Chapter Seventeen Raffa #2
I knew Guinevere had the kind of soul that complimented old women on their beauty and smiled at strangers just to brighten their day for a single moment.
I knew she was driven and determined; planning a solo trip to Florence after being sheltered her whole life was hardly for the faint of heart.
I knew she was the loveliest creature I had ever had the privilege to touch.
That I could close my eyes that moment and perfectly reconstruct the pale lilac of her eyelids and the bend in her soft brows, the way her long neck sloped into a slim shoulder.
She was the kind of woman who had inspired artists in Italy throughout the centuries.
Dante’s Francesca, Petrarch’s Laura, and Botticelli’s Simonetta.
A fleeting force of beauty in their lives, like a shooting star whose impression lingered in their souls forever, leaving an indelible mark.
Even a kind of insanity that would not diminish with time.
I thought, sitting there watching Guinevere circle her own patterns in blue ink, her mind working furiously behind those dark doe eyes, that I had found the star that had lit up my own life and unwittingly changed it forever.
And any resistance I had to her involvement evaporated in the heat of that starlight.
“Do you see?” she asked me, bouncing in my lap in excitement.
I leaned over her back, pretending as if my entire world had not just shifted slightly on its axis with the simple act of having her sit on my lap in the early hours because she wanted to help carry the weight of my world.
I wondered dangerously if she would feel the same way after knowing exactly what it was we were doing here.
“You see,” she said again when Renzo, Martina, and Ludo had crowded around behind us to look at her discovery.
“There are only two discernible patterns. The first is the names of the companies. Do you see how they all reference the one before? They cycle every month, but the basic principle is the same. It’s a kind of cipher. ”
She laid out three pages from the month of May to show us the pattern with a tap of her pen by each company listed for the shipment.
“It’s a bastardized anagram mixed with a Caesar shift.
” She spoke so quickly her tongue almost tripped over the words.
“So they start with the first shipment of the month. Here it’s Porca Pronto exporting pork products from Livorno, and then a week later, Capitale dell’Olio importing bottles of olive oil from Greece, and then ten days after that Itauba Construction with a shipment of construction materials. Do you see it?”
“No,” Renzo grunted.
But my mind was whirring because I did.
“They use three letters from the first business in the next, starting from the fourth letter,” I explained before Guinevere could.
Her response was to absolutely beam at me.
“Exactly. It’s obviously used as a signal to whoever is receiving shipments for them at the port authority.
I mean, they have to be doing something more than money laundering with a scheme like this.
It’s fairly brilliant, even, but I would have to see how far back it goes because these are only for May and June. ”
So obviously the Albanians had set up shop with new contacts when we’d first told them we were breaking our contract in April and then implemented a new process with whoever was bringing in their drugs.
It wasn’t as sophisticated as our scheme, which relied heavily on submarines and technology to cover our tracks and to limit human error at the port authority, but it was still clever.
And my girl was shrewd as hell for figuring it out with just a glance at the papers on my desk at six in the morning.
“I can find the origin company much better now,” Ludo muttered, already moving to grab his computer, then resting it on one forearm as he typed with the other hand on his way back to my desk. “It will take time, but they have given many more data points that can be traced to them.”
“ Eccellente ,” I told him, but I was staring at Guinevere, honestly a bit in awe of her.
“ Ottimo lavoro ,” Renzo bestowed on her, lifting a big hand to clamp it over her shoulder, then giving her a little shake the way he would have done to Martina or Carmine.
Guinevere basked in the praise, her smile almost dopey. “Thanks, Renz.”
I lifted my brows at the nickname, but my taciturn right hand only lifted his chin at her and went back to the sofa to continue his work with our new information.
“I knew I wasn’t the only one with beauty and brains in this place,” Martina complimented her, pressing her cheek to Guinevere’s in a rare gesture of intimacy. “This is a big deal for us.”
My fawn lifted and dropped her shoulder as if she wasn’t sure what to do with the kind words from my crew. Her eyes dipped to mine when Martina moved back to the couch.
Carmine, still out cold in his chair, snored on.
“ Magnifico ,” I told her when it was just the two of us behind the desk, palming her entire face in my hands. “Absolutely magnificent.”
Her flush was the prettiest swipe of vermilion along her cheekbones. “It wasn’t anything.”
“It was everything,” I corrected, then said, softer, “That is twice now you have come to my financial aid. Even if you had not found anything, it means everything to me that you wanted to help.”
Her bashfulness melted away, leaving behind an expression of mingled wonder and tenderness that made the spot behind my sternum ache. I thought perhaps it was because each time she did something to move me, her name was carved into the walls of my chest.
“I may not be strong enough to break a man’s finger when he insults you or wealthy enough to fill your closet if you lose all your clothes, but I can protect you in the ways I know how.”
I fingered the cornicello around her neck and wondered aloud, “Have you heard of the saying ‘ sfortunato al gioco, fortunato in amore ’?” She shook her head.
“It means ‘unlucky at cards, lucky in love.’ You cannot have good fortune in all things, and so you have to choose, or maybe fate chooses for you. Either way, perhaps you have spent your life until now saving up all your good fortune for a truly worthy love story.”
I looked up into her eyes to find them dark as lake water at night, the impact of my words rippling across their surface. We were suspended in the moment, but under the silence I could see that we were breathing in tandem, and I knew without checking that our hearts would be beating the same notes.
“Maybe,” she whispered, the word almost sick sounding with hope.
“Boss, I found something,” Ludo called out from the floor.
I nodded, drawing my thumb along Guinevere’s suede-soft cheek. “It bears repeating—thank you.”
“No thanks necessary,” she mumbled, getting off my lap as Ludo came around the table with his computer once more. “I’ll leave you to sort out the rest, but have any of you eaten?”
“Are you offering to cook?” Martina asked, perking up. “Because Servio won’t be in to start breakfast for another two hours, and I’m starved .”
“Coffee,” Renzo added.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Guinevere said, winking at me over her shoulder as she rounded the desk.
She hesitated beside Carmine, peering at me with mischief in her eyes. When I nodded, she dropped the pen lid that had found a place on her pinky again straight into Carmine’s open maw.
He woke up spluttering, everyone enjoying a good laugh after a long night.
Guinevere left bouncing on her tiptoes, grinning ear to ear.
There were still too many unanswered mysteries, but thirty minutes later, one thing had become clear.
The Grecos had taken over operations for the Albanians, and a handful of the shell companies had linked back to some of the higher-ups in their organization.
“What are we going to do?” Martina asked as the scent of frying pork filtered through the room.
I leaned back in my chair, staring into the distance, trying to sort through the threads of information we had and plait them into something we could use to bind the Grecos to the stake and burn them for their betrayal.
“Carmine,” I said slowly. “Do you think Drita would forgive you if you took her some choice information? Like perhaps that the Grecos have informed about their previous transactions with us to the DIA?”
Understanding and dark glee suffused his handsome face. “I think she could be persuaded.”
“Right, then we contact the Albanians and offer the information without a price. They won’t want to lose their ties to Italian trading ports, so we suggest that we will step in again. If they are hesitant, point out that one of our men deciphered their code in under five minutes.”
Not one of my men. My woman. But still.
Merda , she was phenomenal.
“I thought we wanted to phase out the drug trafficking?” Martina reminded me. “We’ve shifted a lot of those old resources into the wind business.”
Green tech was a new and burgeoning industry in Italy and across Europe that we had jumped into on the ground floor.
We had earmarked half a million euros to bribe local officials to get permits for even more wind farms this year after grossing over thirty million euros off them last year.
The lack of government regulations and increasing need for green energy made it a perfect business for the family.
And it was considerably less harmful than the drug industry.
But this could not be helped if we wanted to get the DIA off our backs.
“We outsource it,” I explained. “Pull Clan Burette in to take over the operations. Get them set up with the mini submarines in Genoa with Gerlando. He still runs the x-ray machines at the port? Perfect. We connect them. Then the Albanians owe us a favor, the Grecos are fucked, and we toss Burette a bone after I publicly set down his daughter last night in front of half of Florence. Three birds, one stone.”
“Stealing the Albanians’ business back from the Grecos isn’t enough of a punishment for those motherfuckers,” Ludo grunted.
Which was true.
“We could—” Renzo started.
“No, we are not killing any of them.” I shot my bloodthirsty enforcer a look. “We are trying to get off police radar, not invite further scrutiny.”
“It’s not like the Gentleman not to send a message,” Martina mused, staring at me shrewdly. “Do you have another idea?”
The Grecos had tried to undercut my authority by planting an earworm with the DIA that I had secretly taken over my father’s illegal enterprise and was smuggling drugs into Livorno. It was only fair to turn that police attention back on them.
“Call Drita,” I told Carmine, grinning like the cat who ate the canary. “Set a meet and explain things to her. I think she can be convinced that the Grecos need further punishment, too, and what better way to do that than getting the DIA’s eyes on someone else?”
Martina laughed, bright and happy and edged with evil intention.
It had always been one of my favorite sounds, and I grinned at her then.
It was in moments like this, problem-solving, maneuvering the constant moving parts of an illegal empire, that made me forget why I had ever shunned this way of life.
It was dangerous, yes, but at the end of the day, it could also make you feel something more than just alive. It could make a mortal man feel like a god.
But when Guinevere popped her head back into the room and announced she had made us all an American breakfast, I realized that my little fawn had the very same effect.
“ Cerbiatta mia ,” I said as we moved out of the study toward the sumptuous scents from the kitchen and terrace, my arm around her waist. “How would you feel about visiting an Italian beach one day?”