Chapter Twenty-One Raffa #2
There was a difference, though, between growing from what you were and changing entirely. And she would have to do that if she wanted to stay and be my woman.
She would have to become the Queen Below to my King.
The thought of her royal and clothed in shadow by my side, Proserpina to my Pluto, made my throat tight with a hope so big it threatened to choke me.
I was about to open my mouth to declare I would tell her at the end of the night, after our guests had left, when Carmine entered the room looking slightly disheveled. He immediately made for a carafe of wine on the counter and poured himself a large glass.
A moment later, a friend of Martina’s appeared, a small bruise at the hinge of her neck and shoulder.
Martina, Renzo, and I chuckled, ignoring Carmine’s smug grin. He swallowed a hefty gulp of expensive wine and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Dehydrated?” Martina teased.
Carmine winked. “I hope you don’t mind, Raffa. We used the bench in the gym for some X-rated exercise.”
I rolled my eyes at him, but my mood was so good I couldn’t be even slightly irritated.
“Oh,” he mentioned. “You should fire whoever you used for the flowers, boss. They left an arrangement of chrysanthemums in the foyer.”
He made a sign to ward off the devil, but I was too preoccupied with his words to pay it any mind. Annella, my housekeeper, had hired people to decorate the house for the party, but the decorations were mostly Florentine banners and huge urns filled with white and red flowers.
Not chrysanthemums.
They were only used on graves and at funerals in Italy, and as a superstitious people, we avoided them on any other occasion.
“Show me,” I demanded.
Carmine set his wineglass on the counter, sobering instantly. Martina and Renzo followed behind me as we moved through the first floor and down the stairs to the foyer.
The flowers were in a large, low bowl on the marble table at its center.
I searched the blooms and came up with a small card perched on the edge of the bowl.
“I did not die, yet I lost life’s breath.”
You will not die. You will not go gently.
So I will take your breath instead and watch you suffocate.
San Marco
As if the quote from Dante’s Divine Comedy made it so, I could not breathe.
Terror was a noose cinched too tightly around my neck, all my blood rushing to my head and inducing dizziness so severe I had to brace my hand on the table.
Of course, there was only one choice for who my breath could be.
And she was laughing upstairs with her friends at a party.
Renzo plucked the card from my hand and read it before cursing savagely and passing it off to Martina.
“She leaves in two days,” Carmine soothed after reading it himself. “You just have to be careful until then.”
I could not speak, muted by that ever-closing noose.
“He was going to ask her to stay,” Martina murmured, her hand soft against my forearm.
“This is why I never could.” The words almost wheezed out of me, wrung from my air-deprived lungs. “She has already survived so much. I will not ask her to survive this.”
“Whoever the fuck San Marco is, we will find them eventually,” Renzo swore.
“We have suffered worse fools than these. The Pietras are a shell of what they once were before we broke them apart for taking Aldo. Eight Greco members are rotting, awaiting prosecution from the DIA, because they dared to turn against us. We will end this poetic motherfucker’s threat too. ”
“Yes,” I agreed on a hiss as fury worked fingers under the rope around my throat and pulled it loose.
I let the dark joy of violence fill my blood and bring me back from the brink of panic.
Il Gentiluomo was a figure spoken about in whispers in dark corners and back alleys.
A man so monstrous he had become legend.
For a brief moment, I forgot that monster was me, having spent too long in human skin around Guinevere.
But there was no future where I was not both, and there was no future where I could live with Guinevere suffering the consequences of my choices.
“Talk to Annella. Get the name of the decorator or the florist and discover who the fuck sent these,” I ordered as the cool mantle of numb cruelty settled back around my shoulders. “Find me the man, find me the messenger, I do not care. Just find me someone to kill for this.”
Renzo and Carmine both nodded before taking off back up the stairs to do my bidding.
“Raffa,” Martina tried, voice soft, hand still on my arm though I was numb to it.
“Not now. The party is over. Wrap it up without causing alarm in the next hour. I do not want anyone outside the family in this house after that.”
The idea of people I did not trust farther than I could throw them being in the same city, let alone under the same roof as Guinevere, filled me with primal rage.
Martina hesitated a moment before her posture changed, shoulders tightening, spine straightening to her normal military bearing. “Yes, boss.”
“Nothing touches her,” I ground out. “Not so much as a bee stings her in the next forty-eight hours before she is gone. Understood?”
She nodded.
I went to find my woman and install her for the rest of the night within arm’s reach of my side. In a way, I was glad for the rage flaming in my rib cage. It almost overwhelmed the crushing grief at my heart.