My Dark Ever After (My Dark Mafia Romance) By Giana Darling NovelM80052 My Dark Ever After (My Dark Mafia Romance) (Chapter - 19)

My Dark Ever After (My Dark Mafia Romance) By Giana Darling

They kept me locked in a room in the basement for four days.

Four.

Truthfully, I did not expect to be kept longer than two. That was how much faith I had in Raffa and his crew and their ability to get through any obstacle to reach me. Raffa had literally saved me from being taken by thugs while I was an entire ocean away from him in Michigan. Surely, he could do the same here in his own country, in his own territory.

Even as the morning of the fourth day crept over the horizon and spilled weak pink light onto the ceiling of my stark but comfortable bedroom, I did not worry.

I knew he would come.

And if it was taking a little longer, it was only because he would eviscerate them when he was done.

I had not seen Gaetano again, but Ginevra visited me.

The first day, I refused to speak with her, but she told me stories about her youth with my father. In some ways, she spoke of a stranger, a man named Mariano instead of John, whom I had no memory of. This man was taught to play with guns and knives the way normal children would their toys. She spoke of Gaetano’s idea of after-school care, a mini boot camp for his sons to arm and defend themselves and learn about the family business. As a woman, Ginevra herself was not sanctioned to participate, but she had grown sly and clever enough to practice in the shadows and tutor with my father at night before bed in their limited free time. She knew more than enough, she said, to teach me how to take care of myself.

Even though I enjoyed the sentiment, I didn’t deign to answer her. When all this was over, and I knew in my bones it would be soon, Raffa and his crew would teach me all I needed to know and more. They could be excessive like that.

The second day, she tried to ask me questions about my life. What did I like to do back home in Michigan? What was my mother like? Did I speak Albanian as well as Italian?

Each time she was met with silence until she gave up and stalked out of the room, punctuating her frustration by slamming the door behind her.

On the third day, she arrived with a tablet, and the only questions she asked were about the Romano family.

How many people lived at Villa Romano? And how many of them were guards?

Where did Raffa spend most of his time, at the villa or the palazzo?

Was I aware of the names of any of the Romano holding companies? Maybe I saw them on his desk sometimes.

When I didn’t reply, Ginevra had sighed and said, “Truly, I am your best ally in this entire compound, Guinevere. I told you the story of my brother.” Her eyes skittered to a camera fixed in the corner by the door. “I only want what is best for you. So please, hear me when I say that if you do not answer my questions or give me any inkling you might be converted to our side in this, things will go very poorly for you.”

I had merely stared at her as I had done for the past two days.

She could say whatever she wanted, but her actions thus far had proven she was under Gaetano’s control, and my grandfather definitely did not have my best interests at heart.

It wasn’t surprising then, on the third day, when the man named Eduardo opened the door instead of Ginevra, followed closely by Gaetano.

“I hear you are not finding Ginevra a pleasant conversationalist,” he said in that faux-jovial way of his as Eduardo started to move some of the furniture to the side of the room.

I watched him wearily, a metallic taste like blood on the back of my tongue. A premonition maybe. I was sitting on the bed with the only book in the room, Italo Calvino’s collection of folktales. It seemed fitting I had just been reading about Sfortuna, the unlucky heroine whose fortunes change after a series of unpleasant events when she catches the attention of a prince and earns his love.

My own happily ever after had been within my grasp, and I’d squandered it out of fear. Now, based on the way Eduardo was rolling up his sleeves and then rolling back the carpet, I wondered if that chance was gone for good.

“What is he doing?” I asked quietly.

“Eduardo? Oh, we don’t like to get any stains on the carpet,” my grandfather explained with a smile as he sat in a chair at the edge of the room. “It’s an eighteenth-century Persian carpet.”

“Of course,” I said dully, my gaze tracking Eduardo as he grabbed a wooden chair from the desk and dragged it into the middle of the room before, surprisingly, he left.

“Now, we are just us two,” Gaetano said, opening his palms as if to symbolize he wasn’t hiding anything. “Why don’t we have a candid discussion about your future, hmm?”

I didn’t reply because there was nothing to say. Gaetano had complained that the Venetian was theatrical, but it was clear my grandfather was playing his own game, and he did not really need my participation.

“It is clear that you hold affection for Raffaele Romano, but my daughter has told me it is likely a symptom of Stockholm syndrome and that with enough time you’ll come to see the light about him.”

I let my scornful doubt shine through my expression, but he ignored me.

“He killed my eldest sons,” he continued. “Did you know this? Giorgio and Giuseppe. A car bomb in Genoa took out my firstborn, and poisoned wine my second.”

“I thought you had put the idea of revenge to rest?” I asked as fear skittered down my spine and sank sharp teeth into my tailbone.

He cocked his head, tapping his cane against the floor. “Yes, and I thought I had. But now you are here, and I find it difficult to resist the temptation.”

“Why would you work for the Venetian?” I tried to reason. “You said he had to blackmail you into helping so far.”

“Yes, but I do not want this information to hand it over to that stronzo. I want it for myself. The Venetian can have Raffa’s kingdom if he can steal it. All I want is his life.”

“No.” The word exploded from me like a bullet.

I wished it was one.

If someone had put a gun into my hand that second, I would have raised it without hesitation to put lead between my grandfather’s eyes.

The thought should have chilled me.

That the idea of killing could be so immediate in my fantasies. That I could almost feel the weight of the gun and the cool of the metal in my hand, my index finger twitching like it was hungry for the pull of a trigger.

But I had already had my existential crisis about killing someone. The man on the top of the Impruneta bell tower.

Now, instead of the blare of panic trilling through my head, I heard only the cool, calm tones of Raffa.

Non sei un’assassina; sei una cacciatrice.

You are not a killer; you are a huntress.

And I felt it was true in that moment, staring at a stranger who shared my blood and feeling certain I would end him if he so much as laid a finger on Raffa or Martina or Renzo, Ludo, or Carm. On any of the Romanos who had taken me into their home.

Far from horrifying me, the idea sang through my blood like a macabre song.

“The Venetian doesn’t want him dead yet,” Gaetano continued as if I hadn’t spoken, and I had a feeling he did that often, especially with women. “He doesn’t have what he needs from Raffaele, and until he does, he can’t secure the empire. But it is too good an opportunity to pass up. So I have made my own little plan. Unfortunately, it involves your cooperation.

“Tu sei mia nipote. Il mio sangue,” he said in Italian, gesturing widely with one hand. “You are my granddaughter. My blood. Of course, even though the circumstances were not desirable, I was thrilled to discover your existence. It was wrong of your father to keep you hidden from us.”

He paused for me to agree with him, and though I did take umbrage at Dad for keeping such a colossal secret, I couldn’t very well blame him for keeping me from his family.

They were batshit crazy.

“I want to embrace you as my blood and, one day, maybe even my heir,” he continued, dangling the last word like bait before a fish, hoping to hook me with its shiny promise. “What do you think about that?”

“I have no interest in being a mob boss,” I said flatly, though that wasn’t necessarily true anymore.

When Raffa came for me, I would never leave his side again. Not for meetings with Albanians, not to confer with other capos. Not when he could be in danger and not when he might be complicit in criminalities. I would go where he went—be it prison or the ER or any circle of Dante’s hell. I would be his partner in all things.

The queen to his King Below.

He laughed. “That is a good thing. Men who want to be mob bosses only care about the money and the swagger. I have looked into you, Guinevere Stone, and you are a smart woman. First in your class at the University of Michigan for your MBA, a job at one of the best financial firms in the country. Doing what I do is much like running a giant corporation.”

“Where people are killed if they don’t follow company policy,” I quipped.

A shadow passed over his face. “I do not appreciate jokes when talking about business, Guinevere.”

“And I do not appreciate your threatening the man I love or my being kept hostage when I’ve asked to leave.”

“We have welcomed you warmly,” he started to say, but I cut him off with a harsh laugh.

“Warmly? My aunt drugged me on a train and dragged me here, and when I didn’t immediately comply with your wishes, you had me locked in this room. I haven’t met any other family members, and I haven’t been allowed access to my phone. Is that considered warm in the Camorra?”

“Yes,” he snapped. “A cold welcome would involve you strung up with the prosciutto in the barn, left to dry and rot until we deigned to slice you open. Would you rather the alternative?”

I swallowed thickly but gathered my bravado around me like a shield. “Which are you? The loving grandfather happy to meet his granddaughter for the first time, or the Mafia don wanting answers from me by any means necessary?”

“Can’t I be both?” he asked, and it gave me chills because he was utterly sincere. “I do not want to hurt you, but I will if it means ending this mess once and for all.”

“By killing me, you mean?”

“No, of course not. Why would I kill one of my only remaining blood relatives?” he asked, irritated with me enough that the thin, loose skin around his neck wobbled. “There are many stages between life and death, Guinevere. This is something I could teach you, if you consented to help us now.”

“Help you how?”

The door creaked open, and Eduardo appeared holding two large ceramic pitchers and a pretty designer silk scarf, kind of like the one Raffa had used to tie my hair back on our ride out to Livorno.

“Tell me about Raffa Romano and his outfit,” Gaetano suggested, flicking invisible lint off his suit pants.

I sat silently, letting the quiet stretch on and on.

“Eduardo,” Gaetano said with a heavy sigh, gesturing toward me with a nod. “Perhaps you will have an easier time convincing her than I.”

The whipcord-lean man stepped away from the middle of the cleared room, where he had placed the pitchers beside the chair, and came for me.

I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting the open hand slap that hit me over the ear. Pain and static erupted in my head, my vision fuzzy and white, my senses deafened by a loud ringing.

Vaguely, I was aware of Eduardo picking me up to carry me over to the chair in the center of the room and secure me with something by the ankles and wrists.

When my head cleared enough to make sense of things again, I was locked to the chair, with the end of my braid tied into the rope around my wrists so that my head was forced back at a painful angle.

“I am sorry for this, Guinevere,” Gaetano murmured from his spot to my left. “But this is the only way to ensure Romano shows up in the piazza tomorrow. He needs to see how much you are suffering and imagine how much you will suffer still if he does not do as I’ve asked.”

“Vaffanculo,” I spat at him as Eduardo reached for the pitcher filled with water and draped the beautiful orange silk scarf over my face. “When Raffa comes for me, I hope he leaves killing you until last so I can be the one to put a bullet between your eyes.”

Gaetano’s laugh was muffled as Eduardo started to pour water over my face through the silk until I felt like I was drowning.

He’s coming, I thought desperately as I struggled not to swallow water and fought to breathe.

He will always come for you.

“What is the security code for the palazzo in Firenze?” Gaetano raised his voice to be heard over the rush of water in my ears.

It was the first of many, many questions.

---

Eduardo waterboarded me for a long time.

They interrogated me about Raffa, his business dealings and family, and then, when none of that proved fruitful, they asked me about my father.

My continued silence resulted in the questions devolving into threats.

Did I want to see Raffa tomorrow after he’d been killed?

Maybe they would place him in my bed while I slept so the blood would soak the sheets and wake me with a chill.

Maybe they would serve me his eyeballs, plucked intact from his head, on my breakfast tray Sunday morning.

Maybe they would hunt down my father all the way in Michigan so they could meet my mother and invite them for a friendly visit. Would that properly motivate me?

At some point, I couldn’t even hear them anymore. Every single one of my senses and every atom of my being was focused on not asphyxiating. If I’d had the wherewithal to think beyond that, I might have criticized the torture technique. How could anyone focus enough to answer questions when they were fighting for every breath?

The sunlight spilling through the one window in the room was thick and syrupy with midday heat by the time he peeled the silk from my face for the last time and swept out of the room without untying me.

Gaetano had left a while ago.

He said it distressed him to see me suffer.

I would’ve laughed at the memory, but I was still struggling to drag air into my waterlogged lungs. My desperate gasps rasped too loudly in my ears, panic making the laborious act even more difficult.

It felt like I might never breathe properly again.

I coughed up water until I felt sick and then vomited the meager amounts of breakfast I’d eaten onto the wood floor beside my feet.

This was why Dad hadn’t wanted me involved with his family.

This was why Raffa had kept his camorrista secret for so long.

There was nothing glamorous or comforting about life in the Mafia.

I was not even a mafioso, not even legally bound to one, and yet there I sat, tied to a chair, dripping with water and sweat, gasping like a fish out of water.

My mind had taken me to a place in the subterranean depths of my psyche, a kind of mind palace or safe harbor away from the horrors of what Eduardo was doing to me.

I found myself in a dark wood, the very same one as Dante in the opening line of The Divine Comedy. Virgil was there, as he was for the poet, greeting me solemnly and offering me a skeletal hand.

He promised to take me to my lover, but first, I had to journey through hell to reach him.

Now, sitting listlessly in the chair, the heavy drip of water leaching off my hair and clothes and the harsh rattle of my breath a soundtrack to the revelation, I understood something vital.

If this was hell, I would cross it over and over if it meant being with Raffa.

Even more importantly, I acknowledged that this wasn’t just a once-in-a-lifetime scenario. Maybe I would never be waterboarded through a designer silk scarf again, but there would be other times when I would be in danger because of Raffa and what he was.

Loving the capo dei capi was not without its risks.

I had firsthand accounting of that.

But God, it was also not without its rewards.

As I dripped dry, a chill settling into my bones, I warmed myself by thinking about all the ways Raffa had loved me.

Buying me an entire new wardrobe, taking care of me when I was ill, letting me drive his Ferrari Spyder, buying me a cornicello to counteract my bad luck.

Trying to save me from himself, even though it hurt him.

It took me a long time to realize I was crying, because my face was already wet.

At some point, miraculously, I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, I was jerking awake so strongly I almost upended the chair.

A flurry of Italian shouts echoed throughout the usually quiet house, along with a sound that made my heart take off racing in my chest.

Gunfire.

I never thought I would be so happy to hear that tat-tat-tat of semiautomatic weapons.

When the door flung open, Ginevra was there in what looked like gardening clothes, dirt streaked across her cheek and a huge gun in one hand. Something in her expression flickered with relief at the sight of me before passing into horror and arriving at resolution.

“He’s here.”

I thought it was a sob crawling up my throat like a rat through a pipe, a sensation that almost made me gag, but when it emerged, it was laughter.

Bright, hysterical laughter.

Ginevra stared at me for a moment until a crash reverberated through the house, shaking the walls so that dust spiraled through the air.

“Cazzo,” Ginevra cursed as she hurried to my side and bent to work at the ropes around my ankles.

“Something rammed the house,” I said, smiling so wide it hurt my wet, aching face.

“Crazy man,” she muttered before clamping the gun between her thighs to reach for a knife in her gum boot, cutting through the ropes to free me. “Attacking the Pietra compound in broad daylight.”

I laughed again. In the wake of surviving this horror on my own, giving Gaetano and Eduardo nothing, and knowing that Raffa was not riding in on his noble steed as my Prince Charming but cracking open the very earth to find me, as Pluto had to reach Proserpina, I felt freer than I ever had before.

“He wanted to make a spectacle of it,” I said, even though she hadn’t asked a question. “He wants them to know he can come for them at home in broad daylight, with the house full of soldati, and still win.”

“He won’t win,” Ginevra said as the last of my bonds fell away. “Not unless he has an army. This is a castello, Guinevere. It was made to withstand a siege.”

I only grinned as she tugged me toward the door. My legs were gummy, but I forced them to move with minimal grace.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked.

Following her seemed like the best option regardless. I was a sitting duck in that room, especially given everyone in the house knew that was where I had been kept. I had no idea of the layout, but emerging from the basement seemed like getting a step closer to Raffa.

“The safe room,” Ginevra declared, pausing at the threshold of a staircase to peek around the corner with her gun drawn.

“I’m surprised you’d bother,” I admitted as I ran up the stairs behind her and followed her into a room hidden in the concave wall of the staircase.

Inside, an older woman sat on a chartreuse velvet love seat with two boys.

I recognized her instantly as the confused woman from the Duomo.

She blinked at me, pushing aside one of the boys gently as she stood up and then reached out her hand toward me.

“Io ti conosco,” she said.

“You do,” I agreed in Italian, stepping forward to take her hand and press it to my cheek. “I am your granddaughter.”

Tears pooled in her lower lids, catching on the wrinkles beneath as they spilled.

“She has dementia,” Ginevra explained quietly. “She often gets confused. Gaetano does not let her out in public much.”

“I saw her in Firenze the day you took me from the train,” I mentioned without looking away from my grandmother’s beautifully aged face. “She recognized me then too.”

“You have the eyes of your father,” my aunt said. “Of your grandmother.”

“What’s your name?” I asked the elderly woman, who was still cupping my face, her thumb rubbing back and forth along my cheekbone.

“Giulia,” she said with a tremulous smile.

“Hi, Giulia,” I replied, pressing a kiss to each of her silken cheeks.

She beamed at me.

“And these are my sons, Circo and Ottavio,” Ginevra introduced the two preteen boys, one of whom I’d also seen at the church with Giulia.

“I’m glad you broke the G naming tradition,” I said, which prompted my aunt to laugh. “It was a bit much.”

Behind me the door opened, Gaetano ushered in by a soldato I didn’t recognize. He stopped in his tracks when he saw me there, face screwing up with distaste.

“What is she doing in here?”

“She is family,” Ginevra pointed out. “Just because you do not trust her yet does not mean she shouldn’t be kept safe.”

“I am safer out there than you are,” I countered. “They’re here for me.”

“To take you away again and use you against us,” Gaetano said, his brows so knit together they were one thick black squiggle from a marker drawn across his face. “We will not give you up to be manipulated again.”

I looked at the man who had raised my father and wondered how Dad could have become the kind of man I knew today. There were shades of the iron will and stubbornness that must have come as a product of this life, but John Stone was otherwise kind, caring, and thoughtful.

This paranoid creature who would waterboard his own granddaughter while claiming to want to welcome her into the family was the kind of monster Raffa had claimed to be. Two faced, violent as a baseline, convinced always that his way was the best.

It was ironic that this kind of man was exactly whom Dad and Raffa had warned me against, thinking themselves inherently monstrous too.

I could say with a clear heart that they were not.

And neither was I.

But that did not mean I wouldn’t do something monstrous when my loved ones were threatened. Or when I was.

So I fixed a trembling pout to my mouth, ran to Gaetano, and threw my arms around his neck to sniff into his shoulder.

“I’m so sorry,” I gasped. “I was afraid and confused, but I just want it all to go away. Please, make it all go away.”

Gaetano was stiff in my embrace for a moment before the hand holding his cane came up to thump me gently on the back.

“Hush now. Do not worry. Your nonno will take care of it.”

I lifted my head from his suit jacket just enough to peer around his arm at the soldato who had come inside with him. He stood close, a personal bodyguard.

Close enough that if I shoved Gaetano just a little bit as I nuzzled closer for comfort, I could snag the gun dangling from his right hand . . .

Gaetano stumbled back a step as I pushed forward, the guard reaching to steady him with his left hand. He was distracted by the movement, lulled into a false sense of security behind the locked door of the panic room with only the Pietra family inside.

So it was almost too easy to grab the gun and wrench it to the side, twisting his wrist to such an extreme angle he barked out a curse. Gaetano was between us, so it was impossible for him to get a good grip on me as I took the gun for myself.

Shuffling so that my back was to the side wall, I leveled the gun at Gaetano, then swept it across the room.

Ginevra sat with Giulia and her sons on the love seat, staring at me with more curiosity than fear.

Gaetano’s gaze was one of indignant fury.

“You will not shoot us,” he proclaimed. “This is your first time holding a gun, if I had to bet.”

It wasn’t.

I’d held one at the Beaumont Building what felt like years ago but was only weeks prior in Michigan, when those thugs had tried to take me away.

But he was right in that I had never fired one before.

I raised a brow at my grandfather and smiled, all teeth and peeled-back lips. “I know enough to hit a target four feet from me.”

Gaetano shifted quickly for a man of his age, snapping his cane up with one hand to knock it against my wrist. The impact smarted, the weapon swerving to the right.

To the soldato, who used Gaetano’s distraction to lunge for me.

Without a second’s hesitation, I pulled the trigger.

The bullet caught him in the upper shoulder and hardly slowed him down.

So I fired again, his torso only a foot from mine. The kickback from the gun bit into my hand, but I hardly felt it through the adrenaline.

This time, the bullet blasted through his chest cavity, the force so much greater because it was at point-blank range.

When he hit me, it was in a stumble, his breath a thin thread of air whistling through his throat. I shoved him off me, and his body fell to the side against the wall, alive but not for long.

Gaetano stared at me as if he had never seen me before.

Which was funny, in a way, because I had never felt more myself.

There was a loud bang at the door, not as if someone knocked but as if a body was crushed against it. Gaetano pulled his own silver handgun out of its shoulder holster and shuffled back away from the door.

“It will hold,” Ginevra reassured him. “It’s reinforced. No one will get in using force.”

All of us waited with eyes on the door, only the dying man’s gurgling breaths to punctuate the silence.

“Guinevere, get back here,” Ginevra hissed as a mechanical whirr sounded.

“I’m fine here,” I insisted, but one glance behind me showed my aunt standing before Giulia and her sons, fierce and proud like a female warrior staring down the barrel of her gun.

“They must be friendly if they know the code,” Circo whispered. “Right, Mamma?”

The whirr continued until there was a loud beep and the heavy door began to swing open.

Gaetano fired into the narrow gap, once, twice, three times.

“Non sparate,” someone called out from the other side.

Hold fire!

My grandfather froze, his mouth puckering in tart surprise, while behind me Ginevra gasped.

Then again, I did too.

Because I would have known that voice anywhere. It had read to me before bed, soothed me through multiple hospital visits, and bantered with me my entire life.

The door pushed open farther, and John Stone, born Mariano Giovanni Pietra, stepped into the room wearing a bulletproof vest over his dress shirt, a semiautomatic rifle strapped across his chest as casually as a fanny pack.

“Ciao, papà,” he said. “Are you happy to see me?”

Behind him, Raffa emerged in his own bulletproof vest, blood from a shallow cut weeping down his neck. His eyes immediately found mine, darkening as they took in my damp clothes and hair, the blood spatter from the fallen soldato at my feet.

Without hesitation, he stepped around Dad and pistol-whipped Gaetano, who fell to his knees with a sharp cry.

“Did you do this to her?” Raffa asked, his words as clear and cold as ice carved from an Arctic glacier.

Gaetano spat a wad of blood at his feet. “She was defending the man who killed my sons.”

Raffa arrested completely before a snarl retook his features. He looked utterly feral in that moment, filled with animal fury and a base sense of right and wrong that was entirely founded on his own skewed code.

It was magnificent to behold.

Especially knowing that a crime against me had inspired it.

“What did he do to you?” Dad asked, staring at me in anguish. He looked simultaneously older than his years and younger. I could see the old version of himself transposed against the man he was now like a palimpsest.

“They filmed it to send to you,” I said, surprised that my voice did not waver even though it was rough from choking on water and crying out with distress. “They waterboarded me for information about Raffa. About you.”

Raffa cursed viciously in Italian, but it was my dad who shocked me.

John Stone, the same man who was a leading financial adviser and owner of the largest investment firm in the Midwest, the man who followed his routines like gospel, without deviation, who volunteered at the local homeless shelter and held me every single time I cried, stepped up to his father’s kneeling form and put a bullet straight through his head.