Chapter Thirteen Raffa #2
She shrugged and waved the words away with one hand, but her eyes were shrewd on me. “You look half-elated and half-exhausted. Does either have anything to do with the lovely Guinevere?”
I hesitated, rubbing my overgrown stubble as I considered telling her anything about my conflict around Vera. How much I already ached to see her. How these new risks made me afraid for the first time in a long time because I did not want my dangers to become hers.
My family was insulated at Villa Romano with staff and soldiers to tend to their every need and protection. Guinevere was just a foreigner trying to have an adventure on her own in a new place, and unwittingly, she’d run into the arms of the worst monster in Tuscany.
“Once you said you would never enter into a deal with the family,” I reminded her, then asked the question I had always wanted answered. “Why did you, in the end?”
“You have made me a very wealthy woman. I think, in this country, we have a strange relationship with the Mafia. We hate them and revere them in equal turn. You are terrifying and horrible so often, and yet you can change generations of lives in an instant. The investment you made in Alfonso took it from a local pizzeria to an international chain. My nephew is at school in London and told me he had a slice of home from their first location there.” She sighed, toying with a marble wolf figurine from my desk as she searched for the words.
“What is the saying? A femmena bona, si tentata e resta onesta, nun e stata bona tentata .”
A good woman, if tempted, remains honest, but that means she was not well tempted.
“You are a complicated man, but not a bad one by any means. Your father delighted in his cruelty when it was necessary, and I believe you see the Mafia as a game, one of life and death, but with calculation and an eye to the stakes. If you can manipulate a situation to suit your needs without death, you will do anything in your power to make it happen. I suppose I wanted to indulge my greediness and avoid my fear of death.”
She ended with a joke, but I was not in a laughing mood hearing those words.
I had always struggled with my definitions of good and bad , righteous and evil , and how these words could be applied to me. I had killed, stolen, and lied and would continue to do so for the rest of my life with little compunction.
But there was a soft spot in my heart I couldn’t seem to harden no matter how much I tried. I was not empathetic, exactly, but I could be moved by beauty in all its forms and sought valiantly to preserve it.
I had purchased the crumbling church in the town next to Villa Romano simply because it had once been beautiful, and I wanted it restored instead of demolished for housing.
I had helped to fund the continued excavation of the gladiator training grounds outside the Colosseum in Roma, even going so far as to buy a block of buildings in order to demolish them for the sake of discovering and preserving our history.
I had killed Martina’s husband because he was eroding her day by day in front of my very eyes and I could take it no longer, and I had allowed Pamina to become capo of her territory after killing her own husband for the same kind of abuse.
I had helped Guinevere because I could not resist such a beautiful woman lost and alone with the odds stacked against her.
Not much of a moral code, one founded on keeping beauty intact instead of one of honor or justice, but it was the only one I had.
“I wanted a good life for my family long after I am dead,” Imelda added, peering at me with cunning gray eyes the same color as that marble wolf. “Isn’t that why you are where you sit today? Capo dei capi of everything you swore you’d never touch?”
“It is easy to have good intentions when the stakes are low,” I conceded. “There is nothing I would not do for my mother and sisters. For my chosen family in the Camorra.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “This is our way, I think. Family before all else. It is not something foreigners understand well.”
That was true, but I considered Guinevere and wondered if there was another exception there.
The dead sister who had given her a kidney, the mother and father she lied to in order to give them peace of mind so she could have some freedom.
The future she was intent on following because it was what they wanted for her even if she did not want it for herself.
“You care for her,” Imelda said, a note of awe in her words.
Frustration wrapped a firm hand around my throat and squeezed. “She is ... interesting.”
“Interesting and lovely.”
I chuckled, because that word would never be free of the memory of Guinevere’s wine-soaked skin and breathy, surprised moans of pleasure.
“Yes, lovely.”
“You deserve such loveliness. I know you do not agree, but it is true. Everyone needs happiness, Raffa. And if you are worried that you are too much the villain to deserve it, consider that unhappiness will only drive you further into the dark. I know that is not the kind of man you wish to be in thirty years. The kind of man your father was.” She got up and came around my desk to press her cheeks to each of mine. “ Chi non risica non rosica. ”
He who does not risk does not get the rose.
It was an Italian proverb my mother had used my entire life, so it was fitting that her best friend would use it now to taunt me to take a chance on Guinevere.
“There is no future if I tell her, and there is no future if I do not,” I admitted as she pulled away. “She is going back to America in a month.”
Imelda shrugged one shoulder and walked toward the door, stopping only to throw back, “Is she?”