Chapter Seventeen Raffa
Chapter Seventeen
Raffa
Everyone gathered in the study while Guinevere slept. We waited until Martina arrived to begin, but the atmosphere after I briefed them on the situation crackled with tension, and everyone was palpably on edge.
“I need to know why this happened,” I began slowly, so the anger bubbling lava hot in my gut would not spill onto the people who did not deserve it.
“Did Pucci overstep and send someone to break into her place to find something on me, even knowing it would not be admissible in court? Did this San Marco lion-bullshit enemy decide to threaten Guinevere to get to me? Or was this truly a random break-in and the timing is insanely coincidental?”
“The Grecos have ties to Venice,” Carmine admitted, shifting forward in his chair to run a weary hand over his face. “Angela Greco was married off to the Tancredi family there, and her mother was originally from Murano.”
“Fuck,” Renzo and I said simultaneously.
“Ludo, have you found out who the Albanians are using in Livorno now? My bet is on the Grecos or Pietras because they both have access to the coast around the area.” I flipped the stone wolf figurine in my hand as I spoke, unable to get the image of the wooden lion with the wolf pup in its mouth out of my head.
Seeing it induced a vivid nightmare of Guinevere just as limp and cold in the arms of my enemies.
Why did that image tear through me? Not with a clean slice but in a great sundering, as if I were being ripped in two. I had known her for three weeks. Three weeks.
But what weight did time hold over the human heart?
Because despite having spent the last four years believing that I had become a machine, more metal than bone, I felt alive and completely defenseless sitting in that chair, knowing that my actions could bear consequences for this woman.
This woman I wanted to shield at any cost and keep at my side for ...
Well, for much longer than the three weeks we had left together.
“I have the shipping manifests from the port authority,” Ludo explained, interrupting my thoughts. “But there are thousands of them. I would have asked some of our men to help look through the figures, but ...”
“But we do not know who we can trust when there is obviously a traitor in our depths,” I concluded. “Fine, we do not leave this room until we find evidence of whoever is working with the Albanians. Unless—Carmine?”
He shook his head with a wince. “Drita caught me fucking Regina again. Let’s just say we are not on good terms. I doubt she would tell me anything other than a creative way to cut off my own balls.”
Renzo snorted, but then, he had always found his brother’s womanizing ridiculous.
“Then, we look,” I declared warily, thinking of Guinevere alone in my bed. “I refuse to believe these incidents are not tied together. Pucci fucked up tonight asking if the family had ties to Livorno. It proves that someone turned them on to us, and that party clearly has ties to the region.”
I pulled out my phone to update Leo and frowned when I saw a new text from him.
Leo: Sorry about being rude to your friend. Bad day, but it isn’t an excuse. How long is she in town for?
It had been sent a few hours ago, when I was still at the Pitti Palace, but as I stared at the screen another text came in.
Leo: Did she mention if she had a sister at all?
Raffa: Why the fuck are you so interested in Guinevere?
He responded immediately.
Leo: She reminds me of a girl I used to know. She wasn’t good news. Bad memories. I’ll stop.
Instead of responding, I put the phone down on the table, irritated with his bad opinion of Guinevere when he did not even know her.
“Okay, email sent,” Ludo announced a second before everyone’s devices pinged with the new message.
“Good, get to work,” I commanded, pulling up the files on my computer and resigning myself to a very long night.
We worked for so long, the sun was a blush on the horizon by the time someone knocked at the closed door.
“Come in,” I beckoned in Italian, assuming it was my housekeeper or Servio.
Instead, Guinevere stuck her head through the door, hair tousled from sleep but face washed clean of last night’s makeup. She was wearing one of my button-up white silk shirts, and I bemoaned the fact that I could not take her back to my bed and remove it with my teeth.
“Well, this is one boring after-party,” she quipped, noticing Martina in her dismantled suit sitting shoulder to shoulder with Renzo on the couch, a tablet in her lap and a computer in his.
Ludo was where he most liked to be, on the floor, back pressed to the bookshelves, his phone, tablet, and computer open around him.
Carmine had fallen asleep some time ago in the chair across from my desk, mouth open for a trail of drool to leak down his chin.
I smiled tiredly at her, opening my arms in silent appeal.
She read my cue and tiptoed across the layered Persian carpets to my side, hesitating only for a moment before climbing into my lap.
The feel of her in my arms dragged the chaos of my brain down to the depths of my gut like an anchor so that for the first time in hours, my mind fell quiet.
I pushed my nose into her hair to seek out the rosemary scent of her shampoo and kissed her head because my lips were already there.
“You should be asleep,” I murmured.
She snorted. “Pot, meet kettle. What are these?”
Her fingers were shifting through the papers I had printed out and laid over my desk, the white littered with red as I tried to look for patterns.
“Shipping manifests,” she muttered at the same time I did. “Why would an investment banker be looking at these?”
“A company we have in our portfolio has been accused of committing fraud using shell companies,” I lied smoothly, letting my hands wander to her hair, then braiding it before I was even aware I was doing so.
It was soothing to have that thick silk in my fingers, mundane work to busy my hands so my brain could take a moment.
“Mmm,” she hummed, but her eyes were flying over the pages as she spread them out over my palatial desk. “Do you have a pen somewhere?”
I finished the braid and handed her a pen in exchange for the hair elastic she pressed into my hand.
She returned to her task, and I leaned back in the leather chair to watch mildly as she scoured the figures.
It would do no harm for her to see the details when she had no clue what we were looking at them for or how we planned to use the information.
In fact, if I had been thinking clearly, I might have asked her to take a look.
She had proven herself more than capable at Fattoria Casa Luna with the Zhang-Liu Imports debacle.
Guilt screeched across my bones like nails over a chalkboard.
Thanks to Guinevere’s aid, the CEO was currently food for the fishes at the bottom of the Shanghai harbor and the entire company had been dissolved after the COO admitted to fraud after I had sent men to politely suggest prison was a better sentence to serve than an eternal sleep.
It was not right to involve my innocent American girl in my underworld, however tempting it might have been to utilize her smarts and take comfort from her company in the shadows.
This was why I was a reluctant mafioso, because the King Below did not deserve a woman wreathed in sunlight and daydreams.
She was too good for this world, and her association with me was enough to taint her without my exposing her to the violence, retribution, and lies of la mafia .
“What did you say you studied in university?” Renzo was asking her when I clued back into the conversation around me.
“I have my MBA with a concentration in finance,” she mumbled around the lid of the pen, shifting papers and circling names without any obvious reason. “I’m good with numbers and finding patterns.”
“You do not need to help us. It is late, and you had an ... eventful night. You should sleep,” I declared, a little too forcibly because it was so easy to give in to temptation with the weight of her in my lap and the sight of her wildly intelligent brain sifting through this problem like a threshing machine, separating the wheat from the chaff.
She paused, looking over her shoulder at me for a moment before taking the pen lid out of her mouth and sticking it on the end of her pinky as if she was afraid to lose it. Only then did she curl into me, hand to my cheek, nails scratching lightly through the stubble as she searched my face.
“I can, if you want me to. But you are tired, Raffa, and clearly unsettled. I want to help, if you’ll let me. You have come to my aid so many times, it’s really the least I can do.”
“You do not need to pay me back for anything,” I reminded her sharply, because she was right—I was tired and stressed, and my filter had burned down to the stub.
“This isn’t about payback,” she promised me softly, tilting her forehead against mine so that those occhi di cerbiatta that had first caught my attention were all I could see.
“This is about me doing something for you because I care about you. If I can ease some of the weight on your shoulders, I’m happy to.
I’m honestly honored I’m in a position where I’m allowed to help you. ”
“Because—”
She pressed the hand with the pen lid on her pinky nail to my mouth to stop me.
“Because you matter to me,” she concluded with a brisk nod before turning in my lap to address the papers once more, popping the lid into her mouth again as if she needed it to think.
I stared at her as emotion moved through the rusty joints of my body, easing the weight of responsibility and the resulting loneliness I had not realized I felt before now.