Page 141 of My Dark Ever After
Gemma’s big blue eyes, bloodshot and weary, filled with tears.
“Hi, Dad. Hi, Jinxy.” Her voice, rough as it was, sounded like a gospel chorus, something heralding hallelujah.
Together, Dad and I took a first running step and sprinted to her, falling to our knees in order to tackle her into a group hug. We were all crying, sobbing so hard I thought I might go on crying forever. It felt too surreal, too precious to stop touching her for even a moment, as if she might disintegrate, lost to us but for our memories once more.
Vaguely I was aware of Raffa and Leo speaking over us, the tension radiating off my fiancé, who stood at my back like a shield.
“You can’t say you wouldn’t have done the same for Guinevere,” Leo was saying.
“I would have,” Raffa agreed instantly. “But I would have fuckingtoldyou.”
“He would have killed you, do you get that? He monitored me all the time. He owned Philippe and Michele and Bruno. All soldiers close enough to track your every movement too. If I made one mistake, he took it out on Gemma. That night in the bell tower, Gemma sent one of the guards she had persuaded over to her side to Impruneta to make contact with Guinevere. Unfortunately, Guinevere spooked and killed him, and Tonio witnessed the entire mess. He didn’t feed Gemma for a week after that, and he beat her each one of those days. We did not try again.”
Gemma whimpered slightly in response, pulling away from us just enough to lift her hands between us. Each finger was tipped with raw skin, the nails removed. Three fingers on her right hand had clearly been broken and not reset, and she was missing the entire pinky on her left hand.
“Oh, honey,” Dad said, the words torn from him as he gently pulled her hands into his and pressed his mouth to the back of her mangled hand. “My sweet girl.”
I cupped my hand over my mouth as if I could contain the brutal sob carving out my throat. Dad sensed it, slipping one of his arms around me to tug us both into his side as if he could physically shield us from the trauma of our past and future.
Gemma curled into him, reaching out to hold on to me so tightly I knew it had to hurt her brutalized hands.
“What are you going to do with me now?” Leo asked, utterly resigned to his fate, almost eager for it, as if it could rectify the utter chaos he’d helped to bring to our door.
“Kill him,” Renzo snarled from where he was still tending to Martina.
Soldatihad entered the room, lingering in the doorway, one of them crouched beside Martina with an impressive first-aid kit.
But the only people who existed for me in the room were my dad and my sister, and the two men who had changed the course of the Stone women’s lives forever.
I wanted to beg Raffa to spare Leo just for Gemma’s sake as much as I wanted to order him to tear Leo apart with his bare hands and burn the pieces, so I stayed silent, muted by the force of the opposing desires.
“He was the only thing that got me through this hell,” Gemma said quietly, in such a raspy voice I felt sympathy pains for her in my throat.
The words seemed to resonate with Raffa, though. We all understood about going through hell to get to the other side. I’d led him through the deepest, darkest circles of hell just as Beatrice had done for Dante, and apparently Leo had done the same for Gemma.
Raffa’s precious-metal eyes fell on me, their warmth softened with love even while his mouth twisted with lingering fury and indecision.
It wasn’t just Gemma who loved Leo.
Raffa had related to him as a brother for every one of his thirty-four years, and to kill him now. when he understood his motivations for helping Tonio under duress ... I did not think the monster in Raffa would win out.
The man beneath the predator had too big a heart.
“We will sort it out,” he said finally, staring Leo down even as he staved off his execution. “But you will account for your actions, Leo.”
His friend swayed slightly on his feet as if relief had made him dizzy.
“Thank you,fratello,” he whispered.
“You will spend the rest of your life earning back my friendship, if it can be done at all,” Raffa declared coldly, but his hand found my shoulder and moved up my neck to tip my chin back so he could look into my eyes. “Consider it a wedding present,cacciatrice.”
The smile that overtook my face ached in my cheeks. I pulled him down to the floor beside me, where he naturally shifted me half into his lap, even though I was still partially under my dad’s arm.
“Gemma,” I told my sister in a waterlogged voice, “this is Raffaele, my fiancé.”
A glimmer of her previous coquettishness sparked in Gemma’s eyes as she glanced between us. “I met him when he saved my life. When the first explosion went off, he shielded me from the blast before Leo arrived and got us out through the bunker exit.”
I felt oversaturated with relief and joy, as if every atom of me was filled with enough light to burst like a supernova. In the wake of terror, joy was so much sweeter.
