Bruno Cardona hung from his hands in the damp, wine-musk-scented cellar of Tenuta Romano like a sprig of drying rosemary in my mother’s kitchen. He was currently unconscious, head limp between his shoulders, hair dull with old sweat, and face covered in blood from a gash above his forehead and another through his lower lip.
Two weeks ago, he’d been a trusted soldato in my organization. He had worked down in Naples with the Camorra outfit under Damiano Vitale for years before coming north to join my ranks, and he’d come highly recommended. He was in possession of a special skill set I needed for my operations up north, someone with experience in olive oil harvest and fraud, and ties to the Corporazione Mastri Oleari, one of the entities that verified extra-virgin olive oils. He had helped my outfit rake in millions of euros over the last four years from our agromafia pursuits alone.
Then, on a Thursday night when I was waiting for my driver to pick me up in Rome, someone on a Vespa had sped up the straight in front of the restaurant I was waiting beside and opened fire on me with a semiautomatic.
I’d ducked behind a Lamborghini almost immediately, but one of the bullets had taken a chunk out of the meat of my bicep. Shouts from inside the restaurant sounded the alarm, and the figlio di puttana took off without getting the job done.
The job being my murder.
It had been a very long time since someone had tried to take out the capo of the Toscana Camorra. Four years, in fact. When someone had successfully put a bullet between my father’s eyes.
It seemed my brief era of peace had ended.
Unhappily for Bruno, I had recognized two important details about my shooter.
He was left handed, and he was wearing a black jacket with an SSC Napoli football team logo on it.
Little things, but didn’t they say the devil was in the details?
It meant my would-be assassin was from Naples, the heart of Camorra Mafia territory.
My territory, if only by proxy.
While Damiano ruled Campania, it was my family who reigned supreme in the north.
Oh, tourists thought the Mafia only existed in Sicily, maybe in the heart of Naples, but no farther. Even Northern Italians loved to bury their heads in the sand, claiming the camorristi were a disease of the south.
We were not.
We were everywhere inside the country, with branches extending all over the globe.
New York, London, Buenos Aires.
We’d just gotten smarter than the gold-chain-wearing, swaggering mafiosi of the eighties and early nineties who thought they were invincible. We’d learned from the crackdown on the Cosa Nostra in Sicily and adjusted.
I ran a multimillion-euro business out of the heart of Tuscany, and I’d never personally had any issues with the carabinieri. It was almost unbelievable what a few well-greased palms would buy you in local politics.
We might not have had any trouble with the police, but rival families were another matter entirely. Every criminal syndicate wanted a foothold in Italy’s north, with its bustling industries to launder money through, its countless tourists to scam and extort, its thriving ports.
But only one could rule.
And that man was me.
Something I had been certain Bruno understood until I’d seen that SSC Napoli patch and known in my gut it was my rabid-fan soldato. A man who had also known my schedule in Rome.
“Wake him up,” I ordered Renzo.
My cousin stormed forward with a bucket of icy well water and tossed it over Bruno’s limply hanging form.
He came sputtering to life, thrashing and gasping for breath like a fish out of water.
I took a drag of my cigarette, studied the long line of ash at its end, and flicked it to the floor.
“Bastardo,” Bruno cursed when he gained his bearings, hurling insults at me as if they were knives.
They weren’t, and they did nothing to hurt me.
“Bruno, Bruno,” I scolded lightly, strolling forward to the edge of the dirty puddle pooling beneath his bare feet. “Do not bite the hand that can kill you.”
“I don’t deserve this. I am a good man,” he countered. “A good man for you. Haven’t I made you money?”
I arched a brow, studied the butt of my cigarette again, and then lashed forward with my free hand to grip Bruno hard by the throat. The tip of the lit tobacco sizzled satisfyingly as I pressed it to his wet cheek. He hollered and jerked, but I had a good grip on him and did not let go.
“Understand something,” I suggested mildly. “I may not have wanted to become a made man, but fate saw fit to take that choice from my hands and anointed them in blood instead of ink. I do not fight fate. So here we are. You and me. They call me the Gentleman Mafioso, but that is misleading, is it not? You know me better than that.”
I wrenched his head toward me, a scream slipping from his contorted mouth as the pressure seared through his shoulders.
“You know the secret,” I whispered as I flicked the damp butt to the floor and exchanged it for the knife from my belt, pressing the blade into Bruno’s anxiously jumping Adam’s apple. “You know I might not have wanted this life, but I am very, very good at it. I like to get creative, bending the law to my whims. I enjoy looking for new ways to make money. But what I really love?”
I cut a long, thin slice across his neck just to watch him bleed. Not enough to kill him.
Not yet.
Just enough for him to come to the inevitable conclusion that if he did not turn on whoever paid him, he would die.
In a way that I would find long, slow, and highly enjoyable.
“I love to kill those who would come after me and mine. And I like to do it in a way that sends a message to everyone else who has ever thought to try.”
I stepped back, dropping my hold on him abruptly so his body swung on the chains like a macabre church bell, heralding my kind of communion.
“What do you think, Bruno? Are you ready to talk, or would you like to be my messenger?”
In the end, it turned out he was both.
“How is she?” I asked Martina the moment I got through the door of the palazzo later that day.
Even in the midst of skinning a man alive, I’d thought of the small American girl back at my apartment.
There was no reason she should have inspired such curiosity in me.
She was just a girl.
Not more than twenty-five and not at all my type.
I liked my women tall and curved, soft edges and round handholds. I liked them mature and independent, almost detached, so they would ask no questions and I would have to tell no lies.
But . . .
There was something about Guinevere.
Perhaps her helplessness called to my baser self.
I didn’t think that was it, or all of it, though.
I found myself intrigued by her contrasts: She was a silly girl who trusted strangers but one who quite literally laughed in the face of danger after being chased by a man and hit by a car. One who teased me, a grown man, a stranger, like she had the right to when grown men who had known me for years would never dare.
It was an irreverence, a charming one, like she knew the world had big teeth, but she was going to explore it anyway. Armed with a mocking self-deprecation and keen curiosity that made her a glaring beacon for bad men.
Like me.
Because it made me wonder—if she saw my big teeth, would she run away scared or stare into my eyes and ask me to take a bite?
“I just helped her into bed after her shower,” Martina replied as she sharpened her knife on a whetstone with a repetitive hissing rasp. “She finally noticed she was wearing one of your shirts. I gave her a new one that did not smell.”
I raised an eyebrow at her tone and in question.
My friend grinned. “She offered to have it professionally dry-cleaned.”
Laughter bubbled inside my throat, but I swallowed it down.
Still, Martina saw my amusement, however guarded, and smiled wider. “Yes, she’s an interesting girl for an American.”
I inclined my head in agreement, already moving through the living room toward the stairs to check on her.
“You know,” Martina called after me in a bland voice that warned me she did not intend to let this go. “There are other options for the girl. You could loan her some money and send her on her way. Suggest a hotel, if you feel responsible for her. Maybe call Cesar and get her a fast appointment at the consulate.”
I didn’t respond because I didn’t want to acknowledge her words.
Only three more steps toward the stairs and she said, “Or your mother would take her. If you really care that much about helping her until she’s well. You’re not exactly a natural-born caretaker, and you have better things to do than play nursemaid.”
A snarl lodged in my throat, and I was grateful to be facing away from her so she could not see the sneer contorting my features.
Nursemaid?
Cazzo, that was not who I was playing.
But I could not—would not—tell her that my role was that of the shining knight. A role I’d last wanted to play as a boy fighting with sticks as swords against my best friend, Leo.
A role I had banished from my mind completely since picking up the mantle of my father.
The ruler of the underworld did not get to be the good guy in any scenario, I’d told myself as I laid it to rest.
But then, Guinevere had appeared in front of my headlights, a startled deer so ready for slaughter.
And I felt the tug of that nostalgic longing.
To do something good for the first time in a long time.
To feel like a good kind of man again.
“It is not your business,” I said to Martina. “I asked you here because you are the only woman I trust in Firenze.”
“I’m honored,” she annoyed me by saying, walking forward to place a soft hand on my arm. “And I won’t judge, Raffa. I only meant to tease you. She’s a very pretty girl.”
“It is not about that,” I snapped, and truly it wasn’t.
She could have been a troll, and that same part of me would have yearned to help her. It wasn’t even about her.
It was about me and the kind of man I was and could no longer be.
Guinevere was giving me the fleeting chance to live out a different side of myself, and I was going to take it. And that was a secret I’d take to my grave.
“You know Angela has become obsessed with setting me up with Stefania, which has convinced Stef she has a chance with me. Being seen around town with another woman will deter both of them from thinking I would ever go through with such an arrangement.”
It wasn’t exactly a lie, but then over the last four years I had become very adept at skirting the truth. I was annoyed with Mama and Stefania for their mechanisms. I was a grown man capable of finding my own wife when and if the desire struck me. Taking Guinevere out to one of my usual haunts meant the word would spread through Firenze in a matter of hours that I had a new woman on my arm, and hopefully Stefania would take the unsubtle hint after a series of subtle rebuffs.
“Va bene. So you’re just using her as a beard until you can get rid of her,” Martina surmised, but her voice was too dry, and I knew she was challenging me.
“My actions do not require an explanation to you or anyone,” I reminded her. “I have something more important for you to focus on. Bruno sang a very beautiful song before he died at Tenuta Romano. I want you to find out who the fuck San Marco is.”
“Like the piazza in Venice?”
“Like a man,” I corrected over my shoulder. “Bruno said he is the man Rico Pietra introduced him to for the job.”
Her mouth dropped open. “You think the Pietras tried to kill you?”
I shrugged one shoulder as I headed for the stairs again. “It was four years in the making, Tina. There was no way they would not look for revenge one day. Maybe it just took them this long to get their shit together. Maybe they were just the go-between. Or maybe Bruno was lying through his teeth. At this point, we are shooting in the dark.”
She didn’t respond after that, which was good because I was done with the conversation for now. Martina was ex-military and shockingly efficient, but her corruption and decommissioning were rooted in rebelling against authority. She ignored my orders five times out of ten, but the 50 percent she did obey yielded incredible results.
Usually that level of insubordination would have been dealt with swiftly, but Martina had been my boyhood friend, and that was the kind of loyalty you didn’t grow out of.
She would die for me, and she had almost proven it one too many times.
So I knew she wouldn’t speak of the American girl to anyone, not only because it would expose too much about her capo but also because she cared for me. She would help me find the stronzo with enough awareness of my operation to target Bruno and come after me because she would want them dead just as much as I did.
In the Camorra, trust was measured in blood, and Martina had anointed herself with enough to be in my innermost circle.
Upstairs was quiet, as it always was.
I rarely spent time in this house because I preferred the estate in the countryside, and my mother and sisters only ventured into town for concerts or shopping trips. It was a luxurious home to be so infrequently used, but my father had been a frivolous man, and this had been his purchase.
I’d never been fond of it, but when I walked through the open door of the bedroom I’d given for Guinevere’s use and saw her seated against a mound of white silk pillows in one of my old white button-down linen shirts, her dark, wet hair turning the material transparent over her breasts, I thought it was the perfect backdrop to her kind of romantic beauty.
She seemed like something straight out of an Arthurian legend in the four-poster bed with the sheer curtains billowing in the warm breeze flowing in from the pushed-open French doors. Like something a man would have to earn the right to win.
When she looked up at me in the doorway, I was shocked by her smile. It was wide and without insecurity, as if she’d looked up at me with that same smile for years, always happy to greet me. It hit me in the chest like a fist and made me hesitate in the doorway.
“Ciao, Raffa,” she greeted me, her voice still strained from her cold but much better than the painful croak it had been the last few days. “How are you?”
I leaned against the doorjamb and crossed my arms as I regarded her. “I think that is my line. You are the one who has been injured and ill.”
“I’m a bit better, thank you.”
“You told the doctor that you had a condition.” I gestured to the IV that was now unhooked and pushed against the wall. “You needed more water than you could drink?”
She winced as she adjusted herself against the pillows and moved her hair off her chest to rest on the top of the cushion behind her head. It left her breasts shockingly apparent through the wet linen, her nipples hard and pink.
I didn’t tell her to cover herself, but I tried not to stare too much lest I gave myself away.
“I have a genetic disorder,” she admitted. “Primary hyperoxaluria type 1. It doesn’t usually cause issues if I take care of myself. Basically, my body produces too much of a substance called oxalate that can affect the kidneys, liver, and urinary tract, so I have to manually flush them by drinking copious amounts of water every day, watching my diet, and taking my medicine.” She gestured to the side table, where the doctor had left her a series of pill bottles. “I was born with it, but it took them a few years to figure out why I was smaller and sicker than other kids.”
I frowned. “It is dangerous?”
“Not really. I mean, it can be.” She looked into space for a moment. “I was matched with a buddy through the medical center in France, and she passed away after a failed liver transplant when I was eighteen. But it’s not . . . I mean, I’m healthy right now.”
Something twisted in my gut and went rancid. It felt a lot like guilt, even though I had nothing at all to do with this girl. Even though I wasn’t responsible for her illness or her well-being.
“Your parents let you travel to Italy alone when you are sick?”
“I am not sick,” she insisted, some of that bite she’d exhibited on the roadside coming back. “I was born with a genetic disorder. I am not sick, and I am not dying. I’m a healthy young woman capable of traveling alone, taking care of herself, and having adventures, despite what my first horrible day here might make you believe.”
I opened my palms in surrender, trying not to let the smile loose on my face because I had the feeling it would make her even more indignant, and I was already finding her wildly endearing.
“Bene, I meant no offense. You are obviously feeling better if you are ready to go for the throat of the man who saved you.”
Her scowl disappeared as she rubbed a weary hand over her mouth. “God, I’m sorry. It’s just, the whole topic is a little triggering for me. I have overbearing parents.”
“Italian.” I gestured to myself. “Tell me about it.”
She smiled again, the shy curve of her mouth making me take an involuntary step into the room to be closer to her.
“I’m sorry about this.” When I rolled my eyes at her, she laughed. “I know you aren’t a fan of apologies, but I’m from Michigan and it’s basically cultural, so don’t get mad at me. I just wanted to say, thank you again. I know I’ve been an awful imposition. But I’m feeling better.” A cough racked her entire frame and then made her wince as it irritated her bruised ribs and side. “I’ll probably be okay to leave tomorrow—”
I held up a hand to stop her, and her mouth snapped shut with an audible click.
“I do not believe I have ever had a woman try so hard to get away from me before,” I mused, and watched a mixture of horror and amusement wash over her expressive face. It was rather entertaining. “Now, stop trying to run away. You are still sick, and having you occupy one of my eight bedrooms in this giant mausoleum is not an inconvenience. I know how much you Americans like to sue. I am really just covering my own ass so you do not come after me for hitting you with my car.”
Her laugh was throaty. “I’m not sure I’d have a case to make, seeing as how I ran out into the road like a madwoman.”
“I have a man on it. On finding this Galasso character,” I informed her.
I had not intended on sharing that, not just because I did not want her to guess at what kind of man would or could “have a man on it” but also because I did not want her to think I was forming some kind of . . . attachment to her. I would find this stronzo so he did not hurt any other woman ever again, not because he had hurt this particular girl. Unfortunately, it was impossible to look at her in that bed, vulnerable and sweet enough to make my damn teeth ache, and not want to offer her something.
A present.
A tribute.
Something of meaning ripped straight out of my skin.
Her pink mouth parted in shock. “Oh. I didn’t . . . I mean, to what end? Do you think he’ll still have any of my things?”
No, I thought, but I could make him pay for taking them.
“Forse.” Maybe, I allowed.
“Well, thank you.” She tried to gather her hair again, sucking in a pained breath as she moved to push it out of her face.
“Let me help you,” I offered before I could think it through, moving briskly around the bed to her side.
There was a hairbrush on the marble nightstand and one of my sister’s hair ties Martina must have found for Guinevere in the bathroom. I pushed aside the mountain of pillows from behind her back so I could balance a knee on the bed behind her.
“What are you—?” she started to ask and then shivered when I gathered her wet hair in one hand and laid it down her back.
The tension in her shoulders loosened the moment I passed the brush through the strands, careful of the tangles. The sound of bristles passing through the damp silk and her slightly raspy breath from the lingering cold were the only noises in the entire house. It made the scene oddly intimate even though I meant for it to be perfunctory.
When I started to collect her hair into three parts and braid it, she shifted in surprise.
“You know how to braid?”
“I have three older sisters,” I divulged in answer. “This is the least of the things they taught me.”
She giggled. An honest-to-God, bright, bubbling giggle that passed through my armor like vapor.
“French, Dutch, crown,” I continued, listing the ways my siblings had forced me to plait their hair. “My backup profession could be being a hairdresser.”
She laughed again, softly because it clearly still hurt her. “I’m impressed. Even though it feels odd that the only things I know about you are that you own a literal palace, your first name is Raffa, and you’re very good at braiding.”
I slid a lock of rich brown hair through my fingers as I considered that. She knew nothing about me. Nothing.
How fucking freeing.
“Well, I love my country and consider myself an amateur historian. I like to cook, but I hate to clean up after myself, so I have a cook for when I am too lazy and a cleaner for when I am not. If I do not work out every day, I am a brontolone. A . . . grouch, I think the word is. I am allergic to kiwis. And until I met you, I was not very fond of Americans.”
She shivered as my warm breath wafted over her ear. I pretended not to notice, tying off the braid and then getting off the bed to stand beside it.
She lifted a hand gingerly to feel over the braid and offered me that shy, sweet smile like a present she’d wrapped just for me. “Grazie mille, Raffa.”
“Prego. Now, you are probably tired. I will leave you.”
“No, I mean, yes. I am tired, but if you wanted to stay . . . it’s kind of boring laying around without anything to do. I’m not allowed screen time, and I’m not allowed to read, so . . .” She shrugged limply.
I had work to do. Two men to find and, hopefully, kill.
What I did not have time for was caving to the whims of a girl with wide brown eyes and hair like silk.
So why was I crossing the room to the bookshelf near the fireplace and picking up the book I knew I’d find on the second shelf?
I lifted the cover to show her as I crossed back to her bedside and pulled up a chair to get comfortable.
“The Divine Comedy,” I said with a raised brow. “Should we refresh your memory about Dante’s fallen angels?”
I knew I was royally fucked the moment she twisted slightly to pull a pillow behind her back and then faced me with a beaming smile that brought out dimples in both cheeks.
‘“Have pity on me,’ unto him I cried, ‘Whiche’er thou art, or shade or real man!’” I began, skipping straight to this line because it occurred to me that it eerily echoed our own meeting.
And how Guinevere made me feel.
Not like the shade of my father I had postured as for half a decade, but like the man I’d once been. It was a dangerous allusion, but one I found myself reluctant to cull even if it was for my own good.
And her own safety.
