Page 29 of My Dark Ever After
The same enormous wood table we had eaten at the night before was laid for breakfast with ceramic pitchers of juice, a platter of whole fruit and another of fruit salad, and others piled with breakfast pastries. From its place on top of a hill, you could see over the entire valley from the villa in a 360-degree view that included vineyards, olive groves, and weaving roads lined with cypress trees. It was so perfect it didn’t seem real, even as I paused to absorb the view.
Carmine and Ludo sat at one end of the table, the former reading theCorriere della Seranewspaper and the latter doing something on his tablet. The only other people at the table were Stacci and her baby, Nico, in her lap being fed yogurt.
“Buongiorno, Guinevere,” the adults called almost simultaneously as Zacheo dragged me to the table and pushed me down onto the bench.
I laughed when he immediately crawled up beside me and then half into my lap, already reaching for the enormous jar of chocolate-hazelnut spread.
“Zach, you have already had enough Nutella this morning,” Carlotta reminded him as she came out to grab some of the discarded plates to take inside.
The little boy stared at her with huge eyes, blinking innocently. “It’s for her!” he corrected, swinging the mini spatula from the jar in a wide arc so chocolate lashed out across the table. “Shelovesit, Mamma.”
Carlotta bit back the edge of her smile, but the rest of the adults laughed. “All right, if Guinevere says it’s okay, then you can help make her some Nutella toast.”
On my lap, Zacheo wriggled with delight, reaching for acornetto.
“You’ll have to get used to lack of personal boundaries, I’m afraid,” Stacci explained with a soft expression on her face as she watched Zacheo rip open the pastry and spread an obscene amount of Nutella on it. “With five boys under nine years old in the house, it’s pretty chaotic.”
“I don’t mind,” I said, which was the truth.
How could I take umbrage at such a warm reception? The way the family instantly enveloped me into their ranks. Emiliano had offered to teach me how to shoot so that he could take me hunting, and in the meantime he and Stacci had told me they would take me out hunting for truffles with their pig, Tonio, who was apparently named after Leo’s father. Carlotta and Angela had offered to teach me to cook some regional dishes, and Lando had proposed to take me on a tour of local churches through Tuscany and Umbria some weekend when he was off work. Two of Raffa’ssoldatiwho lived on the property had also introduced themselves as Michele and Philippe, brothers who ran security for the villa under Leo. When I’d mentioned taking a jog around the property, they’d both nearly fallen over themselves to illustrate the best routes on a map for me.
I didn’t know what Raffa had told them about me, but it was obvious I had not arrived a perfect stranger.
Only, their lovely reception brought with it an ache, that bitter edge of knowing they seemed utterly genuine and almost perfect on the surface, but that they were, in fact, a family of criminals. Or if not criminals themselves, then complicit in the activities of their patriarch.
Did sweet Carlotta with the messy hair and soft smile know that her brother didn’t flinch when he shot someone in the head?
Had he ever killed someone for Stacci, who was beautiful enough to draw all kinds of attention?
Had he ever kidnapped Delfina “for her own good”?
It was hard to accept kindness now. I was always looking for the catch, and in this instance, it was an obvious one.
They were Raffa’s family.
And if I fell in love with them, how hard would it be to keep my distance from the mafioso who had unfairly stolen my heart?
But as Zacheo offered me a Nutella-laden piece ofcornetto, insisting on shoving it into my mouth himself, I already knew it was a losing battle.
“So these are our last days of freedom before the harvest starts,” Stacci said, wiping Nico’s messy mouth. “What do you say we go into town and grab something you might have left behind? Have you been to Greve? It is touristic but still cute.”
“That sounds wonderful, thanks. What are you harvesting? The olives?”
“No, it is too early for those. Because we are Northern, Lando will not begin the harvest until later in November, even early December. We beginla vendemmiaon Sunday. You won’t see Delfina much for the next couple of weeks because she runs operations at Tenuta Romano. The whole family goes out for the first few days to help. It’s a kind of a ... community ritual.”
“Everyone nearby comes out too,” Carmine added, looking at me over the top of his newspaper with a wry grin. “You can meet the locals and get a sense for the flavor of true Toscana. The countryside is very different from Firenze.”
“Less cold,” Stacci agreed.
“Less civilized,” Carmine countered.
It was worth noting that even sitting in a villa, eating breakfast in the country, Carmine was wearing a bespoke three-piece suit. Before I’d grown to know him, I might have thought him haughty for doing so, but I knew it was part of his identity—his mask.
I realized now that Raffa and hissoldatiall had them in various ways.
Raffa most of all.
The expensive suits, the carefully tamed waves pushed away from his handsome face, the pose he commanded all the time, arms crossed, feet braced like those of a general at attention. There was not one cultivated ounce of him that did not command respect.
