Chapter Eight Raffa
Chapter Eight
Raffa
“Haven’t seen you let go like that in a while, boss,” Ludo mentioned the next morning as I was sitting on the terrace, eating the breakfast Servio had laid out for me.
It was early, the sun still a pale, unsaturated yellow leaking through the streets of Florence, highlighting the locals who populated San Niccolò and guarded it zealously from the tourists across the Arno.
I watched a teenage couple press into each other in an empty doorway, kissing like fools and dressed in disarray as if they were both making their way home after a night of shared debauchery.
I had not even kissed her, yet I felt the way I did the morning after a night of particularly feral fucking.
Energized and exhausted all at once. I had not slept more than a handful of hours after we returned home from the restaurant.
Murder and dancing with a shockingly erotic slip of a girl were a potent cocktail that left me buzzing inside my skin, as if it were too tight to contain my insides.
I lay awake for hours, imagining all the ways I wanted to have Guinevere Stone and all the reasons I shouldn’t.
The former far outweighed the latter.
Because the only real reason I could cling to was that having a holiday romance with a well-known mafioso was dangerous, even if she did not know I was nella mafia .
But looking into those wide eyes as rich as the earth after fresh rain, I saw too much trust and innocent curiosity to let the ruinous longings in my chest taint such a thing of beauty.
“That asshole deserved it,” I told Ludo finally with a shrug, as if I hadn’t been filled with rage as I beat into Galasso’s ugly mug, leaving it irrevocably uglier than I had found it.
“You know I don’t care much about the why of things,” Ludo admitted. “But what did the poor bastard do?”
I cracked the top off a soft-boiled egg with one strike of my spoon. “He tried to take a woman against her will.”
The sound Ludo made was lupine, a snarling kind of whine like he was both distressed and enraged by the idea.
This was why he, Renzo, Martina, and Carmine were my closest soldati .
They had a moral compass; it just didn’t point to the usual true north.
We had internalized rules, a code adopted from the Camorra but skewed by our judgments.
No harming women or children. No stealing from the old.
These two tenets alone were almost unheard of in our world. The ’Ndrangheta were infamous for abusing their women, but it happened across every clan, and the Mafia made tens of millions of euros every year off scamming the elderly.
We stuck to what I was comfortable with: agromafia business, money laundering, and transportation of every kind of illegal good.
These activities were relatively easy to hide or fob off as someone else’s error if we were ever caught, though that had only happened once, in the beginning, when one of our shipments was seized by the Pietra clan on the coast of Pisa.
Barrels of cocaine in shipping crates of textiles imported from the United States.
We had blamed it on a scapegoat in the Pietra clan itself and never smuggled goods in that way again.
We had moved on to small electric submarines that came into port at night nearly undetected.
This was the modern Mafia. We avoided warfare in the streets and bragging, obvious symbols of our trade—such as the color red or gaudy gold jewelry—and lived instead like quiet, officious white-collar gentlemen.
We rarely met in large groups and communicated through codes that were rewritten every year to keep the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia (DIA) from deciphering our inner workings if they were ever successful at hacking our systems.
So it was not a surprise that Ludo took umbrage at Galasso without having to understand the reason I’d wanted him killed.
That was the kind of trust and loyalty you could not buy with money.
Its only currency was blood.
And once, as a boy, I had saved Ludo from a group of teenage thugs much older than us who decided to attack him for being ungainly and slow thinking. They did not realize, as I had from the start, that a slow processor did not equal stupidity.
Ludo was worth more than fifteen other capos from my territory.
“I would have beat his face in with a hammer,” Ludo told me earnestly, “if I had known.”
I waved away the sentiment. “I know, fratello , but this was for me to do.”
“Because of the girl?” he asked, and when I raised my brows at him as I sipped from my double espresso, he grinned lopsidedly. “Renzo and Carmine watched you in the restaurant. They said you put on quite a show. They said she was pretty like something in one of your expensive paintings.”
I would not mention that I had already searched local auction houses to see if there were any worthwhile paintings of Guinevere’s namesake for sale.
It was disgustingly sentimental, but I knew I had to have one for the day when she would leave.
If I could not have her, the house could benefit from a symbol of her beauty and innocence.
“She is captivating,” I admitted, staring into the dark coffee the same luxurious shade as her eyes and all that heavy hair. “She makes me curious.”
“About her?”
“Yes,” I mused, almost to myself. “And about me.”
“ Buongiorno ,” her light voice called from the kitchen a moment before Guinevere appeared in the doorway, dressed in a loose white linen shift dress that seemed precariously close to falling off her shoulders and exposing her entirely.
When she turned slightly to face Ludo, I saw the low dip exposing half her unblemished back.
My mouth went dry as dust.
“ Buongiorno ,” Ludo greeted her, getting up from his lean against the balustrade to cross to her, offering a big, square-fingered hand to her. “Ludovico. Call me Ludo.”
“Guinevere,” she echoed with a jaunty smile, her hand entirely engulfed in his. “Call me Guinevere.”
“You don’t like Gwen?” he asked, dropping her hand and extending his toward the empty chair across from me.
“Not much,” she confessed, walking almost on tiptoe over to her seat.
I had noticed she had a way of doing that and wondered if she had been a ballerina or if it was simply to add some height to her short frame.
“My parents always corrected anyone who called me that growing up, and my full name kind of stuck.”
“What about Vera?” I asked casually as I plucked a ripe plum from the fruit bowl and cut it neatly into segments with a sharp knife. She watched me intently, tracing the line of the blade as her tongue traced her lips, as if she was seduced by it.
“No one has ever called me that,” she admitted, sitting on her knees on the chair cushion so she could lean across the table to grab the freshly squeezed orange juice. “Is it a popular name in Italy?”
“No,” I mused. “It is mostly used as a word. It means ‘true.’ I thought it was fitting.”
She paused, arm extended, heavy pitcher wobbling slightly in her grip, as she stared at me for a weighted moment.
When she moved again, she poured the juice so quickly it splashed over her fingers, and I had the frustrating joy of watching her lick them clean.
“I’ll allow it, then,” she decided with an impish grin.
I inclined my head, but it only made her laugh.
“You would have continued to call me that anyway, wouldn’t you?”
It was my turn to grin, a curling lift of one side of my mouth.
She clucked her tongue, but when I handed her the bowl, she accepted the fruit I’d cut up for her.
I kept one piece for myself, but she leaned across the table to make a swipe for it, so I held it out between two fingers for her to take.
I pulled it back when she tried to grab it with her fingers and lifted a brow in silent command.
She rolled her eyes, but there was a tiny grin tucked into the edge of her mouth when she leaned forward on her knees to grasp it between her teeth. Her lips closed over my thumb, plush and damp.
I wanted to see them wrapped around so much more than just my fingers.
“This is how they eat fruit in America?” Ludo asked in his usual monotone way that made it difficult for strangers to understand his sense of humor.
But Guinevere laughed lightly and sank back on her heels, happily munching on the fruit from the bowl. “Sometimes, between friends.”
“Is that what we are now?” I asked, thinking about the fact that I had never danced with a friend the way I had with her last night.
“I think people who dance together so well must be friends,” she quipped, looking at me with an air of deliberation. “What kind of dance was that, by the way? It seemed traditional, somehow.”
“It was, a bit. Not the way we danced it, but the song. It is the ‘Tarantella Napoletana’ from Campania, where my family is originally from.”
I ignored Ludo’s eyes on me, hoping he would leave it alone, but of course he felt compelled to add, “It is a courtship dance.”
I scoffed lightly as I took the last sip of my coffee, but Guinevere’s smile was radiant as she looked into her bowl of fruit.
Why was her shyness so beguiling? Was it that every emotion seemed purer because I knew it had to fight through her natural reserve to shine through? That it felt hard won when so much in my life had come easy?
“Stefania won’t like it,” Carmine said as he swept onto the terrace in a three-piece brown suit with his hair carefully slicked back from his forehead, emphasizing his widow’s peak.
He grabbed an apricot from the bowl on the table without even looking at Guinevere and hopped up to sit on the stone balustrade.
“She’ll have heard of the American now and already be plotting. ”
“Do not be dramatic, Carm,” I ordered. “I know you like life to mirror those absurd dramas you watch on daytime television, but this is not that.”
Ludo grunted. “Stefania makes those women look like sheep compared to a wolf.”