I ran.
The basic human response to a terrifying situation is fight or flight, and I knew, even in my stupefied horror, that there was no way I could ever fight Raffa.
So I leapt over the body—the body—like the fawn Raffa had accused me of being and darted past him before he could even lower the gun.
The gun!
There were people I could go to inside the house. Martina was my first thought, ex-military and badass, but logic ripped the thought into pieces.
Everyone in this house was unequivocally his.
So loyal to him, they could not be trusted to help me even under the best circumstances.
And these weren’t that.
Because that same level of loyalty that made them a family meant only one thing.
They knew.
They knew Raffa was a monster masquerading as a man.
They knew, they knew, they knew.
I was still screaming.
The sound echoed off the high ceilings of the house as I raced through the first floor and stampeded down the stairs in my bare feet, slipping slightly on the marble because they were slick with blood.
Blood.
By the time I made it to the bottom, I was going so fast, I could not have stopped if I’d tried. Voices were starting to sound behind me, but I couldn’t focus on those.
I had to keep my eyes trained on the doors at the end of the huge foyer, and when I reached them, I threw myself against the heavy wood while I twisted the knob, forcing it open faster than the old, ornate hinges wanted to move.
They screeched painfully, but I was still screaming, so I didn’t notice.
Cool night air hit my face, shaking some clarity back between my ears.
The police.
That was where I needed to go, to the police station.
I couldn’t think beyond that to what I would say, what I would do, once more caught without a phone or ID, in a little nightgown the same maple-brown shade as Raffa’s eyes.
The cold eyes of a killer that I had stared into countless times, believing they were the windows to the soul of a man I loved.
I ran.
Turning on my heel on the pavers, I sprinted toward the Arno. The sun was just a faint glow on the horizon, so I wasn’t sure if the police station would be open, but I remembered where Raffa had taken me to make my statement in Santa Croce.
There were a few people in the streets. A small group of drunk youths around my age who laughed when I passed in my silk nightie at a sprint. An older man, his dog peeing against a graffitied wall.
I kept running.
All the way across the Arno and to the left down to the police station.
It didn’t look open to the public, but there were lights on within, so I raised my fist to pound on the empty door . . .
. . . and found I could not bring my fist to connect with the glass in the frame.
I stood there, swaying slightly, as I sucked in deep, long inhales, and the lack of motion, the time to breathe, cooled the hot rush of panic in my blood until I was as inert as volcanic rock. Trapped in my body while my thoughts battled each other.
As much as instinct urged me to knock on that glass and report a murder, I physically could not bring myself to turn Raffa in.
It was more than the simple fact that, in however brutal a way, he had saved my life.
It was every moment that had led to this one, every moment where I had believed the very best of him. His touch on my shoulder when he was retying that red dress, his mouth on my breasts through the wine-soaked gown, and the feel of him inside me under the starlit night only a handful of hours before this. The way he’d made me fall in love not only with this country and him but also with myself. Exactly how I was.
After years of my being sheltered and controlled for my own good by my parents as we all fought to discover how to live with my primary hyperoxaluria type 1 diagnosis, where it felt as if my condition defined me more than any of my other characteristics did, it had been such an overwhelming blessing to have someone like Raffa admire and care for me. He had made me feel safe and strong, smart and captivating. Worthy of the kind of love I had only ever read about in epic poems.
I sobbed right there in the street, catching it in one hand like I’d thrown up my sickly, bleeding heart.
Raffa was not the kind of hero from those poems, and clearly, I was too silly and naive to be any kind of heroine.
Because seeing Raffa kill that man so coldly had locked a pattern into place I had been too blinded by rose-tinted love to ignore.
The broken skin on his knuckles when we danced in the restaurant, the way he’d threatened Wyatt at the winery, the two different companies trying to steal from his investments, and the calm, eerily cold way he’d reacted and then exacted retribution, at least against the latter. I shuddered to think what he might have done to the people at Zhang-Liu Imports, but part of me knew he hadn’t just turned them in to the police.
Even the scene where he’d confronted and broken the finger of the driver who had called me a whore took on a new light. What once had almost aroused me now seemed to be one scenario in a pattern of violent behaviors.
Raffaele Romano was not the man of my dreams.
He was the stuff of nightmares.
A dangerous criminal who was so inured to violence, sabotage, and death that he didn’t blink an eye at taking justice into his own hands. With Zhang-Liu, with the shipping company, with the driver who had called me a whore, and finally, with the man who had broken in tonight and ended up with four bullets through his body on the floor of the closet.
That man was no random thief.
He was there with a gun searching for something. No. Someone.
Raffa had enough enemies to rival James Bond.
It was too surreal to comprehend, but the only thing that continued to rise to the surface of my murky thoughts was this: You do not know Raffaele Romano.
He is not the man you thought he was.
You are a silly girl in love with a dream you projected onto a man who was probably laughing at your naivete this entire time.
Shame and heartbreak and horror soured my gut so that this time when I sobbed, I gagged, bile having surged up my throat.
“Posso aiutarla?”
Can I help you?
An officer in the standard blue uniform stood at the door, a cell phone held to his ear. He peered at me through the murky glass and then unlocked and opened the door.
My fist fell to my side listlessly as panic followed swiftly on the heels of the bile at the back of my tongue. I did not want to speak to the police. Even if I didn’t know Raffa, even if I’d loved a mirage, there was no way I could turn him in.
Not after everything that had happened.
My heart simply wouldn’t allow it.
“No, I mean, yes,” I amended, holding up my hands as I backed away slowly. “I’m fine, thank you.”
When he only frowned and stepped forward, I repeated myself in Italian, adding, “Really, I’m just great. I got a little lost, but I know my way home now.”
The officer glowered at me, murmuring something too low and fast into the phone in Italian for me to discern before he hung up and stuffed it in his pocket. When he moved forward this time, I wasn’t expecting his swiftness, and he caught my wrist with a painful grip.
“You are covered in blood,” he informed me, as if I wasn’t aware.
And truly, in the chaos of it all, I had forgotten. Now that he mentioned it, I could feel the dried gore tightening my skin, making it itch. When I gave in to the impulse, my fingers came away flaked in dried blood.
“Come with me,” he said, tugging me inextricably into the station.
Alarm cracked through my cool resolve, lava hot once more and flooding my entire nervous system.
“No!” I almost shouted, trying to wrench my arm out of his hold without any progression. “No. I do not have to go inside. There is nothing. I just hurt myself.”
“I would like to hear why you are covered in blood and bone,” the officer demanded as he opened the door and hauled me inside the cold reception area.
I shivered violently, but it had nothing to do with the air-conditioning.
“You can tell me why a young tourist arrives at the police but does not want help,” he continued with narrowed eyes before taking my arm again and leading me through a mostly empty bullpen to a side room with a metal door.
“I wouldn’t want to waste your time,” I tried again, my heart beating so loudly I couldn’t focus, vision swimming. Oh my God, I thought, I was going to get Raffa arrested when all I wanted to do was just get away. “I’m an American. I have rights, and you can’t just—”
The metal door banged shut in my face, and there was a rusty whoosh as he slid a lock into place. When I tested the handle, I was not surprised to find it locked.
“Fuck,” I murmured, curling my arms around myself, blood flaking off my arms as I did and falling like macabre confetti to my feet. “What have I done?”
Half an hour later, I was in a private room in the station, wrapped in a shiny emergency blanket with a lukewarm paper cup filled with thick espresso. The officer, Domani Lastra, was middle aged, with a soft, open face and big gray eyes that looked at me with sympathy as I spun a yarn about the events of the evening. When I was finished, he looked at me for a long, silent moment, then sighed and reached over to pat my hand on the table before he told me he would be right back.
There was a metal cabinet in the corner of the room, just clean enough for me to make out my warped shape and the vivid red of blood still splashed across my face and chest.
I shuddered as I thought about red being Raffa’s favorite color.
Revulsion rolled through me, and I gagged into my hand, breathing hard so I wouldn’t throw up on the table. Blood was gross enough to have all over me. I didn’t want to add vomit.
I closed my eyes when the nausea passed and focused on fighting the tears that burned in the back of my nose.
I would not cry over Raffa.
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.
“No?” he asked finally, wearily. He dragged a hand over his face and let it drop with a thud to the table. “You do not remember the bloodstain on my shirt the day I danced with you in the trattoria? I had just finished in the basement with Galasso, the sacco di merda who tried to rape you your first night in the country.”
I gasped, hands covering my mouth even though my tears had trickled to a stop. “What?”
Raffa nodded, and something dark curled the edge of his ruddy mouth. “Ludo found the figlio di puttana and brought him to the basement. Umberto’s is one of our restaurants, and we use it for business sometimes.”
“What did you do to him?” I asked, but I knew.
Of course I did.
I would never let anything hurt you. I would kill a thousand men who tried, and I would sleep like a fucking baby knowing I did the right thing every time.
“You killed him,” I whispered into my hands.
When Raffa didn’t respond, I looked up to see his grim smile of acknowledgment.
“I drugged him and then beat him to death with my own hands. Ludo took him into the countryside and made it look like a car accident. You can look it up if you want. The crash was in the local news.”
“The company you ‘invested’ in,” I said, the dots already connected, the image clearer than I’d ever wanted to see it. All I could do now was validate my findings. “How legal was your investment?”
“Very good, Vera,” he said smoothly, the same way he might have praised me for staying very still when he spanked me. Even now, it made my heart stutter. “A rival . . . business was making a play for my company. They turned the deputy chief of the DIA, Sansone Pucci, on to me.”
“That’s why he was such an asshole at the party.”
He inclined his head. There was something different about him now, like he had lowered the partition between who he claimed my Raffa was and the man he’d truly been. He looked more wolf than man, with those sharp canines glinting in that tight, mean little smile and his eyes darkened by the heavy ridge of his frowning brow.
Like another man entirely.
“To be fair, I was not doing what they accused me of, but . . .” He opened his palms in a mock show of innocence. “I could not let that stand. You found the shell companies that revealed which family was working behind my back, and we took care of them.”
“The police raid on the boats. You even took me to watch it,” I said, shocked by his audacity.
It spoke of a certain kind of joy in his work, and that, more than finding out the extent of his crimes, hardened my heart toward him. How could I believe such a man would love me when he was capable of such lies, corruption, and enjoyment of it all? How could I believe he wasn’t lying about what mattered most, the shattered heart lying between us?
He sneered. “You enjoyed it, Guinevere. The clues were there. You just did not want to acknowledge them. Do not do us the injustice of pretending I did not give you the real me. I know I did—I feel that I did because my heart is no longer inside my chest. You took it when you ran, and I will not get it back unless you come back with me.”
He stood up abruptly and crossed to me on swift legs, only gentling slightly when I recoiled. Dropping into a crouch so we were eye level, he slowly lifted a hand to show me he meant no harm and laid it, whisper soft, against my chest.
“Can you feel it beating against your own?” he asked in a threadbare voice. “I know I do not deserve a second chance, but I am not too proud to tell you I will spend the rest of my life working to earn it. Let me ask you to stay. Stay now that you know and get to know the real me. The man you once aptly called Rex Infernus. Stay forever, because I promise, Guinevere, no one will ever love you as much as I do.”
“You’re a mafioso,” I said into the pause, determined to have it all out between us. With each piece of the puzzle slotting into place, it felt as if I’d erected a shield between myself and him. I was numb beneath it, growing colder and colder. It was much better than the lava-hot rage and pain of before. “Am I right?”
His sigh was answer enough.
“You lie, steal, cheat, assault, scam, and murder for a living.” The words cut coming up, causing wounds I knew would leave permanent scars. “How can I ever love a man like that?”
Raffa flinched as if I’d hit him with the full weight of my body, face turning away from me, cheeks flushing scarlet. He sucked in a quavering breath and nodded slowly.
He did not realize it was a genuine plea for help. That if he could only convince me and teach me, the way he had taught me so many other things, perhaps I could find a way to rewire my brain, to make sense of his darkness, and the dream of us wouldn’t have to die.
What an impossible hope, one more to add to my silly, girlish heart.
“Right,” he whispered to himself in Italian. “Of course.”
I curled tighter in on myself, hating how hard it was to see him in such pain when he was the cause of my own.
He stood suddenly and turned on his heel to walk toward the door. A pause, his shoulders tense and unmoving, before he twisted back to look at me.
An implacable expression was fixed to his face. It made him look like a total stranger.
“I will have Martina pack your things for you,” he said in a perfect monotone. “If you can just text her where you will be, she will get them to you before you leave tomorrow.”
“Okay.” I swallowed hard around the words that clawed their way up my throat.
Why did you do this to us? To me?
Knowing all this, I still don’t think it’s enough to kill the love that’s overgrown inside me.
We stared at each other for a long time, and I pretended I wasn’t cataloging everything one last time. Even though he’d become the villain, he had still left a massive impression in my life and my soul, and now I would have to learn to live around it.
“For what it is worth.” He paused. “For what I am worth, I may have lied about what I do and how I do it, about my family and our history. But I never lied about anything else. Honestly, no one has ever known me better than you do.”
“Frankly, caro mio.” I bastardized the quote from Gone with the Wind with Italian, so cruel it hurt my teeth as the words passed them. It calcified that armor around my heart and gave me the strength to look him right in those cold black eyes. “I don’t give a damn.”
Raffa rocked back on his heels, mouth parting slightly as my final shot found its mark.
Suddenly exhausted beyond all reasoning, I closed my eyes and wished on one last shooting star that when I opened my eyes, he would be gone for good.
And when I did, he was.
The end . . . for now.
