Chapter Twenty-Four Guinevere
Chapter Twenty-Four
Guinevere
I ran.
The basic human response to a terrifying situation is fight or flight, and I knew, even in my stupefied horror, that there was no way I could ever fight Raffa.
So I leapt over the body— the body —like the fawn Raffa had accused me of being and darted past him before he could even lower the gun.
The gun!
There were people I could go to inside the house. Martina was my first thought, ex-military and badass, but logic ripped the thought into pieces.
Everyone in this house was unequivocally his .
So loyal to him, they could not be trusted to help me even under the best circumstances.
And these weren’t that.
Because that same level of loyalty that made them a family meant only one thing.
They knew.
They knew Raffa was a monster masquerading as a man.
They knew, they knew, they knew.
I was still screaming.
The sound echoed off the high ceilings of the house as I raced through the first floor and stampeded down the stairs in my bare feet, slipping slightly on the marble because they were slick with blood.
Blood.
By the time I made it to the bottom, I was going so fast, I could not have stopped if I’d tried. Voices were starting to sound behind me, but I couldn’t focus on those.
I had to keep my eyes trained on the doors at the end of the huge foyer, and when I reached them, I threw myself against the heavy wood while I twisted the knob, forcing it open faster than the old, ornate hinges wanted to move.
They screeched painfully, but I was still screaming, so I didn’t notice.
Cool night air hit my face, shaking some clarity back between my ears.
The police.
That was where I needed to go, to the police station.
I couldn’t think beyond that to what I would say, what I would do, once more caught without a phone or ID, in a little nightgown the same maple-brown shade as Raffa’s eyes.
The cold eyes of a killer that I had stared into countless times, believing they were the windows to the soul of a man I loved.
I ran.
Turning on my heel on the pavers, I sprinted toward the Arno. The sun was just a faint glow on the horizon, so I wasn’t sure if the police station would be open, but I remembered where Raffa had taken me to make my statement in Santa Croce.
There were a few people in the streets. A small group of drunk youths around my age who laughed when I passed in my silk nightie at a sprint. An older man, his dog peeing against a graffitied wall.
I kept running.
All the way across the Arno and to the left down to the police station.
It didn’t look open to the public, but there were lights on within, so I raised my fist to pound on the empty door ...
... and found I could not bring my fist to connect with the glass in the frame.
I stood there, swaying slightly, as I sucked in deep, long inhales, and the lack of motion, the time to breathe, cooled the hot rush of panic in my blood until I was as inert as volcanic rock. Trapped in my body while my thoughts battled each other.
As much as instinct urged me to knock on that glass and report a murder, I physically could not bring myself to turn Raffa in.
It was more than the simple fact that, in however brutal a way, he had saved my life.
It was every moment that had led to this one, every moment where I had believed the very best of him.
His touch on my shoulder when he was retying that red dress, his mouth on my breasts through the wine-soaked gown, and the feel of him inside me under the starlit night only a handful of hours before this.
The way he’d made me fall in love not only with this country and him but also with myself. Exactly how I was.
After years of my being sheltered and controlled for my own good by my parents as we all fought to discover how to live with my primary hyperoxaluria type 1 diagnosis, where it felt as if my condition defined me more than any of my other characteristics did, it had been such an overwhelming blessing to have someone like Raffa admire and care for me.
He had made me feel safe and strong, smart and captivating.
Worthy of the kind of love I had only ever read about in epic poems.
I sobbed right there in the street, catching it in one hand like I’d thrown up my sickly, bleeding heart.
Raffa was not the kind of hero from those poems, and clearly, I was too silly and naive to be any kind of heroine.
Because seeing Raffa kill that man so coldly had locked a pattern into place I had been too blinded by rose-tinted love to ignore.
The broken skin on his knuckles when we danced in the restaurant, the way he’d threatened Wyatt at the winery, the two different companies trying to steal from his investments, and the calm, eerily cold way he’d reacted and then exacted retribution, at least against the latter.
I shuddered to think what he might have done to the people at Zhang-Liu Imports, but part of me knew he hadn’t just turned them in to the police.
Even the scene where he’d confronted and broken the finger of the driver who had called me a whore took on a new light. What once had almost aroused me now seemed to be one scenario in a pattern of violent behaviors.
Raffaele Romano was not the man of my dreams.
He was the stuff of nightmares.
A dangerous criminal who was so inured to violence, sabotage, and death that he didn’t blink an eye at taking justice into his own hands.
With Zhang-Liu, with the shipping company, with the driver who had called me a whore, and finally, with the man who had broken in tonight and ended up with four bullets through his body on the floor of the closet.
That man was no random thief.
He was there with a gun searching for something. No. Someone.
Raffa had enough enemies to rival James Bond.
It was too surreal to comprehend, but the only thing that continued to rise to the surface of my murky thoughts was this: You do not know Raffaele Romano .
He is not the man you thought he was.
You are a silly girl in love with a dream you projected onto a man who was probably laughing at your naivete this entire time.
Shame and heartbreak and horror soured my gut so that this time when I sobbed, I gagged, bile having surged up my throat.
“ Posso aiutarla? ”
Can I help you?
An officer in the standard blue uniform stood at the door, a cell phone held to his ear. He peered at me through the murky glass and then unlocked and opened the door.
My fist fell to my side listlessly as panic followed swiftly on the heels of the bile at the back of my tongue. I did not want to speak to the police. Even if I didn’t know Raffa, even if I’d loved a mirage, there was no way I could turn him in.
Not after everything that had happened.
My heart simply wouldn’t allow it.
“No, I mean, yes ,” I amended, holding up my hands as I backed away slowly. “I’m fine, thank you.”
When he only frowned and stepped forward, I repeated myself in Italian, adding, “Really, I’m just great. I got a little lost, but I know my way home now.”
The officer glowered at me, murmuring something too low and fast into the phone in Italian for me to discern before he hung up and stuffed it in his pocket. When he moved forward this time, I wasn’t expecting his swiftness, and he caught my wrist with a painful grip.
“You are covered in blood,” he informed me, as if I wasn’t aware.
And truly, in the chaos of it all, I had forgotten. Now that he mentioned it, I could feel the dried gore tightening my skin, making it itch. When I gave in to the impulse, my fingers came away flaked in dried blood.
“Come with me,” he said, tugging me inextricably into the station.
Alarm cracked through my cool resolve, lava hot once more and flooding my entire nervous system.
“No!” I almost shouted, trying to wrench my arm out of his hold without any progression. “ No . I do not have to go inside. There is nothing. I just hurt myself.”
“I would like to hear why you are covered in blood and bone,” the officer demanded as he opened the door and hauled me inside the cold reception area.
I shivered violently, but it had nothing to do with the air-conditioning.
“You can tell me why a young tourist arrives at the police but does not want help,” he continued with narrowed eyes before taking my arm again and leading me through a mostly empty bullpen to a side room with a metal door.
“I wouldn’t want to waste your time,” I tried again, my heart beating so loudly I couldn’t focus, vision swimming. Oh my God, I thought, I was going to get Raffa arrested when all I wanted to do was just get away. “I’m an American. I have rights, and you can’t just—”
The metal door banged shut in my face, and there was a rusty whoosh as he slid a lock into place. When I tested the handle, I was not surprised to find it locked.
“Fuck,” I murmured, curling my arms around myself, blood flaking off my arms as I did and falling like macabre confetti to my feet. “What have I done?”
Half an hour later, I was in a private room in the station, wrapped in a shiny emergency blanket with a lukewarm paper cup filled with thick espresso.
The officer, Domani Lastra, was middle aged, with a soft, open face and big gray eyes that looked at me with sympathy as I spun a yarn about the events of the evening.
When I was finished, he looked at me for a long, silent moment, then sighed and reached over to pat my hand on the table before he told me he would be right back.
There was a metal cabinet in the corner of the room, just clean enough for me to make out my warped shape and the vivid red of blood still splashed across my face and chest.
I shuddered as I thought about red being Raffa’s favorite color.
Revulsion rolled through me, and I gagged into my hand, breathing hard so I wouldn’t throw up on the table. Blood was gross enough to have all over me. I didn’t want to add vomit.
I closed my eyes when the nausea passed and focused on fighting the tears that burned in the back of my nose.
I would not cry over Raffa.