This is something I could teach you, if you consented to help us now.”
“Help you how?”
The door creaked open, and Eduardo appeared holding two large ceramic pitchers and a pretty designer silk scarf, kind of like the one Raffa had used to tie my hair back on our ride out to Livorno.
“Tell me about Raffa Romano and his outfit,” Gaetano suggested, flicking invisible lint off his suit pants.
I sat silently, letting the quiet stretch on and on.
“Eduardo,” Gaetano said with a heavy sigh, gesturing toward me with a nod. “Perhaps you will have an easier time convincing her than I.”
The whipcord-lean man stepped away from the middle of the cleared room, where he had placed the pitchers beside the chair, and came for me.
I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting the open hand slap that hit me over the ear. Pain and static erupted in my head, my vision fuzzy and white, my senses deafened by a loud ringing.
Vaguely, I was aware of Eduardo picking me up to carry me over to the chair in the center of the room and secure me with something by the ankles and wrists.
When my head cleared enough to make sense of things again, I was locked to the chair, with the end of my braid tied into the rope around my wrists so that my head was forced back at a painful angle.
“I am sorry for this, Guinevere,” Gaetano murmured from his spot to my left. “But this is the only way to ensure Romano shows up in the piazza tomorrow. He needs to see how much you are suffering and imagine how much you will suffer still if he does not do as I’ve asked.”
“Vaffanculo,” I spat at him as Eduardo reached for the pitcher filled with water and draped the beautiful orange silk scarf over my face. “When Raffa comes for me, I hope he leaves killing you until last so I can be the one to put a bullet between your eyes.”
Gaetano’s laugh was muffled as Eduardo started to pour water over my face through the silk until I felt like I was drowning.
He’s coming, I thought desperately as I struggled not to swallow water and fought to breathe.
He will always come for you.
“What is the security code for the palazzo in Firenze?” Gaetano raised his voice to be heard over the rush of water in my ears.
It was the first of many, many questions.
Eduardo waterboarded me for a long time.
They interrogated me about Raffa, his business dealings and family, and then, when none of that proved fruitful, they asked me about my father.
My continued silence resulted in the questions devolving into threats.
Did I want to see Raffa tomorrow after he’d been killed?
Maybe they would place him in my bed while I slept so the blood would soak the sheets and wake me with a chill.
Maybe they would serve me his eyeballs, plucked intact from his head, on my breakfast tray Sunday morning.
Maybe they would hunt down my father all the way in Michigan so they could meet my mother and invite them for a friendly visit. Would that properly motivate me?
At some point, I couldn’t even hear them anymore.
Every single one of my senses and every atom of my being was focused on not asphyxiating.
If I’d had the wherewithal to think beyond that, I might have criticized the torture technique.
How could anyone focus enough to answer questions when they were fighting for every breath?
The sunlight spilling through the one window in the room was thick and syrupy with midday heat by the time he peeled the silk from my face for the last time and swept out of the room without untying me.
Gaetano had left a while ago.
He said it distressed him to see me suffer.
I would’ve laughed at the memory, but I was still struggling to drag air into my waterlogged lungs. My desperate gasps rasped too loudly in my ears, panic making the laborious act even more difficult.
It felt like I might never breathe properly again.
I coughed up water until I felt sick and then vomited the meager amounts of breakfast I’d eaten onto the wood floor beside my feet.
This was why Dad hadn’t wanted me involved with his family.
This was why Raffa had kept his camorrista secret for so long.
There was nothing glamorous or comforting about life in the Mafia.
I was not even a mafioso, not even legally bound to one, and yet there I sat, tied to a chair, dripping with water and sweat, gasping like a fish out of water.
My mind had taken me to a place in the subterranean depths of my psyche, a kind of mind palace or safe harbor away from the horrors of what Eduardo was doing to me.
I found myself in a dark wood, the very same one as Dante in the opening line of The Divine Comedy. Virgil was there, as he was for the poet, greeting me solemnly and offering me a skeletal hand.
He promised to take me to my lover, but first, I had to journey through hell to reach him.
Now, sitting listlessly in the chair, the heavy drip of water leaching off my hair and clothes and the harsh rattle of my breath a soundtrack to the revelation, I understood something vital.
If this was hell, I would cross it over and over if it meant being with Raffa.
Even more importantly, I acknowledged that this wasn’t just a once-in-a-lifetime scenario. Maybe I would never be waterboarded through a designer silk scarf again, but there would be other times when I would be in danger because of Raffa and what he was.
Loving the capo dei capi was not without its risks.
I had firsthand accounting of that.
But God, it was also not without its rewards.
As I dripped dry, a chill settling into my bones, I warmed myself by thinking about all the ways Raffa had loved me.
Buying me an entire new wardrobe, taking care of me when I was ill, letting me drive his Ferrari Spyder, buying me a cornicello to counteract my bad luck.
Trying to save me from himself, even though it hurt him.
It took me a long time to realize I was crying, because my face was already wet.
At some point, miraculously, I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, I was jerking awake so strongly I almost upended the chair.
A flurry of Italian shouts echoed throughout the usually quiet house, along with a sound that made my heart take off racing in my chest.
Gunfire.
I never thought I would be so happy to hear that tat-tat-tat of semiautomatic weapons.
When the door flung open, Ginevra was there in what looked like gardening clothes, dirt streaked across her cheek and a huge gun in one hand. Something in her expression flickered with relief at the sight of me before passing into horror and arriving at resolution.
“He’s here.”
I thought it was a sob crawling up my throat like a rat through a pipe, a sensation that almost made me gag, but when it emerged, it was laughter.
Bright, hysterical laughter.
Ginevra stared at me for a moment until a crash reverberated through the house, shaking the walls so that dust spiraled through the air.
“Cazzo,” Ginevra cursed as she hurried to my side and bent to work at the ropes around my ankles.
“Something rammed the house,” I said, smiling so wide it hurt my wet, aching face.
“Crazy man,” she muttered before clamping the gun between her thighs to reach for a knife in her gum boot, cutting through the ropes to free me. “Attacking the Pietra compound in broad daylight.”
I laughed again. In the wake of surviving this horror on my own, giving Gaetano and Eduardo nothing, and knowing that Raffa was not riding in on his noble steed as my Prince Charming but cracking open the very earth to find me, as Pluto had to reach Proserpina, I felt freer than I ever had before.
“He wanted to make a spectacle of it,” I said, even though she hadn’t asked a question. “He wants them to know he can come for them at home in broad daylight, with the house full of soldati, and still win.”
“He won’t win,” Ginevra said as the last of my bonds fell away. “Not unless he has an army. This is a castello, Guinevere. It was made to withstand a siege.”
I only grinned as she tugged me toward the door. My legs were gummy, but I forced them to move with minimal grace.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked.
Following her seemed like the best option regardless. I was a sitting duck in that room, especially given everyone in the house knew that was where I had been kept. I had no idea of the layout, but emerging from the basement seemed like getting a step closer to Raffa.
“The safe room,” Ginevra declared, pausing at the threshold of a staircase to peek around the corner with her gun drawn.
“I’m surprised you’d bother,” I admitted as I ran up the stairs behind her and followed her into a room hidden in the concave wall of the staircase.
Inside, an older woman sat on a chartreuse velvet love seat with two boys.
I recognized her instantly as the confused woman from the Duomo.
She blinked at me, pushing aside one of the boys gently as she stood up and then reached out her hand toward me.
“Io ti conosco,” she said.
“You do,” I agreed in Italian, stepping forward to take her hand and press it to my cheek. “I am your granddaughter.”
Tears pooled in her lower lids, catching on the wrinkles beneath as they spilled.
“She has dementia,” Ginevra explained quietly. “She often gets confused. Gaetano does not let her out in public much.”
“I saw her in Firenze the day you took me from the train,” I mentioned without looking away from my grandmother’s beautifully aged face. “She recognized me then too.”