Everyone gathered in the study while Guinevere slept. We waited until Martina arrived to begin, but the atmosphere after I briefed them on the situation crackled with tension, and everyone was palpably on edge.
“I need to know why this happened,” I began slowly, so the anger bubbling lava hot in my gut would not spill onto the people who did not deserve it. “Did Pucci overstep and send someone to break into her place to find something on me, even knowing it would not be admissible in court? Did this San Marco lion-bullshit enemy decide to threaten Guinevere to get to me? Or was this truly a random break-in and the timing is insanely coincidental?”
“The Grecos have ties to Venice,” Carmine admitted, shifting forward in his chair to run a weary hand over his face. “Angela Greco was married off to the Tancredi family there, and her mother was originally from Murano.”
“Fuck,” Renzo and I said simultaneously.
“Ludo, have you found out who the Albanians are using in Livorno now? My bet is on the Grecos or Pietras because they both have access to the coast around the area.” I flipped the stone wolf figurine in my hand as I spoke, unable to get the image of the wooden lion with the wolf pup in its mouth out of my head.
Seeing it induced a vivid nightmare of Guinevere just as limp and cold in the arms of my enemies.
Why did that image tear through me? Not with a clean slice but in a great sundering, as if I were being ripped in two. I had known her for three weeks. Three weeks.
But what weight did time hold over the human heart?
Because despite having spent the last four years believing that I had become a machine, more metal than bone, I felt alive and completely defenseless sitting in that chair, knowing that my actions could bear consequences for this woman.
This woman I wanted to shield at any cost and keep at my side for . . .
Well, for much longer than the three weeks we had left together.
“I have the shipping manifests from the port authority,” Ludo explained, interrupting my thoughts. “But there are thousands of them. I would have asked some of our men to help look through the figures, but . . .”
“But we do not know who we can trust when there is obviously a traitor in our depths,” I concluded. “Fine, we do not leave this room until we find evidence of whoever is working with the Albanians. Unless—Carmine?”
He shook his head with a wince. “Drita caught me fucking Regina again. Let’s just say we are not on good terms. I doubt she would tell me anything other than a creative way to cut off my own balls.”
Renzo snorted, but then, he had always found his brother’s womanizing ridiculous.
“Then, we look,” I declared warily, thinking of Guinevere alone in my bed. “I refuse to believe these incidents are not tied together. Pucci fucked up tonight asking if the family had ties to Livorno. It proves that someone turned them on to us, and that party clearly has ties to the region.”
I pulled out my phone to update Leo and frowned when I saw a new text from him.
Leo: Sorry about being rude to your friend. Bad day, but it isn’t an excuse. How long is she in town for?
It had been sent a few hours ago, when I was still at the Pitti Palace, but as I stared at the screen another text came in.
Leo: Did she mention if she had a sister at all?
Raffa: Why the fuck are you so interested in Guinevere?
He responded immediately.
Leo: She reminds me of a girl I used to know. She wasn’t good news. Bad memories. I’ll stop.
Instead of responding, I put the phone down on the table, irritated with his bad opinion of Guinevere when he did not even know her.
“Okay, email sent,” Ludo announced a second before everyone’s devices pinged with the new message.
“Good, get to work,” I commanded, pulling up the files on my computer and resigning myself to a very long night.
We worked for so long, the sun was a blush on the horizon by the time someone knocked at the closed door.
“Come in,” I beckoned in Italian, assuming it was my housekeeper or Servio.
Instead, Guinevere stuck her head through the door, hair tousled from sleep but face washed clean of last night’s makeup. She was wearing one of my button-up white silk shirts, and I bemoaned the fact that I could not take her back to my bed and remove it with my teeth.
“Well, this is one boring after-party,” she quipped, noticing Martina in her dismantled suit sitting shoulder to shoulder with Renzo on the couch, a tablet in her lap and a computer in his. Ludo was where he most liked to be, on the floor, back pressed to the bookshelves, his phone, tablet, and computer open around him. Carmine had fallen asleep some time ago in the chair across from my desk, mouth open for a trail of drool to leak down his chin.
I smiled tiredly at her, opening my arms in silent appeal. She read my cue and tiptoed across the layered Persian carpets to my side, hesitating only for a moment before climbing into my lap. The feel of her in my arms dragged the chaos of my brain down to the depths of my gut like an anchor so that for the first time in hours, my mind fell quiet. I pushed my nose into her hair to seek out the rosemary scent of her shampoo and kissed her head because my lips were already there.
“You should be asleep,” I murmured.
She snorted. “Pot, meet kettle. What are these?”
Her fingers were shifting through the papers I had printed out and laid over my desk, the white littered with red as I tried to look for patterns.
“Shipping manifests,” she muttered at the same time I did. “Why would an investment banker be looking at these?”
“A company we have in our portfolio has been accused of committing fraud using shell companies,” I lied smoothly, letting my hands wander to her hair, then braiding it before I was even aware I was doing so. It was soothing to have that thick silk in my fingers, mundane work to busy my hands so my brain could take a moment.
“Mmm,” she hummed, but her eyes were flying over the pages as she spread them out over my palatial desk. “Do you have a pen somewhere?”
I finished the braid and handed her a pen in exchange for the hair elastic she pressed into my hand. She returned to her task, and I leaned back in the leather chair to watch mildly as she scoured the figures. It would do no harm for her to see the details when she had no clue what we were looking at them for or how we planned to use the information.
In fact, if I had been thinking clearly, I might have asked her to take a look. She had proven herself more than capable at Fattoria Casa Luna with the Zhang-Liu Imports debacle. Guilt screeched across my bones like nails over a chalkboard. Thanks to Guinevere’s aid, the CEO was currently food for the fishes at the bottom of the Shanghai harbor and the entire company had been dissolved after the COO admitted to fraud after I had sent men to politely suggest prison was a better sentence to serve than an eternal sleep.
It was not right to involve my innocent American girl in my underworld, however tempting it might have been to utilize her smarts and take comfort from her company in the shadows. This was why I was a reluctant mafioso, because the King Below did not deserve a woman wreathed in sunlight and daydreams.
She was too good for this world, and her association with me was enough to taint her without my exposing her to the violence, retribution, and lies of la mafia.
“What did you say you studied in university?” Renzo was asking her when I clued back into the conversation around me.
“I have my MBA with a concentration in finance,” she mumbled around the lid of the pen, shifting papers and circling names without any obvious reason. “I’m good with numbers and finding patterns.”
“You do not need to help us. It is late, and you had an . . . eventful night. You should sleep,” I declared, a little too forcibly because it was so easy to give in to temptation with the weight of her in my lap and the sight of her wildly intelligent brain sifting through this problem like a threshing machine, separating the wheat from the chaff.
She paused, looking over her shoulder at me for a moment before taking the pen lid out of her mouth and sticking it on the end of her pinky as if she was afraid to lose it. Only then did she curl into me, hand to my cheek, nails scratching lightly through the stubble as she searched my face.
“I can, if you want me to. But you are tired, Raffa, and clearly unsettled. I want to help, if you’ll let me. You have come to my aid so many times, it’s really the least I can do.”
“You do not need to pay me back for anything,” I reminded her sharply, because she was right—I was tired and stressed, and my filter had burned down to the stub.
“This isn’t about payback,” she promised me softly, tilting her forehead against mine so that those occhi di cerbiatta that had first caught my attention were all I could see. “This is about me doing something for you because I care about you. If I can ease some of the weight on your shoulders, I’m happy to. I’m honestly honored I’m in a position where I’m allowed to help you.”
“Because—”
She pressed the hand with the pen lid on her pinky nail to my mouth to stop me.
“Because you matter to me,” she concluded with a brisk nod before turning in my lap to address the papers once more, popping the lid into her mouth again as if she needed it to think.
I stared at her as emotion moved through the rusty joints of my body, easing the weight of responsibility and the resulting loneliness I had not realized I felt before now.
I knew Guinevere had the kind of soul that complimented old women on their beauty and smiled at strangers just to brighten their day for a single moment. I knew she was driven and determined; planning a solo trip to Florence after being sheltered her whole life was hardly for the faint of heart. I knew she was the loveliest creature I had ever had the privilege to touch. That I could close my eyes that moment and perfectly reconstruct the pale lilac of her eyelids and the bend in her soft brows, the way her long neck sloped into a slim shoulder.
She was the kind of woman who had inspired artists in Italy throughout the centuries. Dante’s Francesca, Petrarch’s Laura, and Botticelli’s Simonetta. A fleeting force of beauty in their lives, like a shooting star whose impression lingered in their souls forever, leaving an indelible mark. Even a kind of insanity that would not diminish with time.
I thought, sitting there watching Guinevere circle her own patterns in blue ink, her mind working furiously behind those dark doe eyes, that I had found the star that had lit up my own life and unwittingly changed it forever.
And any resistance I had to her involvement evaporated in the heat of that starlight.
“Do you see?” she asked me, bouncing in my lap in excitement.
I leaned over her back, pretending as if my entire world had not just shifted slightly on its axis with the simple act of having her sit on my lap in the early hours because she wanted to help carry the weight of my world.
I wondered dangerously if she would feel the same way after knowing exactly what it was we were doing here.
“You see,” she said again when Renzo, Martina, and Ludo had crowded around behind us to look at her discovery. “There are only two discernible patterns. The first is the names of the companies. Do you see how they all reference the one before? They cycle every month, but the basic principle is the same. It’s a kind of cipher.”
She laid out three pages from the month of May to show us the pattern with a tap of her pen by each company listed for the shipment.
“It’s a bastardized anagram mixed with a Caesar shift.” She spoke so quickly her tongue almost tripped over the words. “So they start with the first shipment of the month. Here it’s Porca Pronto exporting pork products from Livorno, and then a week later, Capitale dell’Olio importing bottles of olive oil from Greece, and then ten days after that Itauba Construction with a shipment of construction materials. Do you see it?”
“No,” Renzo grunted.
But my mind was whirring because I did.
“They use three letters from the first business in the next, starting from the fourth letter,” I explained before Guinevere could.
Her response was to absolutely beam at me. “Exactly. It’s obviously used as a signal to whoever is receiving shipments for them at the port authority. I mean, they have to be doing something more than money laundering with a scheme like this. It’s fairly brilliant, even, but I would have to see how far back it goes because these are only for May and June.”
So obviously the Albanians had set up shop with new contacts when we’d first told them we were breaking our contract in April and then implemented a new process with whoever was bringing in their drugs. It wasn’t as sophisticated as our scheme, which relied heavily on submarines and technology to cover our tracks and to limit human error at the port authority, but it was still clever.
And my girl was shrewd as hell for figuring it out with just a glance at the papers on my desk at six in the morning.
“I can find the origin company much better now,” Ludo muttered, already moving to grab his computer, then resting it on one forearm as he typed with the other hand on his way back to my desk. “It will take time, but they have given many more data points that can be traced to them.”
“Eccellente,” I told him, but I was staring at Guinevere, honestly a bit in awe of her.
“Ottimo lavoro,” Renzo bestowed on her, lifting a big hand to clamp it over her shoulder, then giving her a little shake the way he would have done to Martina or Carmine.
Guinevere basked in the praise, her smile almost dopey. “Thanks, Renz.”
I lifted my brows at the nickname, but my taciturn right hand only lifted his chin at her and went back to the sofa to continue his work with our new information.
“I knew I wasn’t the only one with beauty and brains in this place,” Martina complimented her, pressing her cheek to Guinevere’s in a rare gesture of intimacy. “This is a big deal for us.”
My fawn lifted and dropped her shoulder as if she wasn’t sure what to do with the kind words from my crew. Her eyes dipped to mine when Martina moved back to the couch.
Carmine, still out cold in his chair, snored on.
“Magnifico,” I told her when it was just the two of us behind the desk, palming her entire face in my hands. “Absolutely magnificent.”
Her flush was the prettiest swipe of vermilion along her cheekbones. “It wasn’t anything.”
“It was everything,” I corrected, then said, softer, “That is twice now you have come to my financial aid. Even if you had not found anything, it means everything to me that you wanted to help.”
Her bashfulness melted away, leaving behind an expression of mingled wonder and tenderness that made the spot behind my sternum ache. I thought perhaps it was because each time she did something to move me, her name was carved into the walls of my chest.
“I may not be strong enough to break a man’s finger when he insults you or wealthy enough to fill your closet if you lose all your clothes, but I can protect you in the ways I know how.”
I fingered the cornicello around her neck and wondered aloud, “Have you heard of the saying ‘sfortunato al gioco, fortunato in amore’?” She shook her head. “It means ‘unlucky at cards, lucky in love.’ You cannot have good fortune in all things, and so you have to choose, or maybe fate chooses for you. Either way, perhaps you have spent your life until now saving up all your good fortune for a truly worthy love story.”
I looked up into her eyes to find them dark as lake water at night, the impact of my words rippling across their surface. We were suspended in the moment, but under the silence I could see that we were breathing in tandem, and I knew without checking that our hearts would be beating the same notes.
“Maybe,” she whispered, the word almost sick sounding with hope.
“Boss, I found something,” Ludo called out from the floor.
I nodded, drawing my thumb along Guinevere’s suede-soft cheek. “It bears repeating—thank you.”
“No thanks necessary,” she mumbled, getting off my lap as Ludo came around the table with his computer once more. “I’ll leave you to sort out the rest, but have any of you eaten?”
“Are you offering to cook?” Martina asked, perking up. “Because Servio won’t be in to start breakfast for another two hours, and I’m starved.”
“Coffee,” Renzo added.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Guinevere said, winking at me over her shoulder as she rounded the desk.
She hesitated beside Carmine, peering at me with mischief in her eyes. When I nodded, she dropped the pen lid that had found a place on her pinky again straight into Carmine’s open maw.
He woke up spluttering, everyone enjoying a good laugh after a long night.
Guinevere left bouncing on her tiptoes, grinning ear to ear.
There were still too many unanswered mysteries, but thirty minutes later, one thing had become clear.
The Grecos had taken over operations for the Albanians, and a handful of the shell companies had linked back to some of the higher-ups in their organization.
“What are we going to do?” Martina asked as the scent of frying pork filtered through the room.
I leaned back in my chair, staring into the distance, trying to sort through the threads of information we had and plait them into something we could use to bind the Grecos to the stake and burn them for their betrayal.
“Carmine,” I said slowly. “Do you think Drita would forgive you if you took her some choice information? Like perhaps that the Grecos have informed about their previous transactions with us to the DIA?”
Understanding and dark glee suffused his handsome face. “I think she could be persuaded.”
“Right, then we contact the Albanians and offer the information without a price. They won’t want to lose their ties to Italian trading ports, so we suggest that we will step in again. If they are hesitant, point out that one of our men deciphered their code in under five minutes.”
Not one of my men. My woman. But still.
Merda, she was phenomenal.
“I thought we wanted to phase out the drug trafficking?” Martina reminded me. “We’ve shifted a lot of those old resources into the wind business.”
Green tech was a new and burgeoning industry in Italy and across Europe that we had jumped into on the ground floor. We had earmarked half a million euros to bribe local officials to get permits for even more wind farms this year after grossing over thirty million euros off them last year. The lack of government regulations and increasing need for green energy made it a perfect business for the family.
And it was considerably less harmful than the drug industry.
But this could not be helped if we wanted to get the DIA off our backs.
“We outsource it,” I explained. “Pull Clan Burette in to take over the operations. Get them set up with the mini submarines in Genoa with Gerlando. He still runs the x-ray machines at the port? Perfect. We connect them. Then the Albanians owe us a favor, the Grecos are fucked, and we toss Burette a bone after I publicly set down his daughter last night in front of half of Florence. Three birds, one stone.”
“Stealing the Albanians’ business back from the Grecos isn’t enough of a punishment for those motherfuckers,” Ludo grunted.
Which was true.
“We could—” Renzo started.
“No, we are not killing any of them.” I shot my bloodthirsty enforcer a look. “We are trying to get off police radar, not invite further scrutiny.”
“It’s not like the Gentleman not to send a message,” Martina mused, staring at me shrewdly. “Do you have another idea?”
The Grecos had tried to undercut my authority by planting an earworm with the DIA that I had secretly taken over my father’s illegal enterprise and was smuggling drugs into Livorno. It was only fair to turn that police attention back on them.
“Call Drita,” I told Carmine, grinning like the cat who ate the canary. “Set a meet and explain things to her. I think she can be convinced that the Grecos need further punishment, too, and what better way to do that than getting the DIA’s eyes on someone else?”
Martina laughed, bright and happy and edged with evil intention. It had always been one of my favorite sounds, and I grinned at her then. It was in moments like this, problem-solving, maneuvering the constant moving parts of an illegal empire, that made me forget why I had ever shunned this way of life.
It was dangerous, yes, but at the end of the day, it could also make you feel something more than just alive. It could make a mortal man feel like a god.
But when Guinevere popped her head back into the room and announced she had made us all an American breakfast, I realized that my little fawn had the very same effect.
“Cerbiatta mia,” I said as we moved out of the study toward the sumptuous scents from the kitchen and terrace, my arm around her waist. “How would you feel about visiting an Italian beach one day?”
