Chapter Twenty-Eight Guinevere #5
The predatory expression that had turned his face to marble wavered, as if the sound of his name in my mouth called him back from a berserker rage. A moment later, his gaze turned from Tonio to me, and the last of that hardness shattered into unfiltered relief.
“Vera,” he breathed like a dying man’s last wish.
And then we were crashing into each other despite his injuries, my hands fisting in his hair, his gripping my ass to leverage me up into his arms, our mouths connected like a watertight seal for our plundering tongues.
We kissed so desperately I could not breathe and didn’t care to ever again so long as I could stay safe in his embrace for the rest of my life.
“Meus Rex Infernus,” I said against his mouth. “Come to save me.”
Because he was no one’s Prince Charming, but he was my King Below. And no matter the enemy at the gates, I knew in my bones we would find a way to conquer them and live the rest of our lives in our kind of dark ever after.
“My huntress,” he whispered as he kissed my lids, my nose, the point of my chin, anointing me in his love. “You are so fucking brave. I am so sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” I insisted, holding him away from me by tightening my fingers in his hair. “This wasn’t your fault. It was Tonio and . . .”
I hesitated.
Because it was also Leo’s fault, even if he had been the reluctant villain to Raffa’s reluctant mafioso.
Which reminded me . . .
“Gemma,” I gasped, almost choking on the hope ballooning inside me. “Is she . . . ?”
Raffa smoothed a hand down the back of my hair. “She is.”
He turned so that I could face the room again and notice what had taken place in the few moments we had taken to reunite and reaffirm we were alive.
Renzo knelt at Martina’s side, his hands wet with her blood as he stanched her wounds. She loosely held on to his shirt, lids fluttering as she struggled to breathe, but she was alive.
And beyond that, Leo was on his knees holding on to a figure in a dirty gray dress, with blond hair I recognized even under the grime of soot and ash.
“Gemma,” I mouthed because the air had been ripped from my lungs. I tried again after sucking in more oxygen, which burned going down. “Gemma.”
Leo’s hands spasmed on her back before reluctantly loosening so that she could pull away and twist to look at me.
“Dio mio,” Dad said from beside the left wall, his hand at his neck as if his shock and joy were strangling him. “Gemstone.”
His nickname for her all our lives.
Gemma’s big blue eyes, bloodshot and weary, filled with tears.
“Hi, Dad. Hi, Jinxy.” Her voice, rough as it was, sounded like a gospel chorus, something heralding hallelujah.
Together, Dad and I took a first running step and sprinted to her, falling to our knees in order to tackle her into a group hug.
We were all crying, sobbing so hard I thought I might go on crying forever.
It felt too surreal, too precious to stop touching her for even a moment, as if she might disintegrate, lost to us but for our memories once more.
Vaguely I was aware of Raffa and Leo speaking over us, the tension radiating off my fiancé, who stood at my back like a shield.
“You can’t say you wouldn’t have done the same for Guinevere,” Leo was saying.
“I would have,” Raffa agreed instantly. “But I would have fucking told you.”
“He would have killed you, do you get that? He monitored me all the time. He owned Philippe and Michele and Bruno. All soldiers close enough to track your every movement too. If I made one mistake, he took it out on Gemma. That night in the bell tower, Gemma sent one of the guards she had persuaded over to her side to Impruneta to make contact with Guinevere. Unfortunately, Guinevere spooked and killed him, and Tonio witnessed the entire mess. He didn’t feed Gemma for a week after that, and he beat her each one of those days. We did not try again.”
Gemma whimpered slightly in response, pulling away from us just enough to lift her hands between us. Each finger was tipped with raw skin, the nails removed. Three fingers on her right hand had clearly been broken and not reset, and she was missing the entire pinky on her left hand.
“Oh, honey,” Dad said, the words torn from him as he gently pulled her hands into his and pressed his mouth to the back of her mangled hand. “My sweet girl.”
I cupped my hand over my mouth as if I could contain the brutal sob carving out my throat. Dad sensed it, slipping one of his arms around me to tug us both into his side as if he could physically shield us from the trauma of our past and future.
Gemma curled into him, reaching out to hold on to me so tightly I knew it had to hurt her brutalized hands.
“What are you going to do with me now?” Leo asked, utterly resigned to his fate, almost eager for it, as if it could rectify the utter chaos he’d helped to bring to our door.
“Kill him,” Renzo snarled from where he was still tending to Martina.
Soldati had entered the room, lingering in the doorway, one of them crouched beside Martina with an impressive first-aid kit.
But the only people who existed for me in the room were my dad and my sister, and the two men who had changed the course of the Stone women’s lives forever.
I wanted to beg Raffa to spare Leo just for Gemma’s sake as much as I wanted to order him to tear Leo apart with his bare hands and burn the pieces, so I stayed silent, muted by the force of the opposing desires.
“He was the only thing that got me through this hell,” Gemma said quietly, in such a raspy voice I felt sympathy pains for her in my throat.
The words seemed to resonate with Raffa, though. We all understood about going through hell to get to the other side. I’d led him through the deepest, darkest circles of hell just as Beatrice had done for Dante, and apparently Leo had done the same for Gemma.
Raffa’s precious-metal eyes fell on me, their warmth softened with love even while his mouth twisted with lingering fury and indecision.
It wasn’t just Gemma who loved Leo.
Raffa had related to him as a brother for every one of his thirty-four years, and to kill him now. when he understood his motivations for helping Tonio under duress . . . I did not think the monster in Raffa would win out.
The man beneath the predator had too big a heart.
“We will sort it out,” he said finally, staring Leo down even as he staved off his execution. “But you will account for your actions, Leo.”
His friend swayed slightly on his feet as if relief had made him dizzy.
“Thank you, fratello,” he whispered.
“You will spend the rest of your life earning back my friendship, if it can be done at all,” Raffa declared coldly, but his hand found my shoulder and moved up my neck to tip my chin back so he could look into my eyes. “Consider it a wedding present, cacciatrice.”
The smile that overtook my face ached in my cheeks. I pulled him down to the floor beside me, where he naturally shifted me half into his lap, even though I was still partially under my dad’s arm.
“Gemma,” I told my sister in a waterlogged voice, “this is Raffaele, my fiancé.”
A glimmer of her previous coquettishness sparked in Gemma’s eyes as she glanced between us. “I met him when he saved my life. When the first explosion went off, he shielded me from the blast before Leo arrived and got us out through the bunker exit.”
I felt oversaturated with relief and joy, as if every atom of me was filled with enough light to burst like a supernova. In the wake of terror, joy was so much sweeter.
“He saved mine too,” I said, and I meant so much more than just today.
He had been saving me since the day he’d hit me with his Ferrari in the middle of an empty Tuscan road, but the truth was, I knew I had been saving him too.
It might have been silly to some, but as I sat there holding my man, my dad, and my sister, and my mom came running into the room with a loud sob before throwing herself at all of us, I said a prayer of thanks to Italy.
“It is fate that I am here,” E. M. Forster once said, “but you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.”
And I knew it was here in this forbidden country that I had finally found myself and the life I was meant to live.