I did not see Guinevere for four days.
It was unacceptable but seemingly unavoidable.
I had neglected business for too long to take care of her when she was sick, and both my desk and my inbox were stuffed with items that needed immediate attention.
After my weekly security brief with Ludo, I was even more on edge.
When I had taken over the outfit, I had moved our focus from trafficking mostly drugs to prioritizing imitation products. The counterfeit trade was a wildly lucrative market with huge audiences in Asia, Europe, and America, and none of the other clans had monopolized it yet, so it was rife for the dominating. In the last four years, we had made over €250 million from that part of our portfolio alone. It seemed everyone wanted knockoff designer handbags and garments. Since we’d opened five factories run by Clan Riva and Clan Burette in Lombardy, our profit margins had doubled.
So why was Ludo reporting that the anti-Mafia police force was looking at the Camorra for the influx of street drugs through the port of Livorno?
“When was our last drug shipment?” I asked, tossing my pen to the leather desktop in exasperation.
Carmine and Renzo were both in attendance, too, the former seated beside Ludo across from me and the latter standing by the window with his arms crossed.
“Over a month ago. We were finishing out our agreement with the Albanians. We’re scheduled for one last delivery in two weeks, but with the DIA looking into us, it’s a risk,” Carmine admitted.
“Porca puttana,” I cursed, driving both hands through my hair. “How the fuck did this happen?”
“The Albanians?” Renzo suggested. “I know Carmine said they didn’t seem aggrieved about finding someone new to work with, but they’re fucking crazy. They could have turned rat out of bitterness.”
“No,” Carmine argued. “Yeah, they’re nuts, but they’ve got their own sense of honor, same as us. Ratting on a former business partner is just not their style.”
“Are you only saying that because you’re sleeping with Drita Hoxha?” his older brother asked with raised brows.
“Fuck you,” Carmine snapped, but before they could get into it, I raised a hand for silence and waited until I received it.
“Not the Albanians,” I mused, chewing over my thoughts. “But who are they working with now that we have cut ties?”
When no one answered, I sighed. “Fine. Ludo, find out who they have moved on to. I do not like any of this. Why have we had relative peace for years, and now we have police interest in Livorno, which will fuck up our counterfeit production and transportation, an assassination attempt on me in Roma, and what?” I looked at my tablet. “Three cyberattacks on three separate holdings. Whoever our enemy is, he knows too goddamn much about our business.”
“A traitor,” Ludo said baldly.
The silence seemed to echo around those words.
I flashed back to first carving that word into the forehead of one of my father’s enemies and wondered if I would be forced to do the same again.
“Signore Romano?” My housekeeper, Signora Angelucci, knocked on the door. “Signora Imelda Sabitini is here.”
“Let her in,” I ordered.
Imelda appeared in the doorway looking unusually haggard, her salt-and-pepper hair collected into a haphazard bun and her mouth pulled taut and pale like stretched taffy.
“What has happened?” I asked, moving to take her arm and help her to the empty chair between Ludo and Carmine.
She sat and let out a shaky sigh. “Mario caught someone in the laboratory last night. He will be okay, but they hit him over the head with a gun.”
“Why am I finding out about this now?” I demanded.
“Be calm, Raffa. It has happened before that someone comes sniffing around to learn our secrets. You do not become one of the top wineries in this country without inviting espionage.”
“Yes, but this is a pattern,” I muttered as I shared a quick glance with my soldati. “These are obviously not isolated incidents. They are coming at us from all sides, trying to sense where we are weakest.”
I checked the brief Ludo had emailed me again and noted that in the last month, ten of our top-grossing vineyards had been victims of either attempted cyberhacking or on-site breaking and entering.
That was not normal.
And it lent itself to the growing picture I was puzzling together.
Someone was coming for Clan Romano, which could only mean someone wanted to be capo dei capi for themselves.
I thought through the most dominant families in the region and concluded that three of them were the only real threats.
The obvious choice was the Pietra clan, which had feuded with my family over control of Tuscany for decades before they’d killed my father and I had, in retaliation, killed their patriarch and two eldest sons. The détente had lasted almost half a decade, but perhaps they had regrouped enough to make a serious comeback. Renzo and Carmine had urged me to wipe out the entire clan, but my life outside the Mafia still lingered in my soft tissues and made me weak.
The Riva family was headed by the matriarch Pamina, who was as bloodthirsty as they came and known by la mafia as Vampira because of it. They were located to the west and focused mostly on drug trafficking through the port of Rimini to and from eastern Europe. We had a good relationship, but her voraciousness made her fairly unpredictable. An argument could be made that she was setting her sights on the eastern ports as well so she could dominate the entirety of central Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna, and much of Marche.
The next were the Grecos in Liguria, who made no bones about lusting after total control of the north, but who I had always thought to be too stupid to make a go of it. Still, idiocy wasn’t really the deterrent it should have been, and they were ridiculous enough to think they could take over now that Aldo Romano was dead.
The question was, Why hadn’t they tried before now?
I’d been in power for four years, and while I’d faced assassination and coup attempts in the beginning, they had ceased after four or five prudent and public messages had been sent to our enemies, written on corpses.
It seemed so . . . random that they should come for me now.
Imelda was bright enough to see my mind working and suggested, “The Clan Romano of today is not what it was under your father. It’s taken you time, but you have changed the outfit fundamentally, Raffa. You must see others could be threatened by that.”
“Success is success. People will be threatened by it no matter how it happens or who it happens to.” It was disgusting, but a truth I’d faced countless times. Even friends I’d had at Oxford had begrudged me my sudden inheritance, though it meant the death of my own father. It was easy for outsiders to get caught up in the glamour of success, to be ignorant of the way it corroded over time.
“Maybe. But you have brought so much modernity to a staunchly traditionalist society. Even at la fattoria, we are scoffed at by old winemakers who say the use of technology on our scale is basically sacrilegious. My husband manages the grapes, but I manage the money. A woman. And I am not the only one you have empowered, Raffa.”
“It is the twenty-first century, and I was raised by a strong mother and three older sisters. We have a female prime minister, for fuck’s sake.”
“And even she doesn’t declare herself a feminist,” Imelda pointed out. “We are not talking about national politics, anyway, but Mafia politics, which are so far stuck in the past, I am surprised the men don’t insist on wearing togas and being fed grapes by hand. All this to say, you might not have police eyes on you, but you have the eyes of the underworld watching and scrutinizing your every move.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and sank back into my chair. “I knew it would seem to weaken my position when we stopped focusing so much on drug smuggling, but money laundering, agromafia operations, and counterfeiting make us more money than we made under my father, with half the risk.”
Imelda held her hands in the air, her wrists bony and covered in bangles that chimed as she gestured. “I know, Raffuccio, but this is the world you live in.”
“She is right,” Renzo added, moving from the window to stand over my shoulder, where he usually resided, like a permanent symbol of support and a giant deterrent to my enemies. “The capos have quieted, but many of them were unhappy when you made Pamina capo after she killed her husband.”
“He nearly killed her,” I said, but I was exhausted by this subject and had been for years. “The women in this organization are some of the best minds we have.”
“You made it clear Martina will be consigliere when Tonio dies, and he only occupies the position still out of respect for your father,” Carmine pointed out. “Martina already does most of the legal legwork.”
“Enough. I know my faults, but bringing the Camorra into the twenty-first century is not one of them. New York’s capo dei capi Dante Salvatore would agree with me, as would Damiano in Napoli. The issue here is that someone is coming for us, and I will not have peace until I know the face of our enemy.” I stared each of my men in the eye. “Find me names, and do not show your faces to me until you do.”
Renzo clasped me on the shoulder on his way out, taking my words as the dismissal they were. Carmine kissed Imelda on the cheeks before following Ludo and Renzo out of my study, closing the door behind them.
“I am sorry,” I told my mother’s best friend, “that Mario was hurt because of this.”
“It is not because of you directly. All the top wineries contend with such things.”
“I will increase security,” I promised.
She shrugged and waved the words away with one hand, but her eyes were shrewd on me. “You look half-elated and half-exhausted. Does either have anything to do with the lovely Guinevere?”
I hesitated, rubbing my overgrown stubble as I considered telling her anything about my conflict around Vera. How much I already ached to see her. How these new risks made me afraid for the first time in a long time because I did not want my dangers to become hers.
My family was insulated at Villa Romano with staff and soldiers to tend to their every need and protection. Guinevere was just a foreigner trying to have an adventure on her own in a new place, and unwittingly, she’d run into the arms of the worst monster in Tuscany.
“Once you said you would never enter into a deal with the family,” I reminded her, then asked the question I had always wanted answered. “Why did you, in the end?”
“You have made me a very wealthy woman. I think, in this country, we have a strange relationship with the Mafia. We hate them and revere them in equal turn. You are terrifying and horrible so often, and yet you can change generations of lives in an instant. The investment you made in Alfonso took it from a local pizzeria to an international chain. My nephew is at school in London and told me he had a slice of home from their first location there.” She sighed, toying with a marble wolf figurine from my desk as she searched for the words. “What is the saying? A femmena bona, si tentata e resta onesta, nun e stata bona tentata.”
A good woman, if tempted, remains honest, but that means she was not well tempted.
“You are a complicated man, but not a bad one by any means. Your father delighted in his cruelty when it was necessary, and I believe you see the Mafia as a game, one of life and death, but with calculation and an eye to the stakes. If you can manipulate a situation to suit your needs without death, you will do anything in your power to make it happen. I suppose I wanted to indulge my greediness and avoid my fear of death.”
She ended with a joke, but I was not in a laughing mood hearing those words.
I had always struggled with my definitions of good and bad, righteous and evil, and how these words could be applied to me. I had killed, stolen, and lied and would continue to do so for the rest of my life with little compunction.
But there was a soft spot in my heart I couldn’t seem to harden no matter how much I tried. I was not empathetic, exactly, but I could be moved by beauty in all its forms and sought valiantly to preserve it.
I had purchased the crumbling church in the town next to Villa Romano simply because it had once been beautiful, and I wanted it restored instead of demolished for housing. I had helped to fund the continued excavation of the gladiator training grounds outside the Colosseum in Roma, even going so far as to buy a block of buildings in order to demolish them for the sake of discovering and preserving our history. I had killed Martina’s husband because he was eroding her day by day in front of my very eyes and I could take it no longer, and I had allowed Pamina to become capo of her territory after killing her own husband for the same kind of abuse. I had helped Guinevere because I could not resist such a beautiful woman lost and alone with the odds stacked against her.
Not much of a moral code, one founded on keeping beauty intact instead of one of honor or justice, but it was the only one I had.
“I wanted a good life for my family long after I am dead,” Imelda added, peering at me with cunning gray eyes the same color as that marble wolf. “Isn’t that why you are where you sit today? Capo dei capi of everything you swore you’d never touch?”
“It is easy to have good intentions when the stakes are low,” I conceded. “There is nothing I would not do for my mother and sisters. For my chosen family in the Camorra.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “This is our way, I think. Family before all else. It is not something foreigners understand well.”
That was true, but I considered Guinevere and wondered if there was another exception there. The dead sister who had given her a kidney, the mother and father she lied to in order to give them peace of mind so she could have some freedom. The future she was intent on following because it was what they wanted for her even if she did not want it for herself.
“You care for her,” Imelda said, a note of awe in her words.
Frustration wrapped a firm hand around my throat and squeezed. “She is . . . interesting.”
“Interesting and lovely.”
I chuckled, because that word would never be free of the memory of Guinevere’s wine-soaked skin and breathy, surprised moans of pleasure.
“Yes, lovely.”
“You deserve such loveliness. I know you do not agree, but it is true. Everyone needs happiness, Raffa. And if you are worried that you are too much the villain to deserve it, consider that unhappiness will only drive you further into the dark. I know that is not the kind of man you wish to be in thirty years. The kind of man your father was.” She got up and came around my desk to press her cheeks to each of mine. “Chi non risica non rosica.”
He who does not risk does not get the rose.
It was an Italian proverb my mother had used my entire life, so it was fitting that her best friend would use it now to taunt me to take a chance on Guinevere.
“There is no future if I tell her, and there is no future if I do not,” I admitted as she pulled away. “She is going back to America in a month.”
Imelda shrugged one shoulder and walked toward the door, stopping only to throw back, “Is she?”
