Page 47 of My Dark Ever After
“It is good to know you have not outgrown your dramatics,” Stacci huffed, sharing an eye roll with Carlotta.
I snorted as I clipped another bunch of Chianti classic grapes and dropped them carefully into the bucket so the delicate skins would not burst. “If I am dramatic, I learned it from my sisters.”
“Why are you so convinced she will not stay?” Carlotta asked. “She looks right at home to me.”
I followed her gaze back through the leaves to Guinevere to find she was pelting Carmine and Martina with debris, laughing so hard there were tears leaking from her eyes. She had stayed close to mysoldatifor most of the day, but had taken pains to introduce herself to the townsfolk too. At one point, I had caught three older men—all brothers, and all widowed or divorced—crowding around her in a blatant attempt to flirt. She had laughed—that vibrant, bells-ringing, celebratory sound—and indulged them, though Ludo, confined to a comfortable chair because of his gunshot wound, had scowled at them all.
Santa Madonna, she was glorious.
“You both do not understand what it is like to fall in love with a person outside the life. She thought she had fallen in love with someone else entirely until circumstances meant the real me was unmasked.”
“The real you?” Stacci scoffed. “Raffa, you are not so subtle as to be able to affect multiple personalities. Even as a boy, you were always exactly who you wanted to be, take it or leave it. If she loved you, Guinevere loved who you really are.”
“You are only saying that because you do not understand what it must have been like for her,” I argued in a sharp, sibilant hiss like theviperaeveryone watched out for with wary eyes. “She did not know her lover was a killer.”
“She did not know she would become one either,” Carlotta pointed out with a raised brow as she carted a heavy plastic container of grapes in her arms, barely breaking a sweat at the load she carried under the warmOctober sun. “The best kind of people change and adapt. Especially if they are rewarded for it.”
“I am hardly enough reward for having blood on her hands,” I derided, grasping a bundle of grapes too firmly so they burst apart in my gloved hand, the vibrant skins staining the white canvas purple red.
“Does she at least knowwhyyou becamecapo dei capi?” Stacci asked. “Knowing you, she doesn’t.”
“It hardly matters why when the end result is the same.”
“It does matter, and you know it,” she pressed, poking me with a hard finger to the chest. “Does she know you did it to save us? Does she know the first threat came with the news thatpapàwas dead? Does she know Leo had to stop a gunman from storming Carlotta’s delivery room? No one knowing these things could hold what you do against you.”
“She is a twenty-three-year-old girl from America,” I growled, thinking of Guinevere going to college classes, sunning herself with her family at Gun Lake. “What does she know aboutla mafia? What right do I have to want her to stay in this life with me where a gunman could storm her delivery room, eh?”
“Women in the life do not have to do much but stay silent and obey,” Delfina said, suddenly over my shoulder.
I scowled at her, but only because I was so mired in my own turmoil that I had not been alert to her arrival.
“Not my women,” I said firmly, raising a brow at my wayward, headstrong sister, who had insisted on going to college when our father disapproved, who had dated a woman last year even though it was tittered about behind lifted hands at church and in the piazzas. “My women do as they want because they know I will protect them. If worse comes to worst, they know how to protect themselves because I have made sure of it. Above all, theyknowwhat they want because they are smart enough to go after it.”
“And you want Guinevere to go after you,” Martina said, popping through the leaves with a childish grin, happy to have the opportunity to eavesdrop and meddle. “You want her to do more than just stay.”
“Si,” I answered, lifting my chin as if I expected to be punched and was bracing for the hit. It was what my father would have done if he had known I wanted to bring anestraneointo the family. “I want her to stand at my side, without secrets and without shame. My partner in all things.”
“You don’t think she is too innocent for that?” Carlotta asked, watching as Zacheo raced down the row of vines away from his older cousin to throw himself into Guinevere’s side.
She laughed and swung him up into her arms, blowing a raspberry into his cheek.
“She pushed a man off a roof to save Ludo,” I said without taking my eyes off her. “She would do worse to save me, to save any of you now that she knows you and has shared a meal with you. The biggest heart is the most ruthless of all because it knows no bounds when it has to protect those in need.”
“That may be true, but you arecapo dei capi. Let us not pretend what you do is entirely altruistic. I know you came home and took vows to save us, but you lie, murder, and steal almost every day, and you cannot tell us there isn’t a part of you that loves it,” Martina rejoined.
“There is. A large part,” I admitted with a blasé shrug, like my own bloodlust and savagery did not alarm me sometimes. “But I have told her that, and she has seen it for herself more than once. I know her in ways you do not. She has darkness in her, seething and hungry. I just have to be patient and find a way to set it free.”
“Buona fortuna, fratello mio,” Carlotta said, squeezing my arm as she moved away with her crate of grapes to load them onto the waiting truck. “I have a feeling you will need it.”
Stacci and Delfina laughed, bumping shoulders as they took their own wares to the truck behind their elder sister.
But Martina lingered, her gaze a warm weight on my cheek like a cupped hand.
“I do not think you need luck,” she whispered to me in Italian. “Guinevere is too curious about the world, too hungry for experience, to be satisfied with the norm. Look at her. She fell in love with a mafioso eleven years her senior who never made light of his dark side, even if she did not know the extent of your underworld career. She sees you and she wants you, Raffa.”
“Then why the face?”
She pursed her lips. “You told us earlier this morning that Guinevere’s sister was involved with the Albanians. She mentioned when she was last here that her father forbade her from ever setting foot in Italia. Why do you think that is? Maybe she has secrets just as dangerous as your own.”
