Chapter Twenty Guinevere
Chapter Twenty
Guinevere
Ginevra, the boys, and I screamed as his body hit the floor with a dull thwack, his cane clattering to the stone beside him. Gaetano’s brains painted the wall, the floor, and an old leather chair the same color as the blood dripping from its upholstery.
“Mariano!” Ginevra snapped, stepping forward only to pause when Raffa pointed his gun at her. “Che diavolo?”
What the hell?
“Ginnie,” Dad murmured, studying her with mild shock and warmth before he realized that she was exclaiming about their father’s death. “If anyone knows how much he deserved it, you do.”
My aunt stared at him for a long moment before her face crumpled. “I’ve wanted to do that for years.”
I was pulled from their exchange by the fact that Raffa had crossed the room to my side and was cupping my cheeks tenderly to tip my face to his gaze.
“La preda diventa la cacciatrice,” he murmured, his thumb rubbing through the blood under my eye.
The prey becomes the huntress.
“I knew you would find me,” I told him, clutching at his wrists, the gun still held in one hand as I did so. To my mild horror, tears pricked the backs of my eyes. “Even when they hurt me, I thought of you, and I knew it would be okay.”
I had never before now seen the expression that seized Raffa’s face, a softening of every feature except for his eyes, those pale-copper orbs burning like firelight as they stared down into mine.
“I will always come for you,” he swore. “Across oceans and any degree of space or time, I will come for you.”
“Me lo prometti?” I asked, suddenly desperate to hear it. “Promise me.”
“Te lo giuro,” he said solemnly.
I swear it.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, tipping my head forward to rest my bloody forehead against his chin. My fingers curled into the straps of his bulletproof vest and tugged him closer.
“Hush,” he ordered, kissing my chin. “I am just happy to have you alive and in my arms once again.”
I pulled back to look up at him, a stranger’s blood on his lips, which I had transferred to him like a lipstick mark.
The force of the love I had for him momentarily overwhelmed me, robbing me of my voice, stripping reality away to nothing but the gorgeous man holding me like a treasure even though I had hurt him, even though I was damp and bloody.
I thought of Petrarch’s quote “To be able to say how much love, is love but little,” and I understood it. There would never be enough language to harness the power of that singular sensation in my chest that existed just for Raffaele Romano.
As I opened my mouth to say something to that effect, I heard Dad say, “Jinx?”
And I was returned to myself jarringly, suddenly back in a safe room in the Pietra compound with a dead man to my right and an estranged family to my left.
“Dad,” I said, choking on the word.
Raffa reluctantly dropped his hands and stepped away so I could move toward my dad, who had his arms spread, waiting for me. I threw myself into them without thought, taking the comfort he had offered me most of my life.
“Guinevere,” he whispered, a sorrowful orchestra of pain in those three syllables. “My sweet girl, I thought I might have lost you.”
I didn’t know if he meant physically or emotionally, because both had been real possibilities. In the end it didn’t matter.
I could now understand how much he hated this life and everything it had stood for in his memories, so it meant everything to know he had crossed the Atlantic to make sure I was safe.
“I love you,” I told him, because somehow it was so much easier to say those words to him than to Raffa. Maybe because I had spent my whole life loving Dad already. “I’m sorry you had to grow up in this crazy family. Thanks for giving me a normal childhood.”
Dad’s laugh was wet in my hair as he held me close. “It was the only option acceptable for you. Your mother and I never wanted this life for you and Gemma.”
I laughed a little. “Well, it seems I was destined for it anyway.”
He pulled away to search my face with dark eyes. I kept my expression open, letting him read whatever was written there.
No more secrets between us.
“I suppose you were,” he murmured, both proud and disappointed.
“What have you done with the rest of the crew?” Ginevra asked Raffa, standing behind Dad with her hands on her hips.
Across from her, Raffa stood with his feet braced and arms crossed, appraising her coolly. “Many have been killed. Though having John with us spared us the necessity of killing everyone. You really should update your security more often.”
Ginevra scoffed. “We hardly imagined Mariano—John—would ever show his face again. Let alone to help Romanos break into our home.”
“You kidnapped my daughter,” Dad snapped, stepping away to face her with me tucked under his arm. “You gave me no choice.”
“To be fair, we thought we were saving her,” she insisted. “The Venetian told us Raffaele was keeping her hostage to stop us from turning on him.”
Behind her, Giulia got to her feet and moved gingerly toward Dad.
“Mariano?” she whispered, trembling hands lifting to him as she approached. “Bambino mio?”
“Si, Mamma,” Dad said softly, bending so she could put her hands on his face. “I’m here.”
I watched as Giulia, completely uninterested in the body of her dead husband, took her missing son’s face in her hands and started to weep. And I wondered if more good things than bad had come out of being kidnapped by my father’s family.
It took hours to resolve the chaos.
Raffa had called in the Burette family, which include Stefania, the woman who insulted me at a gala my first time in Florence, and enlisted the reluctant help of the Albanians, who disappeared as soon as the compound was taken.
There were bodies littered like festive decor around the grounds, a line of seven fallen soldiers on the front gravel drive like toppled GI Joes, two floating belly-up in the pool, another at the bottom of one staircase, limbs akimbo.
Raffa’s men hauled them in wheelbarrows down the hill to the incinerator the Pietras kept to cremate their horses and sheep when they died, feeding them into the machine until black plumes of smoke drifted over the triangular treetops.
Inside, Ginevra corralled Giulia into her room for a rest, and then transferred her sons to a recreation room that was unharmed in the attack so they could lose themselves in video games while the adults talked.
We adjourned to the front living space because Carmine had driven a reclaimed military G-Wagon into the back of the castello, right through the wall of windows.
Raffa did not leave my side.
Even when Martina rushed me and lifted me from my feet in a bone-crushing hug that said everything she could not find the words to express.
I missed you. Thank God, you are safe. Don’t do that to me again. I love you.
“I love you too,” I murmured into her hair only to have her drop me unceremoniously on my feet and push me lightly in mock distaste.
I was still grinning when Renzo clamped both hands on my shoulders to give me a gentle shake of recognition and admiration.
“Good work in there,” he said, jerking his head to indicate the panic room. “Got him right through the heart.”
“Yay for me,” I joked a little woodenly.
Now that the adrenaline was leaching away, I felt off balance and vaguely nauseated.
He cuffed me gently on the chin to reprimand my self-deprecation and shifted away so Carmine could come through and kiss my cheek.
“A mali estremi, estremi rimedi,” he told me.
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
“You did well, Vera,” he promised. “A woman worthy of a crown.”
The way he waggled his eyebrows and slid his gaze to Raffa, it was obvious he meant the kind of crown worn by the queen of the underworld.
But it was Ludo who made me cry.
He gathered me up in his arms, uncaring of his still-healing wound, and hugged me with his whole body, even though it was unbearably gentle.
“I would not have smiled for a long time if you had died,” he told me somberly in English. “You have brought joy to more than just the boss. I hope you know.”
I had to swallow past the tears twice to say, “I hope you know he is not the only one I have fallen in love with.”
He didn’t smile when we parted, but the nod he gave me felt like an initiation into the inner sanctum I hadn’t had until that day.
Raffa’s crew had always enjoyed me, cared for me, but I had not been a part of their group, merely a visitor passing through. After this, I felt officially cemented.
It should have alarmed me, and in a way it did.
Raffa had made it clear you became a member of their crew by vows written in blood, and once you were inducted, there was no turning back.
But I had erased the tracks behind me in the dark woods a long time ago and had no desire to find my way back down the path I’d traveled, even if I could find it again.
When Ginevra reappeared with a middle-aged man who had survived the attack, she introduced him as her bodyguard and friend, Raul.
“So I suppose the question now is what to do with us?” Ginevra asked wearily as she took a seat near the wooden coffee table the rest of us were arrayed around.
“That is one of the issues we have at hand,” Raffa agreed.
Dad had taken a love seat and pulled me down beside him so I couldn’t sit with Raffa, but my capo had taken the chair perpendicular to mine and dragged it even closer so the toe of his shoe, stained with blood, kissed my socked foot.
He had pressed Ginevra into sharing some of her clothes so I didn’t catch a chill, and even when I was wrapped in a cashmere sweater, soft lounge pants, and socks, he had still given me the jacket from the back of his car.
I tipped my nose into the collar to enjoy the fragrance of woodsmoke and cedar.
“Part of me thinks it would be best to raze the entire family to the ground,” Raffa continued casually, as if talking about mass murder was normal. “But you are lucky to be related to my cacciatrice, so I will spare you that.”