Chapter Twenty-Five Guinevere #2
“What did you leave on Philippe?” I asked softly in the lull we had between conversations with endless mafiosi and their dates. “I thought you were going to feed him to the pigs?”
Raffa’s expression could not have been called a smile, though his mouth flexed. It was a dark, sinister twist of his lip that made me shiver in places I probably shouldn’t have. “He did not deserve such a subtle ending.”
“He strung him up in the Square of Miracles in Pisa, in the very same place Gaetano had told him to come if he ever wanted to see you alive again,” Martina said, appearing at our side with a martini, a skewer of olives raised to her lips.
She ate one before finishing. “It was quite the spectacle. It was even in the papers.”
“The note read ‘Touch her and die,’” Carmine added, plucking the olives from Martina’s hand to swallow the last two down himself. “He has always been dramatic.”
“Says you,” Renzo said, pushing his brother away from Martina, either to punish him for stealing from her or to stop Martina from stabbing him in the eye with the skewer, as she looked very ready to do.
“Raffa,” I murmured, sliding my hand down his arm to squeeze his hand. “Why do I have a feeling that is about as romantic as mafiosi get?”
Martina laughed. “Because that’s probably true.”
“Well, he did fill an entire Uffizi exhibition with art that symbolized our love story last night,” I said slyly, because Raffa had left it to me to tell his inner circle—our friends—about our engagement.
When I questioned why he had kept it from them, he said he wanted me to be the first person who knew, outside of my father, whom he had actually asked for his blessing.
I still could not believe he had given it.
But it gave me hope that the recent chasm between my father and me could be breached by the honesty and trust we were finally trying to communicate to each other.
“Cazzo, Raffa,” Carmine said as Ludo wandered over with a napkin piled with dolci dei morti, little cookies shaped like bones. “What was the occasion?”
“Maybe the fact that Guinevere survived being abducted?” Renzo asked dryly.
“Or the fact that she’s decided to stay with us?” Ludo added, flashing a brief smile, his mouth still filled with food.
“I had a very good reason,” Raffa agreed, lifting my ringed hand to his lips to kiss it.
“He asked me to marry him,” I admitted as my ring flashed in the candlelight.
“Dio mio,” Martina gasped, snagging my hand to raise it to her face.
“Merda,” Carmine muttered, bending over next to her.
“That’s quite the rock,” Renzo said, thumping Raffa on the back with such a broad grin, I almost didn’t recognize the taciturn man. “Congratulazioni.”
“Congratulations,” Martina crowed, throwing my hand in the air to practically suffocate me with a tight hug. “I am so fucking glad we get to keep you.”
“Me too,” I croaked as she tightened her hold.
“Try not to break my fiancée’s ribs, Tina,” Raffa drawled. “Her father will take back his blessing if one of my soldati starts breaking her bones.”
“Sorry,” she said with an unrepentant grin. “I am just so thrilled.”
“Me too,” Ludo declared, shoving Martina aside with a hip to encompass me in his wide, bulky arms. His hug was achingly gentle, those man-killing arms barely contacting my skin. “Happy for you. And me. I like my workout buddy.”
I laughed and kissed his cheek. “Me too.”
“Waiter,” Carmine called to the server handing out prosecco from a silver tray. “Bring us the bottle!”
“Obviously I’ll be your bridesmaid,” Martina told me. “But don’t you dare put me in a dress.”
“Deal,” I agreed, surprised and happy she would want to stand up with me instead of Raffa.
“We have to stick together as the only women.” She winked at me.
“I have three sisters and a mother, as you well know,” Raffa noted.
“Yes, but I meant in the outfit. Now I have Guinevere to help me keep you idioti in line.”
Raffa rolled his eyes at her, but he was too happy to pull it off with his usual disdain.
“To Raffa and Guinevere,” Carmine saluted with his glass after handing them out to everyone else.
“Raffa and Guinevere,” our friends echoed.
My sip of champagne mimicked the bubbly, ethereal feeling in my belly that I had never experienced before. Something like an excess of happiness.
“As much as I want to celebrate, I came over to collect you for Capo Burette. He wants to speak about the textile factories outside Milan,” Renzo admitted.
Raffa nodded, turning to press a kiss to my cheek before he stalked off between the elaborate tombstones to meet with Stefania’s father.
Happily, the woman herself wasn’t present, and Raffa informed me her father had arranged a marriage with a camorrista in the south to get her away from his territory.
I couldn’t say I wasn’t pleased by the idea.
Left to my own devices as the others followed Raffa, I wandered through the cemetery, admiring the sculptures until I found one of the most famous ones I had read about.
The tomb of the Mazzones, which depicted two siblings dancing on their grave, reunited in death after dying shortly after each other.
It was a beautiful display, the symbolism reaching down inside my chest to clutch at my heart.
“Italians are the best storytellers,” a female voice said from over my shoulder. “If I do say so myself.”
Her English was flawless, hardly accented.
She was an older woman, but it was hard to pinpoint her age in the flickering light and shadows cast by the candle flames, and she was perfectly groomed, not a hair out of place.
In a golden dress that dripped with crystals, she seemed to dance like the inside of one of those flames, dangerous yet intangible.
“I am Donatella,” she said, extending her heavily bejeweled hand to me. “And you are Raffa’s American.”
I took her cool, dry hand in mine for a firm shake.
Her gaze flickered down to the large cross at my throat, and her brow quirked. “Not as American as I thought, perhaps. Where did you get that from?”
“It was my sister’s. My father’s family is from the region,” I allowed, unsure about how to proceed because I recognized her name.
Donatella was the female capo in Venice. The woman Raffa and his men felt sure would not have turned on him, because he’d helped her take power from her brother years ago.
“Near Pisa, correct?” she surmised with a thin smile.
“I have never much liked the Pietra clan. They always felt they should have been in charge of the north just because one man many generations ago was a famous corrupt politician. Who cares about the past, hmm? It is the present that determines the future.”
I cocked my head. “I’ll have to disagree with you, capo donna. I believe by looking to the past you can see the pattern of human behavior and human error.”
Donatella pursed her lips. “Yes, perhaps this is true. And in your past? Secrets and lies, I’m sure.”
“Some,” I agreed, feeling as if I was playing a game with an apex predator. “And in yours? Betrayal and subterfuge. Does that mean you would be willing to act similarly now?”
“You speak of the coup against my brother,” she said flatly, amusement dying.
“And you speak about the fact the Pietras abducted me last week,” I returned. “We both seem to know a lot about each other.”
“Yet we only just met. How interesting.”
“Tell me, Donatella,” I asked, studying the way the light hit the champagne in my glass. I wouldn’t drink it, given my illness, but it was a great social prop. “Would you work against Raffa the same way you once worked against your brother?”
“Who are you to dare ask me that?” she hissed, stepping closer. “Some American puttana?”
I stepped closer too, my free hand falling to the slit in my dress, ready to grab the knife strapped to the inside of my other thigh.
Ludo had been teaching me about wielding a dagger for the last few weeks, and I was getting good enough that with the element of surprise, I was sure I could take Donatella.
“I am Raffa’s fiancée,” I said calmly. “And a member of Clan Romano. I am free to ask you anything I want, and you are free to answer, unless you want to witness his fury when I tell him what you just called me.” My smile cut into my cheeks like knifepoints. “He is so protective of those he loves.”
Donatella’s laugh was brittle. “You think he loves you, ragazza? Your sister believed the same of such a man, and look what happened to her.”
I felt as if I had run headlong into a brick wall.
“Excuse me?”
Donatella’s sneer glowed orange in the firelight. “Her name was Gemma, wasn’t it? I recognize the cross. I saw it last summer when they stayed with me in Venice.”
My heart had slowed to a crawl, my blood like wet cement churning thickly through my veins. “You knew Gemma?”
“Keep up, child. Of course I did. I was the one who introduced them. The Albanians work through the port of Venice, and I transport the goods for Raffa and those eastern European gangsters in the east. With his ties to Venice, it made sense for Raffa to make him a liaison to my outfit, just as Carmine is with the Albanians and Renzo is for those scum in the south.”
“Who?” I whispered.
She waved her hand, gold bangles clanging together. “Who? I am surprised you don’t know, given you have been living with him for some time. You are staying at Villa Romano, no?”
Dread poisoned every breath I struggled to take into my suddenly weak lungs.
“Who?” I repeated.
But I knew.
I knew.
“Are you Italian?”
“What is your last name?”
“So you did not know who Raffa was before you ran into him?”
“I am sorry. You just look like someone I once knew . . .”
And then . . .
“I was rude when we first met. It didn’t have anything to do with you. Not really.”
“I fell in love with a foreigner once too. She was charming and beautiful, and I thought at the time that I would give up anything for her.”
“It didn’t end well.”
Leonardo di Conte.
The postcard I had written to Gemma was in his desk.
He was the one living at the villa with Philippe, taking charge of the compound while Raffa and the rest of his crew stayed in Florence. I thought about the curve of dark ink peeking out of his opened shirt when we danced at la vendemmia and decided it could have been the curl of a G.
Gemma had always thought it would be so romantic if her boyfriend got her name tattooed on him somewhere.
My breath burst out of me like a bullet from the chamber of a gun.
“Did he kill her?” I asked Donatella, seizing her arm like a life raft.
She shrugged delicately, completely unperturbed by the chaos roiling inside me. “I was never sure. He seemed to love her, but you can never really trust a man.” Something dark flickered over her face. “You should have left Italy behind when you had the chance.”
I snarled at her. “You should have told Raffa about this.”
She laughed. “I do not report on the sex lives of camorristi, nor would Raffaele want me to.”
“I hope you are willing to bet your life on that, because he is about to find out,” I snapped in vicious Italian before I gathered my skirt and ran through the cemetery in search of him.
“Raffa!” I called out.
“Guinevere?” He was not panicked, but his response was immediate.
I only had to round one more corner, and there he was, jogging toward me, arms open for me to throw myself into.
“It’s Leo,” I panted, my nails curling over his shoulders. “Leo was Gemma’s mysterious Italian boyfriend. Leo was the one doing business with the Albanians and, I think you’ll find, the Grecos and the Pietras. It was Leo all along.”
“How do you know this?” Raffa demanded, eyes flashing, already moving, with me tucked into his side, back into the fray of soldati.
“Donatella Verdi told me.”
“Renzo,” he bit out as soon as we approached his clutch of friends. “Bring me Donatella Verdi, and get Leo on the phone immediately.”