Chapter Four Raffa
Chapter Four
Raffa
Bruno Cardona hung from his hands in the damp, wine-musk-scented cellar of Tenuta Romano like a sprig of drying rosemary in my mother’s kitchen.
He was currently unconscious, head limp between his shoulders, hair dull with old sweat, and face covered in blood from a gash above his forehead and another through his lower lip.
Two weeks ago, he’d been a trusted soldato in my organization.
He had worked down in Naples with the Camorra outfit under Damiano Vitale for years before coming north to join my ranks, and he’d come highly recommended.
He was in possession of a special skill set I needed for my operations up north, someone with experience in olive oil harvest and fraud, and ties to the Corporazione Mastri Oleari, one of the entities that verified extra-virgin olive oils.
He had helped my outfit rake in millions of euros over the last four years from our agromafia pursuits alone.
Then, on a Thursday night when I was waiting for my driver to pick me up in Rome, someone on a Vespa had sped up the straight in front of the restaurant I was waiting beside and opened fire on me with a semiautomatic.
I’d ducked behind a Lamborghini almost immediately, but one of the bullets had taken a chunk out of the meat of my bicep. Shouts from inside the restaurant sounded the alarm, and the figlio di puttana took off without getting the job done.
The job being my murder.
It had been a very long time since someone had tried to take out the capo of the Toscana Camorra. Four years, in fact. When someone had successfully put a bullet between my father’s eyes.
It seemed my brief era of peace had ended.
Unhappily for Bruno, I had recognized two important details about my shooter.
He was left handed, and he was wearing a black jacket with an SSC Napoli football team logo on it.
Little things, but didn’t they say the devil was in the details?
It meant my would-be assassin was from Naples, the heart of Camorra Mafia territory.
My territory, if only by proxy.
While Damiano ruled Campania, it was my family who reigned supreme in the north.
Oh, tourists thought the Mafia only existed in Sicily, maybe in the heart of Naples, but no farther. Even Northern Italians loved to bury their heads in the sand, claiming the camorristi were a disease of the south.
We were not.
We were everywhere inside the country, with branches extending all over the globe.
New York, London, Buenos Aires.
We’d just gotten smarter than the gold-chain-wearing, swaggering mafiosi of the eighties and early nineties who thought they were invincible. We’d learned from the crackdown on the Cosa Nostra in Sicily and adjusted.
I ran a multimillion-euro business out of the heart of Tuscany, and I’d never personally had any issues with the carabinieri. It was almost unbelievable what a few well-greased palms would buy you in local politics.
We might not have had any trouble with the police, but rival families were another matter entirely. Every criminal syndicate wanted a foothold in Italy’s north, with its bustling industries to launder money through, its countless tourists to scam and extort, its thriving ports.
But only one could rule.
And that man was me .
Something I had been certain Bruno understood until I’d seen that SSC Napoli patch and known in my gut it was my rabid-fan soldato . A man who had also known my schedule in Rome.
“Wake him up,” I ordered Renzo.
My cousin stormed forward with a bucket of icy well water and tossed it over Bruno’s limply hanging form.
He came sputtering to life, thrashing and gasping for breath like a fish out of water.
I took a drag of my cigarette, studied the long line of ash at its end, and flicked it to the floor.
“ Bastardo ,” Bruno cursed when he gained his bearings, hurling insults at me as if they were knives.
They weren’t, and they did nothing to hurt me.
“Bruno, Bruno,” I scolded lightly, strolling forward to the edge of the dirty puddle pooling beneath his bare feet. “Do not bite the hand that can kill you.”
“I don’t deserve this. I am a good man,” he countered. “A good man for you. Haven’t I made you money?”
I arched a brow, studied the butt of my cigarette again, and then lashed forward with my free hand to grip Bruno hard by the throat. The tip of the lit tobacco sizzled satisfyingly as I pressed it to his wet cheek. He hollered and jerked, but I had a good grip on him and did not let go.
“Understand something,” I suggested mildly.
“I may not have wanted to become a made man, but fate saw fit to take that choice from my hands and anointed them in blood instead of ink. I do not fight fate. So here we are. You and me. They call me the Gentleman Mafioso, but that is misleading, is it not? You know me better than that.”
I wrenched his head toward me, a scream slipping from his contorted mouth as the pressure seared through his shoulders.
“You know the secret,” I whispered as I flicked the damp butt to the floor and exchanged it for the knife from my belt, pressing the blade into Bruno’s anxiously jumping Adam’s apple.
“You know I might not have wanted this life, but I am very, very good at it. I like to get creative, bending the law to my whims. I enjoy looking for new ways to make money. But what I really love?”
I cut a long, thin slice across his neck just to watch him bleed. Not enough to kill him.
Not yet.
Just enough for him to come to the inevitable conclusion that if he did not turn on whoever paid him, he would die.
In a way that I would find long, slow, and highly enjoyable.
“I love to kill those who would come after me and mine. And I like to do it in a way that sends a message to everyone else who has ever thought to try.”
I stepped back, dropping my hold on him abruptly so his body swung on the chains like a macabre church bell, heralding my kind of communion.
“What do you think, Bruno? Are you ready to talk, or would you like to be my messenger?”
In the end, it turned out he was both.
“How is she?” I asked Martina the moment I got through the door of the palazzo later that day.
Even in the midst of skinning a man alive, I’d thought of the small American girl back at my apartment.
There was no reason she should have inspired such curiosity in me.
She was just a girl.
Not more than twenty-five and not at all my type.
I liked my women tall and curved, soft edges and round handholds. I liked them mature and independent, almost detached, so they would ask no questions and I would have to tell no lies.
But . . .
There was something about Guinevere.
Perhaps her helplessness called to my baser self.
I didn’t think that was it, or all of it, though.
I found myself intrigued by her contrasts: She was a silly girl who trusted strangers but one who quite literally laughed in the face of danger after being chased by a man and hit by a car.
One who teased me, a grown man, a stranger, like she had the right to when grown men who had known me for years would never dare.
It was an irreverence, a charming one, like she knew the world had big teeth, but she was going to explore it anyway. Armed with a mocking self-deprecation and keen curiosity that made her a glaring beacon for bad men.
Like me.
Because it made me wonder—if she saw my big teeth, would she run away scared or stare into my eyes and ask me to take a bite?
“I just helped her into bed after her shower,” Martina replied as she sharpened her knife on a whetstone with a repetitive hissing rasp. “She finally noticed she was wearing one of your shirts. I gave her a new one that did not smell.”
I raised an eyebrow at her tone and in question.
My friend grinned. “She offered to have it professionally dry-cleaned.”
Laughter bubbled inside my throat, but I swallowed it down.
Still, Martina saw my amusement, however guarded, and smiled wider. “Yes, she’s an interesting girl for an American.”
I inclined my head in agreement, already moving through the living room toward the stairs to check on her.
“You know,” Martina called after me in a bland voice that warned me she did not intend to let this go.
“There are other options for the girl. You could loan her some money and send her on her way. Suggest a hotel, if you feel responsible for her. Maybe call Cesar and get her a fast appointment at the consulate.”
I didn’t respond because I didn’t want to acknowledge her words.
Only three more steps toward the stairs and she said, “Or your mother would take her. If you really care that much about helping her until she’s well. You’re not exactly a natural-born caretaker, and you have better things to do than play nursemaid.”
A snarl lodged in my throat, and I was grateful to be facing away from her so she could not see the sneer contorting my features.
Nursemaid?
Cazzo , that was not who I was playing.
But I could not—would not—tell her that my role was that of the shining knight. A role I’d last wanted to play as a boy fighting with sticks as swords against my best friend, Leo.
A role I had banished from my mind completely since picking up the mantle of my father.
The ruler of the underworld did not get to be the good guy in any scenario, I’d told myself as I laid it to rest.
But then, Guinevere had appeared in front of my headlights, a startled deer so ready for slaughter.
And I felt the tug of that nostalgic longing.
To do something good for the first time in a long time.
To feel like a good kind of man again.
“It is not your business,” I said to Martina. “I asked you here because you are the only woman I trust in Firenze.”
“I’m honored,” she annoyed me by saying, walking forward to place a soft hand on my arm. “And I won’t judge, Raffa. I only meant to tease you. She’s a very pretty girl.”
“It is not about that,” I snapped, and truly it wasn’t.
She could have been a troll, and that same part of me would have yearned to help her. It wasn’t even about her.