Page 44 of My Dark Ever After
“You feel better this morning,” he noted, gaze trailing over my skin like hot fingers.
“I do. You ... you helped last night. Thank you for taking care of me.” Even though I didn’t necessarily mean the orgasm he’d given me, I couldn’t fight the blush that bloomed beneath my skin.
The edge of his mouth pressed into a firm line to fight his knowing smile. “It was my pleasure, Guinevere. As I told you, whatever you need, I will see done.”
“Tell me ...” I hesitated, swallowing thickly. “What was his name? The man I killed.”
Raffa sighed. “He was Federico Mancini. A cook from Venice. He has a brother we are trying to secure in order to question him about why Federico might have been all the way over here in Tuscany to abduct you, but he is proving hard to find.” He paused before admitting, “His girlfriend filed a missing person report on him a few weeks ago.”
“You think he is involved too?” I asked, even though I knew the answer. “That he might come after me as well?”
“I will not let him,” Raffa said with an arrogant shrug. “You are safe so long as you remain here in my home, under guard.”
I didn’t relish the idea of being trapped at the villa, beautiful as it was, but I nodded because I knew Raffa would not budge on that point. He was an overprotective mafioso; there was only so much room for negotiation.
So I tried my hand at an easy ask. “I want to join the harvest.”
“Eat the rest of your breakfast first. It is serious work,” he ordered, watching me until I lifted my fork and resumed eating. “Now, beforewe join the others, can you tell me any details about last night? I know it might be difficult to speak of it, but I need to know.”
My fork dropped with a clatter. “Oh! God, I can’t believe I almost forgot. He had my sister’s cross.” At Raffa’s furrowed brow, I quickly explained, “When he came up the tower stairs, he lunged for me, but when I evaded him, he told me that he was only there as a friend. He said that ‘the Venetian’ wanted to see me, and he’d been told to show me something. It was Gemma’s cross, the one my father gave her when she turned sixteen.”
“Are you sure it was the same?”
I was already nodding. “It’s very specific. Twisted, delicate gold filaments and a two-carat diamond at the center of the cross. I would know it anywhere. I was always a little jealous that she was the one to get it. It’s the only family heirloom we have.”
“It wasn’t returned to you when Gemma died?” Raffa said as he folded the paper up and exchanged it for the phone lying on the table, typing away quickly.
“No, my dad was upset about it, but the authorities said it wasn’t on her person when they found her, and it wasn’t among her possessions in the flat she was renting. That’s all we got back of her. A box of trinkets and clothes, along with this ugly black urn she would have hated. The local authorities had her cremated before they could find and contact us.”
Raffa paused in whatever he was typing to look up at me with bright eyes. “Did she die in the States?”
I shook my head. “No, I think I might have mentioned she was living abroad in Albania. It’s where my mother’s people are from originally.”
He hesitated a moment and then put the phone down to lean over the table, gathering one of my hands to hold tight in his own. “Where exactly?”
“Durrës,” I said. “She was there to study at one of the top wineries on the coast.”
“The port of Durrës also happens to be the main point of drug exportation for the Albanian Mafia,” Raffa told me slowly. “Did your sister ... did she take drugs recreationally?”
I blinked at him as my stomach clenched into a hard knot. Memories seeped through the locked box I kept shoved to the back of my mind. Gemma returning home from a party in eleventh grade with a nosebleed, giggling too loudly and practically bouncing off the walls.
“What did you do, Gem?” I’d asked her when she came crashing into my room, happy that our parents were still out on a date night.
“I hadfun, Jinx,” she’d told me as blood dripped onto her sparkly shirt. “You should try it sometime.”
The day Mom had found a bag of marijuana stuffed in the back of Gemma’s underwear drawer and a bag of white powder stuffed into a bundle of socks, she had argued that she was only hiding it for a friend. It became clear who that “friend” was on our next family trip to Gun Lake, when Gemma and her boyfriend, Sam, had gotten so high they crashed the speedboat into the dock and had to be taken to the hospital.
After the colossal fallout of her actions, Gemma had seemed to quit her partying and focus on her dream to become a winemaker and study at the famous Dukeshës Winery.
“Yes,” I whispered through the clogged emotions in my throat. “She had a bit of a habit for a while, but it was more that she partied too much and didn’t know when to stop. She went to rehab before moving to Albania.”
Raffa’s lips rolled under his teeth as he considered something and then retrieved his phone again to dash off another few messages.
“Do you really think she went to Albania to study wine?” he asked me.
“It was her passion,” I argued. “She was always closest to my mom, and they shared a love of wine and the old country. I think she went with honorable intentions, but I can’t say what might have happened if she met the wrong person. She tended to choose the wrong kind of guy.”
“The irony,” he murmured, clearly indicating the situation I found myself in now with him.
