Chapter Eight Raffa #3
“Sweet,” she echoed softly, turning her pleased expression to the window.
Of course, no one in my life had ever called me sweet.
Not even my mother or sisters, who adored me.
Even as a boy I had been calculating and brutally honest. I could remember making Delfina cry on her first day of high school because I told her that her perm made her look like Valeria Golino’s ugly sister.
Guinevere was the type of person to look for the good in everything. Even made men with very bad intentions. It didn’t make her stupid exactly, but it did make her easy prey to dangerous men and poor decision-making.
This was especially evident when I pulled in front of the apartment building where she had rented a flat for her six-week summer vacation and found a group of three young men dealing drugs just to the left of the doorway.
It wasn’t surprising. Though there weren’t any seriously unsafe areas in Florence proper, the street behind Fortezza da Basso was an open secret with locals who wanted to buy anything from pharmaceuticals to hard-core street drugs.
“Hey, people my age,” Guinevere said happily, perking up from her lean against the window. “That’s nice to know.”
“If you like drugs, perhaps,” I drawled, twisting to raise my brow at her. “You do not look like the average user, but maybe I was mistaken.”
Her mouth dropped into a comical little O of shock. “They’re dealing drugs ?”
She whispered the last word as if she could get in trouble just for speaking it.
I was torn between hilarity and rage. “Guinevere, please tell me you were not raised in a convent.”
Her frown was fierce, and she crossed her arms, unconsciously mimicking my own pose. “ No. I grew up in a college town, so I’m aware that people do drugs. I’ve never seen a drug deal before.”
Madonna santa , she was so young and unblemished.
So what did it say about me that I wanted to dirty her up with sin?
“Did you research this neighborhood before you booked the flat?”
The knot between her brows tightened. “Yes, Raffa. I’m not an idiot, as you yourself just announced. This area is safe.”
“Says who? The internet?”
“I read like forty forums and blogs from locals,” she retorted.
“Well, one of them should have mentioned this has become a popular spot for drug deals,” I snapped. “With your self-proclaimed bad luck, how long do you think it will take for you to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
She rolled her eyes dramatically. “This is Florence. Compared to most other cities in the country, it has a really low crime rate. And don’t even get me started on comparing it to big cities back home in the States. You’re being silly.”
“Silly?” I echoed.
“ Si ,” she said with a sharp nod. “ Sciocco. ”
“She ridicules me in my own tongue,” I murmured, once again shocked by her gumption. “You know, most women would thank me for looking out for them.”
“Maybe you should spend the day with them instead.” She smiled sweetly, tossed her hair over her shoulder, and got out of the car.
It gave me time to lock down my grin before I followed suit and joined her at the door to the flats.
“I can meet Signora Verga without your help,” she groused.
I ignored her, but when the buzz sounded and the door unlocked, I did not immediately follow her into the building. After catching the door before it could close, I wedged a loose brick into the jamb and then turned to face the cluster of young men a few yards away.
They did not notice me approaching at first. Probably because they were high.
But when a skinhead caught sight of me, he glared and nudged his friends with his elbows.
“Hey, asshole,” he called in Italian, thin chest puffed out, a fanny pack worn crossed over it in the style of trendy teenagers. “What the fuck do you want?”
It was an easy mistake to make. A young man thinking he could prove himself by throwing words like knives at a well-dressed civilian walking down the street. An easy mark for an unprovoked attack that would make him cool to his friends in crime.
Only I wasn’t a civilian.
I was a camorrista, a capo dei capi of my territory.
I had the satisfaction of watching his bravado crack down the middle when I continued my quick, strong strides toward him. It crumbled completely when one of his friends turned, saw me, and gasped before muttering quickly, “ è il gentiluomo mafioso .”
The Gentleman Mafioso.
Such a stupid nickname, but one my best friend had given to me the first time I killed a man in cold blood. It was my eighteenth birthday, and my father told me if I wanted to be allowed to leave the country for college, I had to prove my loyalty to the family.
And nella mafia , the only way to prove anything was to write it in blood.
To this day, I have no idea what the poor bastardo had done to cross Aldo Romano, but that was the point. A loyal member of the Camorra followed orders without needing context.
I was dragged out of bed at dawn by my father, still in boxers and bare feet as we crossed the courtyard into the rows of vines separating the main house from the barn.
A man was waiting within, tied to a chair, wearing a stained, ruined suit that had once been worth a lot of money.
My father’s consigliere, Tonio, was there, and, shockingly, my best friend, Leo.
It was Leo, stern faced, who handed me the gun.
“Kill him,” my father had ordered as he sat in a wooden chair at a table near the back wall set with a moka espresso maker and a hand-painted ceramic cup and saucer.
He proceeded to pour himself an espresso and ignore us entirely, looking over documents someone had left for him to peruse.
“You have to,” Leo told me in a quiet murmur before Tonio reeled him to his side with a hand on his shoulder.
“Please,” the man who had wronged my family begged as I stepped closer.
He was much older than me, his skin sallow and flaccid from too much drink.
There was a fine sheen of grease on his flesh from old sweat merging with new, and a dribble of blackening blood on his mouth. “Please, I have a family.”
I could still remember the weight of the gun in my hand, how warm it was from Leo’s grip before mine. I’d been taught to shoot almost as soon as I could walk, so it felt natural in my hand, the way a glove might feel to a sportsman.
Except this was the only sport I’d ever been trained at.
Before I killed him, I took the tie from around his neck. I loosened the knot and stuffed the Gucci silk inside his mouth so he’d stop his pleading.
It meant nothing to me because it meant nothing to Aldo and Tonio.
He thought I had the power to change his fate when I was already struggling to swim upstream against my own.
I took two steps back and shot him through the forehead, right between the eyes.
My father wasn’t pleased.
“Too easy,” he muttered in disgust as he narrowed his eyes at me. “What kind of message is this to send our enemies?”
To appease him, because I wanted to go back to the big house for breakfast with my mother and sisters, I yanked the hunting knife from zio Tonio’s belt and carved a message into the dead man’s forehead.
Traditore.
Traitor.
When Tonio, Leo, and I carefully staged his body back in his apartment, I took care to clean him up and set him perfectly behind his desk. Aside from the lurid red gouge marks in his forehead, he could have been sleeping.
Some reporter called the killing almost gentlemanly for a Mafia hit.
Unfortunately, the moniker stuck.
“Good,” I told the thugs as they tensed for flight, sensing a bigger predator in their midst. “You know who I am. So you will understand how serious I am when I say if any of you so much as look at the small brunette who just entered Signora Verga’s apartments, I will skin you alive and then play mix and match with your flesh until you are each dressed in another man’s face. Do you understand me?”
The skinhead’s mouth had fallen open on the broken hinge of his jaw. “Yeah, yeah, man. No worries.”
“D-do you need us to like ... look out for her?” an acne-faced boy worked up the nerve to ask me.
I considered it for a moment and shrugged. “If you want to, it would not go unforgotten.”
Though I was one fucking mishap away from telling Guinevere she was spending the next five weeks under my roof.
The kids stammered their agreement and skittered away with one wave of my hand.
I shook my head as I made my way back to Verga’s building and pushed through the door.
Kids like that were usually prime pickings for soldati , but not in my outfit.
We played sharp and smart, which meant teenage wannabe badasses were exempt from our ranks.
I let Damiano pick them up in Naples and put them through the wringer before I ever thought about accepting them into the fold.
The Romano family had more college graduates than a prep school.
It was the key to our success and our subtlety.
The soft lilt of Guinevere’s American accent reached me in the foyer, and I followed it up two flights of stairs to the open doorway of an apartment.
The entire thing was visible from my position in the frame: a small kitchenette with a half fridge to the right, a tiny table for two, a lumpy blue love seat and ancient television with rabbit-ear antennae to the left, and a double bed with a brass headboard at the back of the room beside a hand-painted chest of drawers.
The postage-stamp size, along with the lingering scent of heavy Middle Eastern spices from the shawarma place down the street, lent it a distinctly unappealing air.
Guinevere, though, seemed to think it was fabulous.
“It’s fabulous,” she crowed, clapping her hands together as she stood in the middle of the room with a bright smile, as if Signora Verga had shown her the wonders of Michelangelo’s David . “I can’t believe I get to live here.”
Signora Verga smiled at her widely, caught up in Guinevere’s enthusiasm as it spilled out of her like sunlight. “ Si, si , very lucky. You be happy here.”