Chapter Twenty-Four Guinevere #2
I refused to soften myself toward the man who had been my first and only lover.
The least of his crimes was lying to me blatantly, intentionally, for the last six weeks, so why did it hurt more than any of the others?
I felt more alone than I ever had before when just hours ago, I had thought I’d finally found a home where I could thrive, with people who understood and loved me.
Who I had thought I understood enough to love in return.
So then why hadn’t I told Lastra explicitly that Raffa had killed the intruder?
Why, when the time came, had my mouth opened and silence spilled out?
I knew his name more intimately than I knew my own. My mouth had formed those consonants and vowels when I was moved to tears, to pleasure, to laughter. It would, even now, I knew, be the last thought stuck in my head if I ever suffered from dementia.
So. Why. Could. I. Not. Speak. It?
Instead, I’d told Lastra that someone had broken into my room at the palazzo and threatened me.
Someone in the house had killed him before he could hurt me, a murder of self-defense, but I’d run away from the scene before I could get a clear grip on the details.
When he asked me why I’d run from the people who saved me, I told him the truth.
I’d grown up in small-town Michigan, where the most violence I had ever witnessed was when my neighbor hit her husband with a rolled-up newspaper after discovering he’d had an affair.
Running had been a survival instinct I had no experience to curb within myself.
The point was, I told Lastra, there had been a murder.
I told him the address and insisted he send help even though, obviously, the threat had passed.
He assured me dryly that, as he was a police officer, he would send help to the scene.
I wondered if Raffa and the others were okay.
I tried again not to cry.
Shock was setting in, quaking under my skin like shifting tectonic plates, redefining who I was and what I knew for the second time in six weeks.
Because if this was all a lie , then who was this new Guinevere Stone?
There was a brief knock on the door, Lastra’s deep baritone asking in Italian if he could come in.
I called out my agreement, curling the crinkly blanket tighter around my shoulders as if it could shield me from the events of the night.
Lastra opened the door and stepped into the room.
But he did not close it behind him.
Instead, a familiar face appeared around the door, followed by a body I had spent hours worshipping.
Raffa Romano. Dressed in a three-piece suit like those Carmine favored, his hair perfectly in place, not a speck of blood on him.
I shot out of my chair, the metal screeching across the floor, then banging onto its side. As Raffa moved farther into the room and Lastra closed the door, I pressed myself into the corner across from them and fought the primal urge to hiss.
“What are you doing here?” I shouted in Italian, looking wildly at Lastra. “This man! You can’t—! Please, take him away.”
Raffa had tensed midstep, staring at me like he had never seen me before.
Lastra sighed deeply and patted Raffa’s arm. “ Buona fortuna, capo. ”
Capo.
Boss.
The last threads of my sanity and understanding snapped under the shears of that one telling word.
“What the hell!?” I yelled as Lastra slipped out the door. “Who are you?”
Raffa walked over to the table, his movements stilted, almost robotic. “Will you sit?”
“No,” I snapped, my stupid hands trembling so that the blanket crinkled constantly.
“I don’t want to sit with you. Why the hell are you here?
I-I didn’t say you were the one to kill him when I gave my statement.
I won’t.” I swallowed thickly, fear a sour tang on my tongue.
“You don’t need to worry about me telling anyone about anything.
I wouldn’t ever turn you in, e-even now. ”
“Guinevere.” His head slumped forward on his neck, his voice ragged around the sound of my name. “ Dio mio , I would never harm a hair on your head. Please, sit down so I may explain.”
I shook so hard, the blanket wouldn’t stop rustling, so I threw it to the floor and went to the chair. I placed it in the far corner and sat there with my arms and legs crossed. His eyes on my skin hurt , and I wished he would not look at me.
“You just blew a man’s brains out without blinking an eye,” I said, reliving it again and again.
Because that was the craziest thing about it all.
Not that Raffa had a gun when they were legal in Italy.
My father was strictly antigun and could argue for hours with the television about the lack of strict gun control in America, but I could understand the need to have one to protect the palace, or maybe when Raffa traveled through the country as one of its wealthiest citizens.
But to use it like that?
No hesitation. No qualms whatsoever, even after the man had fallen brainless at my feet. When I’d looked up into those whiskey-brown eyes and been met with cold ruthlessness.
“You’ve killed before,” I whispered.
Of course he had.
It matched the pattern I’d refused until now to piece into shape at the back of my mind.
Raffa did not disagree.
“The man was there to hurt you, Guinevere. Someone sent you flowers. Chrysanthemums. In Italy, you only buy chrysanthemums to bring to a funeral or lay on a gravestone. They were not a gift. They were a warning. And tonight, that man came to see it through.”
“Who was he?” My voice was losing steam, fading as I was into a specter of myself.
I was cold, quaking, and utterly alone. The reality of my situation, of how stupid I had been to throw in with a stranger so completely, living with and loving him when I didn’t even really know him or this country ...
God, it was sick how stupid I had been.
How right my father was, and how angry it made me to think that.
Raffa huffed a frustrated breath and ran both hands through his hair. “I do not know yet. Now that you have the police involved, it will be easier to identify him but harder to discover who he worked for.”
“You have multiple enemies.” I thought back woodenly on my earlier suspicions about who Raffa might be. “Who are you?”
There was blood on my hand, smeared on the insides of my thumb and forefinger.
I wondered how difficult it would be to get it off. Books and movies always spoke about how hard it was to get bloodstains out of skin.
Red handed and all that.
“Guinevere.”
I hated that the sound of my name in his mouth could cut through anything, even shock. My head snapped up, and I was looking into his eyes before I remembered why I shouldn’t.
They were absolutely wrecked.
The emotion I had been looking for after he pulled the trigger had surged back in, turning the flat black to warm copper again.
I had never noticed the lines beside his eyes so much, heavy folds that made him look tired and pained.
For the first time, he looked every inch of his thirty-four years, every one of those eleven years older than me.
“I would never let anything hurt you,” he said slowly, as if he was afraid I would not understand my own language. “I would kill a thousand men who tried, and I would sleep like a fucking baby knowing I did the right thing every time.”
I shivered so violently, my tooth tore across my bottom lip and made it bleed.
Raffa leaned over the table, hands flat to the top, face broken open with sincerity.
“I know I am not the hero you thought I was, the hero I warned you I could never be. But I am not quite the villain either. I know that because you showed me all the goodness I had to offer. You shone your starlight on my fucking soul when I thought I had compromised that a long time ago, and you brought everything I have to offer to the surface again. You proved to us both I can be kind and generous.” He sucked in a sharp breath and wrenched his eyes from me to stare at a spot on the floor as he whispered fiercely, “You proved to me I am more man than metal when you reminded me I had a heart and I could love with every goddamn piece of it.”
“Don’t you dare,” I mouthed, breathless with rage. “Don’t you dare tell me you love me now when you couldn’t say it before!”
“I could not say it before because you did not know the truth,” he growled. “How could I tell you I loved you, ask you to stay, when you did not know?”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?” I shouted, slamming my hand against the wall. “Why the fuck did you spend six weeks making me fall in love with you if you were just playing games?”
To my horror, I started to cry. As if unleashing my fury was the key to unlocking the depths of my pain, I wept. Short, soft hiccuping sobs I tried to catch in my hands, dropping my head to hide the way tears sluiced down my face.
“ Cerbiatta mia ,” he murmured, voice thick with his own despair.
“No, no. Please, do not cry. Porca puttana , I did not set out to hurt you like this. How could I ever have expected to meet the light of my fucking life after hitting her with my car? How could I have braced for the impact of knowing you and how it would crash through me, changing everything I thought I knew about my life? About myself?”
I couldn’t stop crying, and his words weren’t helping.
“Just.” I gulped down a sob. “Just tell me the truth. It’s the l-least you can do now.”
He sighed again, but the sound seemed torn out of him. “I think you know who I am, Vera. I think a part of you has wondered for a while now.”
“No,” I said, even though the truth was a heavy weight in my stomach. “I don’t.”
He looked at me for a long moment, and I let him, arrested in the spotlight of his gaze. The same gaze that used to make me feel invincible, like I could be any me and he would love her.
Something pinged behind my breastbone.
Hadn’t I thought I could love any iteration of Raffa the same?
But no. Not like this. Not this man who murdered and lied like some people drank coffee.