Chapter Twenty-Three Guinevere #2
“Call it a hunch,” I’d said with a shrug, and Carmine hadn’t hesitated to create an account for me in their software so I could access the necessary ledgers and financial documents for both companies.
Three hours later, the sun was a narrow neon-pink ribbon on the horizon, and my eyes were so dry they clicked when I blinked as I studied the files open on my computer screen.
It was no wonder I startled when a soft pressure bloomed on my bare shoulder.
Raffa’s laugh was like smoke as his hands came down to settle on my clavicles, holding me still so he could plant another kiss on my neck over the bruise there.
“I thought you were done working for your father?” he asked, nosing into my hair in a way that made shivers erupt down my spine.
“I am, but Carm asked me for help with a problem. Is that okay?” It occurred to me it might not be. I’d never spoken to Raffa about the no doubt confidential information Carmine shared with me while we shared the office.
“Of course it is,” he said, voice bright with pleased surprise. “If you would consider it, I would hire you right here and now to work with me.”
“Really?” I shivered again as he nipped my earlobe.
“Why do you sound so shocked? You have already proved immeasurably helpful both with the Chinese wine fraud and with taking down the Grecos for their Albanian shipments.”
“Well, I am looking for a job now that I plan to stay here . . .” I teased, leaning into his questing mouth at my jaw. “But it might be a conflict of interest, given I’m sleeping with the boss.”
His growl was mostly a purr as his arms bracketed me on the chair from behind. “It is a good thing I make my own rules then, is it not, cacciatrice?”
“It is,” I gasped as he sucked hard at my neck and blew cool air over the wet mark. “But I can’t tell if you are joking or serious when you play with me like this.”
He jerked the chair so it spun to face him and caged me in once more, lowering his face so that finely honed handsomeness was all I could see.
“Work with me, not for me, Vera. My partner in all things, remember?” He waited for me to nod.
“I was not joking about that. Have you ever heard of the Roman empress Theodora? No? Well, she was married to Emperor Justinian, who loved and respected her so adamantly that he made her his equal on the throne. She was his greatest adviser and attended state council meetings, made both political and religious decisions, and became a well-known figure in her own right.”
“You want me to be your Theodora?” I asked through the wide, jaw-aching smile on my face.
Raffa’s pale-copper eyes gleamed. “Mea Regina Inferna is more apt, perhaps. But yes. Equal in all things. Why would I not want your brilliance working alongside me?”
“It’s good to know you think I’m more than just a pretty face,” I joked, and kissed his chin.
He gripped my chin in his hand, expression somber when he stated, “The prettiest face to house the most beautiful mind. I am in awe of you, Vera. Do not underestimate that.”
“I couldn’t,” I promised, pushing my fingers into the short hair over his ears to bring him closer so I could speak against his mouth. “Because I feel the very same. There is an echo, I think, between our hearts. What you feel, I feel.”
“What am I feeling right now?” he asked sinuously, licking my lower lip.
“Dinner,” Angela bellowed from down the hall in the kitchen.
I grinned and punched a kiss to his pouting mouth. “Later, I promise.”
“Having a house full of our kin is not conducive to how I feel about you agreeing to stay here and be with me,” he groused, standing up to glare at the chaos of noise outside the door as feet stampeded to the kitchen.
I laughed. “No, but maybe we can stay at the palazzo soon, just the two of us?”
“Yes, that was actually what I came in here to say. This weekend is Giorno dei Morti, the Day of the Dead. Traditionally, I host a party at the palazzo, which begins in the private cemetery. Donatella Verdi, the capo donna in Venice, will be there, as will most of my other capos, to celebrate.”
“And to be questioned about their loyalty?” I surmised.
“Exactly. I would like you there with me.”
I blinked at him as a smile slowly broke over my face. “Yeah?”
He had not let me join him for the meeting with the Albanians because I had refused to be a part of his world, but now? Now, I would meet them all at his side.
The prospect should have worried me, maybe, but instead I felt suffused with pride that he wanted me beside him and a dark anticipation of watching my powerful man in his element.
“I’d love to,” I told him.
A tenseness I hadn’t noticed until it was gone faded from his frame, leaving behind a soft expression that took my breath away.
“Bene. We will leave a day early to have an evening alone in Firenze. I want to take you somewhere special.”
“Okay,” I whispered, a little dizzy with joy. “I’d like that too.”
We stood looking at each other with silly smiles on our faces for a long moment before the bell clanged in the kitchen, Angela reminding the stragglers that dinner was on the table.
“Come, let us see if this meal is any less painful than the last,” he joked, offering his hand to me.
I giggled but shook my head. “Distract your mom for me? I just want to finish up here—I think I was onto something.”
Raffa bent to press a kiss to my forehead and then, unsatisfied, tipped my head to place a lingering one on my mouth.
“Do not be long,” he implored before turning on his heel and leaving me to it.
I listened as he distracted his mother in the kitchen when she asked after me, and then bent over the keyboard again.
Because there was something in this mess of data that called to me, something about how each company that had been broken into hadn’t noticed anything missing.
Imelda’s vineyard was one of them; then there were a textile factory outside Milan, a chain of pizza places across Europe Raffa had invested in at its source in Naples, a balsamic company in Bologna, and a turbine manufacturer in Turin.
All seemingly without connection, except . . .
The Romano Group had once been invested in that same pizzeria in Naples, but they’d removed funding before expansion over four years ago, when Raffa became capo.
There was an article in the Corriere della Serra about the Romano Group’s lost bid on a huge green tech firm out of Rome last spring and a blog post from a popular food writer about the sale of Tenuta Romano from the Romano Group to a global subsidiary three years ago because of ethical differences between Delfina Romano at the winery and Romano Group CEO Tonio di Conte.
It seemed that every company that had been targeted was a missing piece in the fabric of the Romano Group’s company.
It could have been a coincidence, but I wasn’t the kind of girl to believe in coincidences.
I believed in data-based patterns and mathematics.
I believed in fate.
And something told me that I was right about the Romano Group being the crack in Raffa’s armor. He had dismissed it too readily because of his issues with his father after he died, and it had been left too long unchecked.
I pushed out of my chair, wincing at the crick in my back, and went down the hall away from the kitchen, toward the office Leo kept at the back of the house.
The door was open, but the space was empty, Leo no doubt already gathered with the others for dinner.
I hesitated in the doorway, listening to the cacophony of dinner filtering in from outside, and stepped into the office.
There was nothing on the wide wooden desk but for a computer and a small red clock with, shockingly, a Leaning Tower of Pisa photo on its face. It was cheap and kitschy, so incongruous and unlike Leo that I frowned at it for a long moment before I started snooping.
The bottom two drawers were locked, but the top one opened beneath my hand and exposed a messy interior filled with sheaves of loose paper, notepads, pens, and a handful of notes in other denominations—American, British, Chinese, and Albanian.
I shifted through the papers with one eye on the door, so I almost missed it when my fingers pinched the edge of thicker card stock. My gaze flickered down to catch the edge of a postcard.
I frowned, tugging it out from under a notepad to reveal a photograph of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. It was astoundingly familiar because I had bought the very same postcard of the bridge to write one of my many unsent, diary-like postcards to Gemma.
My fingers shook as I flipped the card over to see the back, and I sucked in such a sharp breath at the sight of the recognizable cramped handwriting that I nearly choked on it.
Dearest Gemma,
You would not believe the adventure I am having here, only because it seems like something that would happen to you and not me.
I met a man.
I know, shocking.
Even more so? He hit me with his car before he basically saved my life. I was being chased by someone who was trying to molest me, and he just appeared in the road in this ridiculous red Ferrari. He blamed me for hurting the car, can you believe that?
But then he helped me into his car and tied my broken sandal to my foot, and you know what I felt like?
Cinderella.
I’ve never felt that way before. Not like a damsel in distress, necessarily, because you know I’ve been sick and I’ve been dreaming all my life. But like . . . like magic is real. Like if I reached out to touch this man, he could change my world.
I’ve been staying at his palazzo (a.k.a. palace!) for ten days now, and I can confirm—he’s doing just that.
Changing my life.
Changing me.
Through kindness and satiating my curiosity. By being the handsomest man I’ve ever seen and taking care of me so tenderly when I’ve been sick.
He says he isn’t a good man, that he’s helping me reluctantly, but I don’t believe it.
There is a loneliness in his eyes, Gemma, and I want to be the one to vanquish it.
Wish me luck.
Your eternally unlucky sister,
Jinx
That was my writing. My postcard.
One of the ones that had been taken from the apartment I’d rented from Signora Verga in Florence.
What in the world was it doing in Leo’s desk?
“Can I help you find something?”
I snapped my head up to see the man himself leaning against the doorframe. Unlike Raffa, with his habitual closed-off pose, his arms crossed and feet braced, Leo had his arms loosely at his sides, a small smile on his face.
As if I had not just been caught snooping in his office.
“I was searching for a notepad,” I said, slipping my fingers off the postcard to the bound papers on top of it and then raising the notepad in the air for Leo to see. “Carmine and I are working on my written Italian, and I’m ashamed to admit it isn’t going well. We ran out of paper.”
“Ah,” he said before a short pause. “Well, here, take as many as you want.”
He crossed to me on those long legs before I could push the postcard back under the mess in the drawer. His fingers lingered along the edge of it, but I was not afraid to look up into his face to read his expression.
“It’s a sweet note,” he said finally, lifting the card and turning it over and back. “When I first found it, I didn’t know who Gemma was, but now I can say I’m sorry for your loss.”
I swallowed thickly and glanced up to find his countenance was one of real sorrow.
“Thank you,” I said. “But how did you come to find this? I thought they’d all been stolen when the Venetian broke into my apartment.”
“The rest were,” he agreed with an easy shrug, dropping the postcard onto the desk and putting his hands in his pockets to rock back on his heels.
It was a boyish gesture to match the slightly chagrined expression on his face.
“I’m afraid I took that when I went looking into you after we met at Fattoria Casa Luna. ”
“Looking into me?”
“You have to understand, there have been many women in Raffa’s life who sought to use him for their own designs. Then there you were, this American girl he ran into, suddenly living in his palazzo? Wearing designer clothes he bought for you and hanging out with his inner circle? It was alarming.”
“So . . . you looked into me,” I repeated. “You broke into my apartment and spied on me?”
He winced. “I didn’t spy. But I had to check to make sure you were who you said you were. It’s part of my job.”
“Isn’t Martina his consigliere?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said with a wan smile. “And Renzo is his underboss. Ludo is his hacker, and Carmine is his second at Lupo Nero and helps to run the other companies.”
“And you look into suspicious people?”
Raffa hadn’t given Leo a title.
Leo? He does everything I need him to do, sometimes before I can even ask it of him.
“That and whatever else needs doing,” he agreed. “I’m sorry for it, but it had to be done. Raffa protects us all, and in turn, I must protect Raffa.”
There was something about the way he said it, defensive almost, aggressive definitely. Like his ability to protect had come into question, and he was determined to prove his worth.
“I want to protect him too,” I said calmly, because I understood that looking into me had been the smart thing to do. “Though, obviously, you missed my connection to the Pietra clan. That would have been helpful to know.”
He blinked at me, and his voice was very mild when he said, “Yes, it would have been. Though computer wiz Ludo didn’t find it either, so I won’t castigate myself too much.”
I nodded, continuing to stare at him, because despite his open expression, I found him the hardest to read of all Raffa’s mafiosi.
“Here,” he said, pushing the postcard closer to me with his pinky. “You should have it back. I’m sorry I can’t do more.”
Without another word, he strode toward the door and back down the hall.
It took me a moment to wonder what more he could have done beyond giving me back my unsent letter to Gemma.