Life was better than it had been since I was a boy, too innocent and young to understand the cruelties of the world. Only perhaps it was better because now I was a man who knew just how cruel the world was and how to make myself cruel enough to defend against it.
And even then, I still fell in love with a girl who was made of starlight and sunshine.
That was the only way I knew how to define the feeling that overcame me whenever I was with her or thinking of her. As if a supernova was expanding in my chest.
Nothing had ever felt like it before, but I had read enough poetry to recognize that these symptoms spoke of love.
I had dated at Oxford and in London, beautiful, interesting women who knew nothing about my history, but there was no comparison.
Even though Guinevere did not know everything about me, specifically the nature of my business and the kind of man I had to be to do it, she still knew so much more than anyone else. From the very first, it was like she had sensed the shape of my soul buried six feet deep in the fallow field of my chest and carefully nurtured it back to life.
Her love of Italy lent itself to knowing me the way women before her had not. How could anyone love me without knowing of Italy? The country that had, for better or worse, carved me slowly and irrevocably into the form I took now. No number of years in Britain could rid me of that influence, and I realized, to my surprise, I was pleased by that.
I had been right at the start when I’d told Guinevere she could make me fall in love with my country again. I just had not expected her to make me fall in love with them both simultaneously.
Loving her was the less surprising of the two.
She was everything good I admired, shaded in just enough of her own unique darkness to be three dimensional and vibrant with complexity.
But the fact that she had made me fall in love with myself?
Shocking.
It was hard to look back at the last four years, no, thirteen including the time in England, and see how truly unhappy I had been. First cast out of my family with only infrequent, clandestine communication so that my father would not discover I was still in contact with my mother and sisters. Completely without the comforts of my culture—the only friends who knew who I was straight through to the bone were Martina, who moved to be with me after the death of her husband, and Renzo and Carmine, who visited whenever they could.
Then, when I returned to Italy, a bittersweet homecoming because I had to pick up the dirty mantle of a man I hated in order to safeguard the Romano women from the vultures circling in the wake of Aldo’s death.
Even as I adjusted to my new reality, it was with a resignation that tainted me through to the very marrow of my bones. Even as I grew to enjoy aspects of the work and the shadowed corners of my psyche that made me so adept at it, I could not fully rejoice in this new life because it had not been my decision to live it.
Loving Guinevere, though terrifying, seemed like the first decision I had made for myself since I’d left Italy, turning my back on my past to pursue my dream of Oxford and a civilian life.
I wondered what I would do to keep the dream of Vera alive too.
I stood drinking a glass of wine in the corner of the kitchen, watching her. She was laughing, hand on the forearm of her old Scottish friend, Fergus, as if she needed his support to hold her up. Bibi, the beautiful Black woman, flicked her on the nose and made her laugh so hard I could hear the faint strains of it over the music and the other general chatter of the San Lorenzo festivities. She had started to talk more with her hands, especially when she spoke Italian, and they fluttered through the air like pale birds.
It was impossible to look away from her radiance.
“You’re completely gone for her,” Martina observed as she sidled up beside me, leaning her hip against the counter so we were pressed together.
For someone who usually avoided physical touch, she sought it with Renzo and me whenever she could. I wondered if she was as touch starved as I hadn’t realized I was before meeting Guinevere.
I sighed, angling an annoyed look her way.
“Don’t sigh at me as if I’m some inaccurate nuisance. I am one of your best friends and, I’ll have you know, filled with deep wisdom.”
“I think you mean bullshit.”
Her elbow dug into my side, but I was ready for her, transferring my glass to the counter so I could pin her in a headlock.
Renzo appeared, blinking at us mildly. “Oh, are we reverting back to the age of eleven?”
“Don’t tease him,” Martina said as she squirmed out of my loosened hold. “Can’t you see he’s in love?”
Renzo gave her his best unimpressed stare, which was effective on almost everyone but Martina.
“Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed.” She leveled a finger at him and then swung it into my face. “None of us have ever seen you happier.”
I lifted my shoulder in a slight shrug but had to hide the beginnings of a grin behind my wineglass.
“Oh, Raffa,” she said, seeing it anyway, softening into my side. “What are you going to do about it?”
My sip of wine turned sour in my mouth, and I had to force myself to swallow it.
Was that not the million-euro question?
“There is a tension between what I want to do and what I know is the right thing,” I confessed.
Renzo considered me with the full weight of his keen attention. “You have not hesitated to do what you want for a very long time.”
“It is not just about me,” I snapped, then sighed. “If I ask her to stay . . . I would have to tell her everything. She either hates me and leaves on the next plane out, or she finds a way to love me still and I subject her to a lifetime of danger as my woman.”
“She leaves on a plane in two days whether you tell her or not,” Renzo prompted.
“And the man I know would not let anything happen to his woman,” Martina decreed with her chin in the air, her eyes flashing with memories.
The night she had finally told me her truth. The night her husband had ended up dead, impaled on the edge of my knife.
I slid my arm around her waist and hugged her into my side. “I would die for her tomorrow if it meant keeping her safe for the rest of time. Loving her like that . . . can you not see how wrong it feels to ask her to stay?”
“She would,” Renzo said, looking into the informal living room where Guinevere was still talking with her friends. Ludo was at her shoulder, too, drinking a Sanpellegrino in solidarity with Vera because he was like that. Of us all, he had the best heart, so it did not surprise me that those two had struck up a quiet, lasting bond.
One of my soldiers, Gustavo, whom I had known since our youth, approached Guinevere to introduce his wife, who was a history professor at the university.
Guinevere’s face lit up.
“I know,” I murmured, because I could feel her love like a light on my face every time she looked at me. “But she thinks I am her hero, a Prince Charming in my red Ferrari saving her on the side of the road. What if she knew I had a body in the trunk, hmm? What if she knew how many people I had killed?”
And how much I enjoyed it, I thought but did not say.
Martina made a sympathetic noise in the back of her throat before dropping her cheek to my shoulder, and Renzo moved to stand on my other side, close enough to bump my shoulder. Sandwiched between the two, I felt grateful that Guinevere had opened my eyes to the beauty in my life that had already existed.
“Thank you,” I told them. “For putting up with my miserable ass for all these years. I would not be here without you.”
If they were surprised by my uncharacteristic show of effusiveness, they did not bat an eyelid. Instead, Martina lifted her beer toward us both and waited until we raised our wineglasses before saying, “Per sempre.”
Forever.
I could toast to that and take comfort in the fact that no matter what I chose to do, I had my famiglia to fall back on.
“For what it’s worth, though, boss,” Renzo said. “I think you should ask her to stay. She thinks you are better than you are, yes, but I think you both believe she is better than she truly is too. She is smart, Raffaele. If she has been looking, and she has, she will have had the opportunity to draw her own conclusions. She just didn’t want to.”
It was an interesting argument, one I hadn’t considered.
Guinevere was darker than she appeared. She adored the harsh crack of my voice commanding her to do things her sweet, dirty mind had only dreamed in her most depraved fantasies. Admitted that she felt safe when I broke the finger of the stronzo who had called her a whore outside Fortezza da Basso. Crowed with glee watching as the trap she had helped lay for the Grecos snapped into place around their necks in the Ligurian Sea.
Oh yes, she had a dark side, and it called out to me like whispers in the night. I could even believe it was one of the reasons she was so drawn to me.
But self-perception was such a tricky business, and I should know that best of all.
Guinevere’s parents had told her to be good and do good her entire life. They had reinforced that she was the good sister, the good daughter, so heavily that I could feel the physical tremors of joy when I called her a good girl in the bedroom.
Now good was a label she had given herself as much as anyone else had.
And I was not sure anything or anyone could change the way she thought about herself except for Guinevere.
She had found fertile soil here in Florence to dig her roots into, soaking up nourishment she had been looking for all her life, tipping her head to the sun until she blossomed. Her confidence grew every day, and along with it her sense of self.
It was gorgeous to behold.
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.
