Chapter Twenty-One Raffa
Chapter Twenty-One
Raffa
Practicalities included what to do with Philippe Morrone, the bastardo who had turned on me and mine.
He was not at the Pietra castello, but two of my men found him heading east through San Bavello, probably en route to Venice.
They had him ready for us when we returned to Villa Romano.
He was suspended in the barn like a leg of pork hung to dry and mold slowly in the dank, cool dark.
But I would not leave him to die in such a way.
I was too impatient. The rage that had been cancerously building in my gut since the moment Guinevere was taken had infected every inch of my tissues. The only way to combat this sick fury was to take it out on Philippe.
He was not even a man to me anymore.
He was a slab of meat, a carcass I had to prepare like a butcher into ordered pieces I could make sense of.
Fortunately, Philippe had witnessed my methods of interrogation before, so he had a taste for exactly what I could do to him if he did not answer my questions clearly and promptly.
Unfortunately, whoever had convinced him to flip on me was a powerful enough influence that he refused to give up the identity of the Venetian even when I asked . . . repeatedly.
“This is the last finger you have left on this hand,” I told him conversationally as I wiped sweat from my brow and adjusted the cigar cutter around his index finger. “Do you really want to lose it and be left with only a thumb?”
Philippe let out an animal groan like a heifer. “Per favore, capo, no. You must understand! If I tell you, many will die. You do not want their deaths on your head.”
“Do I not?” I mused, scratching at the stubble growing thick across my chin. “Should I not be the judge of that? You have proven a useless one yourself.”
“Lui è spietato,” he groaned as blood pulsed from the stubs of his lost fingers, dripping to the ground in a steady rainfall.
“He is a savage. He has looked into your eyes, Raffa, and lied. He has watched you find love, and he wants nothing more than to rip it away. It is an envy that goes beyond hatred. He wants everything you have.”
“My Guinevere?” I asked darkly, the cigar cutter biting into his flesh in a neat circle.
His cry echoed through the barn. “No, no, not her. But your life. Everything you own.”
“Even if he had all the businesses, all my money and connections, he could not keep them. Do you know why, pezzo di merda?” I leaned close to smile in his face, the expression so cruel it hurt my face to make it.
“Because the most important thing I own is the loyalty of my people.” I sighed. “People unlike you.”
“I am not as disloyal as you think,” he cried out as I compressed the blades harder, the metal hitting bone. “All I ever wanted was to be part of this family. Even working with him, I tried to help you and Guinevere.”
“Do not speak her name,” I hissed. “You are unworthy of it. You will not tell me what I need to hear, and I am a man of my word, Philippe. Let me teach you what that looks like.”
His scream tore through the air, beyond the wood slats of the barn, out into the cold autumn night.
He passed out from the pain, hand a bloody stump at his side.
I stood up and moved away to the table set up in the corner to retrieve a handkerchief to wipe my hands.
“He did say the Venetian is based in Tuscany,” Renzo muttered, wearing spectacles as he bent to take meticulous notes of the interrogation.
Ludo sat beside him with his computer and tablet open, the screen of the former running a search for any bank accounts, addresses, and business affiliations linked to Philippe.
Carmine sat beside him drinking sambuca straight from the bottle.
Martina was in the great house, debriefing the soldati about the new turn of events and sending away any of the men who did not meet our exacting qualifications.
I would have a skeleton crew at the villa before I housed another traitor close to my family.
Only the men who had lived under our roof or Tonio’s would be kept on until we discovered exactly where the treachery lay.
“So he is not working with Donatella Verdi,” Carmine said.
“Not necessarily.”
“She owes you her position and her life,” he noted. “She would not have survived the coup against her brother without your support.”
“Loyalty, as Philippe has proven, is not always evergreen,” I drawled.
“Get her to Firenze for the Ognissanti and the Giorno dei Morti celebrations. I want her to look me in the eye as she accounts for the actions of the people associated with her territory, even if she is not directly responsible.”
“You plan to throw the Day of the Dead dinner even in light of this atrocity against our family?” Tonio asked from his post on a stool on the other side of the barn from the others.
They had never liked my uncle, and my uncle had never warmed to them.
They were the old guard and the new, the differences between them never starker than in situations like this.
Leo, seated with his adoptive father, often provided the bridge between the two.
He had been raised just as much by Aldo Romano as by Tonio, even more so than me in many ways because he had lived at the villa during those eight years I was in London.
He understood both sides of the coin in a way I could not.
“It is important to keep up appearances,” Leo soothed. “We do not need people to think the Romano empire is crumbling under the stress of a few errant stronzi.”
Tonio slammed his fist to the wall beside him.
“We do not need to waste time on such niceties. Where are your balls, Raffaele? Your father would have killed every last Pietra standing, including that American girl and her cowardly father who fled our country. He would have put a bullet between the eyes of that traitor hanging there, giving you nothing but platitudes, and ended this bullshit.”
“I am not my father, zio,” I reminded him coldly. “Why would I kill men who could give me the answers I need to truly end this subversive war, hmm?”
“It is like wringing blood from a stone.” Tonio spat, shoving to his feet, his stool thudding against the wall. His gun was in his hand a moment later as he stormed toward Philippe’s hanging body. “Let me end this if you will not.”
The moment his gun hit Philippe’s cheek, I was behind Tonio with my own weapon pressed to the base of his neck.
“When will you learn, vecchio, that it is I who am in charge here? Not you. Stand down and get the fuck out before you push me any further,” I warned.
“You would not harm your own family,” he countered, holding firm.
“I would kill anyone willing to stand between me and the answers I need to protect my loved ones,” I said, hissing the words into his ear just to see the way it sent a shiver over his skin. “Do not opt to learn that the painful way, Uncle.”
“So soft.” He clucked his tongue but dropped the gun and stormed toward the exit, then pulled open the barn door with a metallic gurgle.
“It is your determination not to listen to my advice that has put this family in such a mess in the first place. Did I not tell you leaving the arms trade would result in a loss of status and open us to rivals? Did I not tell you fucking an American girl instead of marrying Stefania Burette was unwise? You proud idiot, Raffa. You will get this family you are so eager to protect killed.”
“Ignore him,” Leo said in the silence that followed Tonio’s dramatic exit. “He was worried about you today, that’s all.”
I scoffed lightly because while Tonio had always encouraged me to forge my own path, he had done nothing to curb the crueler impulses of my father, both in business and in regard to his family.
He had stood by one too many times when Aldo hit me for me to believe he prized my well-being anywhere near as much as his own.
When I took over as capo dei capi, he had the strange notion that I would defer to him in all things.
He did not understand why I did not seek his counsel because he did not understand my most basic principle: not to rule like my father.
“Wake him up,” I ordered Carmine, who stood to retrieve a bucket of cold water before promptly dumping it over Philippe.
He came awake with a splutter, thrashing like a fish hooked on a tight line.
“Raffa,” he gasped. “You have to listen to me. I took Guinevere to help her. To help you both.”
My laugh felt like a death rattle in my throat. “I tire of your games, Philippe. Be blunt or lose the fingers on your other hand.”
“The Venetian was using Guinevere against you with the Pietras, trying to motivate them to join his cause by convincing them you had abducted her knowing she was a member of their family,” he explained in a slurred rush.
“That’s true.”
The voice that spoke was so incongruent with the situation that, at first, I thought I had imagined it.
But when I turned to the source, it was Guinevere who stood beside the open barn door Tonio had left ajar.
Her wavy hair was loose down her front, obscuring the long white silk nightgown I’d bought for her in Firenze that summer and an old Oxford hoodie of mine she wore unzipped over the top.
There was something surreal about her fresh-faced, youthful beauty in the dark barn we used to string up men and strip them of their secrets.
It did not feel wrong, exactly, but wild, as if a fey creature from the night had come to observe our wrongdoings with eager eyes.
“What are you doing here?” I asked when I found my voice.
I knew I made quite the vision, standing in the same trousers and shirt I’d worn for the raid, dried blood from a wound on my neck, Philippe’s blood on my hands and splattered like polka-dot print along my front.