My Dark Ever After (My Dark Mafia Romance) By Giana Darling NovelM80052 My Dark Ever After (My Dark Mafia Romance) (Chapter - 28)

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

The entire family had moved to Stacci’s house down the road from the main villa to sleep what was left of the night. It was an enormous house built for their ever-expanding family, with enough rooms for the adult couples to each have one and for the kids, frightened out of their minds, to share one, where we’d laid mattresses down so they could all cuddle together.

Only Zacheo had refused to leave my side, clinging to me so tightly his little nails had left crescent-moon shapes in my thighs. I’d told Carlotta and Emiliano that it was fine if he slept with me and took him up the stairs to the small bedroom at the back of the house, where he had immediately curled into me, tucked up like a bug in a rug, and fallen asleep.

He was twitching beside me, nightmares plaguing his slumber, but he eased when I smoothed a hand down his freshly washed hair. It soothed me too.

When I had first seen Leo at the edge of the fiery tree line, my only thought had been of revenge. I was going to tackle him to the ground and beat his head in for what he had possibly done to my sister and had attempted to do to Raffa. But when I overheard his conversation with a soldato about Zacheo lost somewhere in the grove, I felt my soul cleave in two.

Did I go after Leo and appease the fury wrapped around my heart like an iron vise, or did I go after sweet Zacheo, who had taken such a shine to me the last month he had been my constant shadow at the villa?

In the end, of course, it was not even a question.

I followed Aio’s barking entreaty farther along the trees before I dived into the curling black smoke.

Until the day I died, I would remember the feel of the scorched soot in my lungs, the heat pressing into every side of my body like ghostly hands threatening to drag me into the depths of hell. I called for Zacheo until my voice ripped up my throat; I’d headed to the copse of trees that we had played in many times before, where there was a trunk that looked like a throne. We liked to play make-believe there and had even erected a little fairy house in one of the trees. It was disorienting with the smoke, and I was completely lost until one of my croaky cries was met with the sweetest voice I thought I had ever heard.

“Vera?”

He had hidden against the lip of a well just beyond where we played, wet from the bucket of water he’d thrown over his head to cool himself.

“Che ragazzo sveglio che sei,” I’d praised him as I collected his steaming body in my arms, tucking his face into the gathered fabric of my dress so he might breathe through it.

Clever boy.

The weight and warmth of him curled under my arm kept the residual panic at bay even though I was too agitated to find sleep myself.

I could not believe Leo had done something like this.

The more I thought about it, the more I remembered the aching despair on his face when he had talked about the foreigner he had fallen in love with. The sincerity and protectiveness he’d exhibited when he told me I was basically a coward for giving Raffa up just because I did not like the nature of the truth I had begged him to reveal.

How could someone who had been born and raised in the warmth of the Romano family end up this way?

I knew Aldo Romano was not like Angela, Carlotta, Stacci, and Delfina. I knew he had been a tyrant who ignored his daughters, manipulated his son, and loved his wife but expected her to warm his bed, raise his children, and look the other way from his transgressions, but he had raised Raffa as much as Leo. How could they have ended up so different?

Even more, how could sweet, charming, and shrewd Gemma have fallen in love with such a psychopath?

She had been drawn to bad boys in the past, but there was a difference between her pot-smoking older college boyfriend and a murdering mafioso. Even the Albanian gangster would have been better than this.

Could Leo have killed her? Someone who was made of sunshine and wickedness and such fun her smile alone could make you laugh?

Could he have been looking me in the eye all this time knowing he had killed her and somehow covered it up?

Raffa might have told me I always wanted to believe the best of people. That I had a tendency, as I had with him, to romanticize the villain.

But as the dark hours passed into the pale tendrils of dawn, I became more and more convinced that I was missing something.

The pattern did not fit.

I needed to know why.

It had to be more than rivalry and the desire to be capo dei capi over Raffa. I had read once that the biggest motives for murder were greed and love.

Didn’t Leo already have enough money and power as COO to the Romano Group and underboss to Raffa’s criminal syndicate?

The bedroom door creaked open.

I was up, gun in hand and trained on the dark mouth of the doorframe in less than a heartbeat, one hand on Zacheo’s shoulder.

“It’s just me,” Carlotta said softly in Italian. “I am sorry to scare you. I couldn’t sleep, and I wanted to check on him.”

My aching muscles softened. “Of course. Why don’t you come sleep here with him? It will bring you both comfort, and I have given up on sleep myself anyway.”

She hesitated, but I could tell she wanted to hold her son. “Are you sure?”

In answer, I got out of bed and walked toward her, kissing her on the cheek as I made to move into the hall.

Her hand caught mine before I could.

Those eyes, almost as pale a brown as Raffa’s, glowed in the low light. “Thank you, Guinevere. I cannot thank you enough. Not just for saving Zacheo, but also for bringing joy to Raffa. He has sacrificed everything for this family. I am happy he has someone willing to sacrifice for him too.”

I squeezed her hand but could not find a way to fit words to the emotions tangling up my throat.

She smiled, released me, and hurried across the wooden floor to the bed.

I closed the door on them and headed down the hall to the stairs.

The lower level was dark, but I caught sight of a sentry near the front door, and Martina sat in the kitchen, staring into a glass of amber liquor.

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asked without looking up.

“No.”

“I can’t stop thinking about Leo,” she admitted, turning haunted eyes to me as I sat across from her. “I am going back through everything we have ever done together. When you first arrived, I had heard a rumor that the Pietra clan was being blackmailed by the Venetian into helping his cause. I told Raffa I had to speak to him about it, but Leo told me it was idle gossip. That the Pietra family had nothing more to lose they could be blackmailed with.”

“He knew who I was the whole time I’ve been here,” I agreed. “Donatella told me he dated Gemma when she was living in Albania before she died.” My fingers found the warm metal of the cross around my neck. “He gave this to the man on the bell tower to try to convince me to go away with him.”

“So he could use you against Raffa,” Martina concluded with a heavy sigh before downing the rest of the booze. “Merda. Even if the boys find him, we will have to completely overhaul all our systems. Who knows how much he has infiltrated and redirected for his own gain.”

“I can help with that,” I offered, invigorated by the idea of doing something. I knew I would have done more harm than good, slowing them down, but it physically pained me to stay behind while Raffa, Renzo, Carm, and Ludo hunted down Leo. “You know I’m good at finding patterns and discrepancies.”

“True. I’m sure Raffa will want your help.”

“I could start now,” I suggested. Now that the thought was planted, I could not ignore it. My knee jumped restlessly under the table. “Maybe I could find something to help the guys hunt him down now.”

Martina’s mouth flexed into a thin line. “It’s four in the morning, Vera. You can take a look tomorrow.”

“It’s four in the morning, but there’s no time to waste, right?” I pushed. “C’mon, Tina. I have everything I need at the office in the main house. Walk me over?”

“Ah, what the hell,” she said with a heavy exhale. “I wasn’t going to sleep for shit anyway.”

“That’s the spirit,” I agreed, jumping out of my chair, landing hard on the blistered soles of my feet, the pain bright even through the soft slippers and gauze Stacci had helped me wrap them in. Running through a burning olive grove in bare feet had not been one of my smartest decisions.

Martina nodded to the two men standing guard at the rear entrance of the house as we passed by them and started along the path to the main house. The way was lit with twinkling lights that mimicked the stars overhead.

“I could spend my whole life here happily,” I said, staying close to Martina, who had her gun drawn even though we were surrounded by soldiers on the property. “And I intend to.”

A little smile flickered at the end of her mouth. “I am glad for you and Raffa both. For myself too. I do not like many people, and when I find a decent one, I like to keep them.”

I laughed a little even though it hurt my throat. “Thanks.”

“If Raffa and I can make it work, I don’t see why you and Renzo can’t too,” I added, knocking my shoulder into her.

Martina rolled her eyes at me, but she was quiet for the rest of the walk, and I had to wonder if she was really considering my words. Life was too unpredictable to waste a moment of it on indecision when what you wanted was within your grasp.

The villa looked like a broken, empty shell when we arrived. The windows and doors were all wide open to clear the space of lingering smoke, and the entire back side was smudged with soot. It was cold enough in early November that I pulled on a coat at the entrance, a large black barn coat that smelled of Raffa.

I chafed my hands together, breath white in the frigid air as we entered the office, and I hustled over to my workstation. The neat pile of papers I’d had at my desk was strewn across the tabletop and floor, probably because of a breeze from the opened window.

But when I went to type in my password, I realized the computer was already unlocked.

I frowned at the documents open on the screen, layer upon layer of open tabs. The financial documents, notes I’d taken, and even the websites I had searched to delve deeper into each business the Romano Group and Lupo Nero owned and operated.

“I didn’t leave this like this,” I whispered to Martina, though we were the only ones in the office.

“What do you mean?” she asked, leaning over my shoulder.

It was then I noticed the little flash drive stuck into the side of my laptop.

“What is this?”

Martina froze behind me, then cursed softly. “It’s a spyware flash drive. Ludo programs them and gives them to us when we need to break into someone’s hard drive or spy on their online activities.”

“Someone wanted to see what I was working on.”

Which meant someone knew I was combing through the Romano Group’s financials.

“This is why he set the fire,” I realized. “He looked into what I was doing for Carmine and discovered I was onto him.”

“Merda,” she spat. “I cannot believe that piece of shit.”

Guilt sucker punched me. If I had been more discreet, none of the family would have been at risk. Everyone was going to be fine, but the kids, Zacheo especially, were probably going to be traumatized for life.

“Don’t blame yourself,” Martina said. “It’s that figlio di puttana who deserves all the guilt for this and everything else he has done.”

“True.” I straightened my shoulders and chafed my cold hands together again. “Okay, well as a royal fuck-you to Leo, I am going to spend the next few hours discovering exactly how deep his conspiracy goes. Pull up a chair and make some coffee, would you? We’ll be here awhile.”

Martina snorted but drifted away, hopefully to the kitchen to make coffee while I got to work.

It only took me twenty minutes to realize I didn’t have the full picture from the Romano Group. Whatever had been sent to Carmine had been doctored, because there were huge gaps in their financial statements. I studied the little flash drive beside my computer and sucked on my teeth before pocketing it and creeping down the hallway to Leo’s office.

The early-morning light warmed my sore feet as I crossed the study to the desk and sat at the multimonitor computer. It took me a moment to find the USB port and then another to figure out how to use it to crack Leo’s password protection.

I gained access to the computer, but his files were encrypted with a password too.

My dad and I used to play encryption games and solve riddles, so I figured I had just as good a shot as anyone at guessing what Leo’s password could be. I tried a variation of his birthday and the first nine numerical digits because I knew those were the most common password choices, but I was still locked out, with a warning that I only had three attempts left.

So I tried to think about Leo as a man instead of a stranger. The conversations he had been a part of at the dinner table, the jokes he had shared with Raffa and the crew, the proclivities he’d shown without meaning to.

But nothing particularly stood out except for his betrayal and the surreal fact that he had been dating my sister.

My sister.

I loved a foreigner once . . .

I chewed on my lower lip as I considered the possibility that Leo, despite having betrayed his best friend and pseudo family, might have enough of a heart to give it over to another person.

Gemma.

My fingers trembled lightly as I used one finger to type the letters and numbers into the keyboard.

G-E-M-M-A-1-9-9-7.

Files exploded open on my screen: building plans, construction codes, green tech development specs, and financial projections for countless agricultural businesses. I recognized many of the names from the shipping manifests and many more from the files Carm had given me from the Romano Group.

But there were even a few for holdings I knew Raffa owned under Lupo Nero, like Imelda’s Fattoria Casa Luna.

Obviously, Leo had stolen information about them to use for his own gain.

I pulled up Leo’s banking application, my heart knocking so hard against my chest it bruised my ribs. It was the way I always felt when I was onto something.

The application was blocked by another password protection, and this one would not respond to the same Gemma password.

I’d sighed, ready to find Martina to ask for her help, when a masculine noise came from the door, startling me so badly I shot out of my chair, banging it hard against the wall behind me.

“I’m sorry,” Dad said, hands open palms up as if in surrender. “I didn’t mean to startle you, Jinx. I saw you walking over out the bedroom window and I just . . . I wanted to make sure you were okay.” He huffed out a bitter breath and scrubbed a hand over his face. “Of course you aren’t okay. It’s been one thing after another since you got to this fucking hellhole.”

“Dad.” I sank back into my chair, feeling suddenly so exhausted that each of my bones was too heavy to hold upright. “This place is not a hellhole. I hope you know that by saying that, you are insulting my love for it and the peace I’ve found here.”

“Peace?” he scoffed, eating up the space between us on long legs to reach over the desk for my hands. When I did not give them to him, his fingers curled into loose fists. “Guinevere, how can this violent series of unfortunate events have brought you anything close to peace?”

“I found love here, and community. A sense of belonging that I never had back in Michigan. For the first time in my life, I know who I am, and I like it. To me, that is the definition of peace,” I explained as I turned my attention back to the computer.

I could feel Dad’s gaze on me, heavy as a brand, as I entered Leo’s full legal name and sent a “forgot password” notification to his email, which I had access to through his main account.

“You almost died again yesterday,” Dad said softly.

“I’m fine.”

“You could have ended up not fine at all,” he pushed. “I know this is the life you’ve chosen, and I wish you hadn’t—God, do I wish you hadn’t. Believe it or not, though, I am trying to be understanding. I just need you to understand that you are my baby, Jinx. The moment I held you in my arms, I knew we would have a special bond, and that bond has been tested by terrifying trips to the emergency room and kidney transplants, by my secrets and lies, and by your choices here in Italy. It’s been tested because I have never been more afraid to lose someone than I have been to lose you, especially after your sister’s death.”

I looked up from the prompts for resetting Leo’s banking password to see Dad’s dark eyes limned with tears, almost silver in the heavy morning shadows. It was hard to breathe through the emotion his speech evoked, through the tension that had been stretched between us for the last few months when all my life, he had been the person I’d felt most myself and safest with.

“I’m just asking for you to understand me as I try to understand you,” he finished with a limp shrug. “I want to support you—I will support you—but I just have to get out of the way of my own fears first.”

“Okay,” I said immediately, finally reaching across the desktop for his hand. It was warm and thick with muscle in my grip. “I can do that. If anyone can understand taking some time to digest all this, it’s me. I didn’t exactly decide this was the life for me overnight, Dad. I am not that impulsive. I’ve spent many, many sleepless nights weighing the pros and cons.”

“And the pros outweigh the laundry list of cons?” he asked with a wry smirk.

“Raffa alone would tip the scales,” I admitted. “And that’s not factoring in his family and our friends.”

Dad rubbed his free hand over his mouth and nodded. “Okay then. I know your mother told you we plan to stay for some time, and she meant it. I can do most of my work from here and schedule videoconferences according to the time difference. I won’t leave you until I’m sure you’re settled. Until we feel good about our relationship again.”

My heart tripped lightly, suddenly unburdened of the weight of my father’s disappointment.

“I love you,” I told him, squeezing his hand. “I know you thought I would judge you for your past in the Mafia, but even if I hadn’t had my own experiences with it, I could never think you were anything less than the best dad in the world. You taught me how to take the true measure of a man, and it has everything to do with his heart and mind and very little to do with his social conformity.”

Dad laughed, and the exhaustion that had sandblasted his face broke open to reveal his handsomeness. “I tried to conform for almost thirty years, and look where it got me!”

I smiled at him. “Right back where you started. Which means maybe you want to help me with this?”

He got up from the chair and rounded the desk to peer over my shoulder as I finished resetting Leo’s password.

“How did you do that?” he asked.

“I had all his personal information right here,” I said, indicating the computer. “And the Romano Group’s information from Carmine. It was easy.”

Pride suffused Dad’s face as he smiled at me. “I never knew, all those hours we spent playing math and pattern-recognition games, that I was preparing you for a life of crime . . . but whatever you do in the future, I am very proud to be your father. You are quite the woman, Guinevere.”

“I was taught by the best,” I quipped. “Now, pull up a chair and help me determine exactly where the money he’s been siphoning from the Romano Group and stealing from Lupo Nero’s companies is going.”

---

We worked in silence for an hour, long after Martina had brought in steaming mugs of coffee and curled up in the chair across from the desk with another laptop to help us in our mission. She wasn’t as familiar with financial forensics, but she provided invaluable context.

Still, I could not find any evidence that the money Leo had been channeling away from Raffa’s enterprises was going into Leo’s own pockets.

Until I decided to stop looking for it in Leo’s coffers and just follow the trail of money.

My mind snagged on a pattern I vaguely recognized from having gone through the shipping manifests when Raffa was trying to figure out who was smuggling the Albanians’ drugs through Livorno.

A bastardized anagram, but this time with an affine cipher instead of a Caesar.

It took Dad and me a long time to work out the mathematical equations for the businesses in the Romano Group’s holdings, but eventually I used frequency analysis of all the company names to come up with the numbers needed to solve the simultaneous equation.

And thereby crack the code of where exactly Leo had hidden the money.

Only, the main holding company that was the pot of gold at the end of a very long rainbow, Nobiliaire, was not owned by Leonardo di Conte.

It was in a trust for a Maria Rizzo, his deceased mother, held by Antonio di Conte.

I was familiar enough with trust law to know that only the holder of the account could access the funds, and after a quick internet search, I found the same was true in Italy. So why would Leo funnel all his hard-won dirty money into an account he could not access?

Unless Leo was not the puppeteer but, instead, the puppet pulled by someone else’s hands.

The account holder: Antonio di Conte.

Uncle Tonio.

I blinked at the financial records, wondering if my sleep-deprived brain was imagining things.

We had not been suspicious of Tonio at all.

He was a seventy-year-old man, for one thing, and the Venetian was said to be a tall, fit young man.

But if Leo was working with him, then perhaps Leo had been the one to don the mask and do Tonio’s more aggressive legwork.

For another, he was already head of the Romano Group, with what had to be an incredible salary and a lot of sway in Florentine society as its CEO.

So why?

Why would he and Leo decide to cut off the hand that fed them and go after the whole enterprise for themselves?

Why would Tonio go to such lengths—getting Leo to shoot him!—to make us believe he was free of guilt? What did he need before he got rid of the Romano family entirely?

“Where is Tonio?” I whispered.

Martina straightened out of her slump at my tone. “He was taken to the hospital for his injuries. Why?”

“Are there any soldati with him?”

“Just his usual bodyguards, Ernesto and Michele.”

I blinked slowly as the name Michele swam up from the depths of my memories.

“Michele and Philippe were brothers, right?”

“No, just friends. They grew up in the same village, and Tonio practically fostered them. Michele’s father was a drunk, and Philippe had to take care of his single mother. She was very sickly. Aldo gave them work.”

Not Aldo, I corrected mentally, but Tonio. The grumpy but sweet older man who was known for taking in strays like Leo. Only, he had been doing it not out of the goodness of his own heart but out of greed, in order to build his own internal army to take control of the outfit from Aldo—or Raffa—one day.

Had he been working against the family for that long?

Was his problem with the Romanos about the sins of the father and not the son?

“It was Tonio,” I said. “Tonio was the one pulling all the strings. Leo might have helped him, but they did it together.”

“You’re saying Tonio shot himself and stayed in the burning olive grove by choice?” Martina asked, but she wasn’t skeptical, just working it out aloud.

“It would be clever,” Dad said darkly.

Martina was already on her phone, fingers flying as she shot off texts.

“Leo could have been the one to shoot him,” I allowed. “But it was a setup to take suspicion off him and put it firmly onto Leo, who we already suspected. This way Tonio could stay close.”

“But why not just kill Raffa and be done with it? I’m sure being so close to the family, to Raffa, he would have had the opportunity,” Dad noted.

“Not really,” Martina said. “Raffa is rarely truly alone. Either Renzo, Carm, Ludo, or me is always with him or in the vicinity. If he’d killed Raffa outright, we would have taken him down.”

“Exactly.” Adrenaline transformed my blood to battery acid. “Whereas if the Grecos or Pietras were the ones to kill Raffa, Tonio could step in like the hero to take over and then wipe out his accomplices in the name of revenge.”

“Bravo, Guinevere,” someone said from the doorway.

I looked up just in time to see Tonio, dressed impeccably in a three-piece suit, looking every inch the strong, deadly mafioso even with his recent gunshot wound, lift his gun and fire.

The scream that tore from my smoke-ravished throat tasted like blood.

Because the bullet had been meant not for me but for Martina, who didn’t even have time to fully turn toward the threat before the shot punctured through the back of her chair straight into her torso. I watched as her eyes went wide and breath punched out of her lungs. Clasping a hand over the blood bubbling up behind her shirt, she tried to stand up only for her legs to give out, falling back into the chair with a shuddering moan.

“Stay there, Pietra scum,” Tonio coolly ordered my father, who had stood to go to Martina. “Do not even blink, or I will shoot you too.”

Dad opened his palms innocently and remained where he stood.

“On the other hand,” Tonio mused, cocking his head to consider my dad. “I do not have any need of you.”

“Wait,” I demanded, stepping in front of Dad. “If you need me, you need him. I won’t do anything for you if you kill my father.”

Tonio sighed as if I were a particularly petulant child. “You are hardly in a position to make demands.”

“Raffa will eviscerate you for this,” I said, hoping that dragging him into conversation might give some of the soldati on the property the opportunity to come looking for us, especially if Martina had had time to text Raffa or any of the others about our revelations.

Tonio moved farther into the room, and I realized he was holding his torso stiffly, so the gunshot must have been bothering him, even if he was trying to hide it.

I filed that away for future use.

“Raffa won’t be doing anything any longer,” Tonio told me with a kind, almost grandfatherly smile that nonetheless froze the blood in my veins. “He’s dead.”

For a moment, everything stopped.

Sound fell into silence; colors faded to white static.

My heart ceased beating.

And then the pain rushed in, as if Tonio had shot me straight through the chest instead of Martina, who sat slumped over and unconscious in her chair, slowly bleeding out.

It was as if Tonio had declared my own death too.

Because if Raffa was truly gone . . .

“How?” I asked, surprised by the vicious strength of my tone when I felt my internal organs shutting down.

“You like patterns, don’t you?” he mused as he walked over to Martina and callously shoved her out of the chair.

She fell to the floor limply with a sickening thump.

Tonio sat in the empty, bloodstained seat with his gun resting on one thigh, trained at Dad and me.

Maybe, if it had only been me at risk, I would have hazarded an attempt to attack him. After all, he was an elderly man, and I was young, with some degree of training. If I could just get close enough with the element of surprise, I had no doubt I could disarm him.

And if Raffa was dead . . .

Then no one was coming to save us.

Before I went to pieces, I had to get Dad out of this situation.

“Well, you are all unbearably predictable,” Tonio continued, adjusting his tie so it lay flat down his chest. “Of course Raffa would never suspect his old uncle, left bleeding in the grove, of being complicit in his demise. Of course my stronzo of a ‘son’ would take the first opportunity I was compromised to go after his girlfriend, and certo, Raffa and his band of unmerry men would follow. It was just a matter of setting up a neat little trap to take them all out in one fell swoop.”

“Why would you want to kill your own son?” my dad asked, slowly trying to tug me back so he could step in front of me.

When I did not move, he sighed and stepped up shoulder to shoulder. The weight and warmth of him beside me provided me safe harbor in the maelstrom of horror, despair, and panic wreaking havoc within me.

“Leo was always such a good little soldier,” he said, reminiscing like we were old friends around a coffee table and not in a quasi hostage situation. “He had to be, as the only child I decided to adopt for my own. There were always other boys that could have taken his position whom I found over the years and groomed into service of the Romano empire. He knew if he was not exemplary, another could fill his very coveted shoes. But then he met your daughter.” His pleasant face twisted into an awful sneer, a gold filling winking in the brightening morning light. “It seems the Pietra girls have the ability to corrupt good men from their true path.”

My laugh was coarse like tearing fabric. “That’s rich, coming from you.”

He leveled me with a flat look, adjusting the barrel of the gun so it was clearly aimed at my father. The threat was obvious yet clever. I was much more likely to be obedient if Dad was in danger rather than me.

Especially if Raffa was gone.

“He tried to keep her a secret, but I knew he was going soft. Traveling to Albania more than was necessary, suddenly questioning why we had to destroy the Romanos to take what should always have been mine.”

Mine, not ours.

A slip that revealed his dangerous narcissism.

“Why should it have been yours?” I demanded. “The Romano clan has held this territory for generations.”

“And for generations the di Conte family has supported them,” Tonio snarled. “We used to be princes of Italy, and now we are reduced to common foot soldiers. I thought when Raffa refused to enter the family business, when my continued efforts to lead him to university and civility paid off, that we would finally have our opportunity. Aldo swore an oath to make Leo his heir.”

A muscle under his eye twitched manically as he looked into old, sour memories.

“He lied,” I surmised.

“He lied,” Tonio agreed. “In fact, he made fun of me one night when we were in Pisa to confer with the Pietras. The first day’s meeting had ended, and Aldo had too much grappa. When I spoke of Leo joining us on the tour of the territory we took each year, he laughed.” There was a pause riddled with the palpable electric energy of his rage. “He told me Raffa would be his heir if he had to drag him back from that British isle kicking and screaming. He had a willing, capable man who wanted the throne, and he still refused to see beyond his own nepotism.”

“You were the one who killed him,” Dad said slowly as he put the pieces together. “You always blamed the family for what happened to him, but Ginevra told me Gaetano swore he never touched the capo, even though he was the one accused of murdering Aldo Romano. It was you, wasn’t it?”

Tonio flicked an invisible piece of lint off his thigh. “It was an accident, really. Grappa always brings out my baser urges, and I could not stand to look a minute more on that smug Romano laughing at me. Luckily, it was fairly easy to lay the blame at the door of the Pietras, given the history of distrust between the two families over the centuries. The two most powerful Northern Mafia families at war? It was too salacious not to be believed.”

There was a flicker of shadow in the light pooling in from the open door to the hall. I tried not to pin my gaze obviously over Tonio’s shoulder, but I kept track in my periphery as the shadow detached from the wall and loomed just beyond the frame.

Someone had come.

My heart leaped into my throat, hope so bright behind my eyes it threatened to blind me.

Raffa.

But the man who slipped into the room with a silver handgun in his grip, trained on the back of Tonio’s head, was not the man I hoped to see.

Leo di Conte looked terrible.

Heavy bags drooped beneath his eyes, and his normally golden hair was covered in a fine layer of soot that stained his white dress shirt and trousers as well. His gaze flicked up to mine, a warning to stay quiet implicit in his gaze as he tried to angle himself behind his father.

Something in my expression must have given him away, because before he could shoot, Tonio was lurching out of his chair, grabbing for me where I stood beside the desk and wrapping his arms around me in a tight bear hug. I’d been so focused on Leo, I didn’t have time to counter Tonio’s attack, and before I could think to move, I was caught in his grip, the cold kiss of a gun at my temple.

“Ah,” Tonio sighed sadly, breath moist against my cheek. “I see the explosion did not take you with it.”

Leo bared his teeth. “You fucking bastard. Gemma didn’t deserve that.”

Beside us, Dad lunged for me, but Tonio clicked his tongue and shuffled us away from him, grinding the gun into my head.

“Not so quick, Pietra. You only have one daughter left now. You wouldn’t want to lose her too.”

“Gemma was alive?” I whispered, looking at Leo. “All this time?”

Those devastated blue eyes flickered to mine, then back to his father. “Yes,” he ground out. “It was how Tonio was keeping me in line. Gemma was the one who sent the man at the bell tower in Impruneta with her necklace. She was trying to get you to help her without putting you in danger. If either of us had tried to tell you what was going on, Tonio had the house he was keeping her in rigged to explode.”

People will die if I tell you, Philippe had sobbed before Raffa killed him.

Gemma.

Tonio had staged her death and kept her locked up for over a year to use her as a tool against his own son, to take down Raffa in his quest to become capo dei capi himself.

And now, because of him, both my beautiful sister and the love of my life were dead.

“He died with her?” I asked with the rest of the breath left in my body.

Leo nodded tersely. “When I arrived, they must have been in the basement with her. The car was outside, and the tripwire for the bombs was at the top of the stairs.”

I closed my eyes against the brutal wave of pain that wrapped me in its viselike hold, crushing me from the inside out, bones and sinew ground to dust, veins bursting open.

“I didn’t want to hurt him,” Leo said quietly, and when I opened my eyes to look at him, tears were rolling through the dirt on his cheeks. “But Tonio had me by the balls.”

Tonio’s chuckle filled my ear. “You and Raffa were never very good at chess.”

“So what now, vecchio?” Leo demanded. “Raffa’s dead, but here we are, and I do not intend to let you out of this house alive.”

“You’re a wanted man, Leo. All I have to do is call the soldati to us, and they’ll come running to end your life,” Tonio replied calmly.

“Even with you holding Raffa’s fiancée at gunpoint?” he countered.

Tonio was quiet for a moment. “Pietra, move to the side wall and stand still.”

I watched from the corner of my eye as Dad obeyed, his gaze fixed on mine. It was calculating, and I was reminded that he had been born a mafioso, not a financial adviser, and he might be able to see a way out of this better than me.

“Sit,” Tonio ordered seconds before shoving me into the desk chair. “You have access to Romanos’ accounts through Lupo Nero and the outfit. I want you to transfer funds to me. I know I do not have to tell you my banking information because you were stupid enough to go snooping where you do not belong.”

“No,” I snapped.

Tonio’s response was to shoot at my dad.

The bullet embedded itself in the wall an inch from his head.

Dad didn’t even flinch, but I did.

“At least let Dad check on Martina?” I asked quietly. “Then I promise I’ll do what you want.”

After a brief hesitation, Tonio agreed, and Dad bent to check Martina’s pulse.

“It’s there but slow and weak,” he announced.

Fuck.

“Get to work,” Tonio urged me, sticking the gun against the swell of my skull.

Slowly, my fingers moved on the keys.

“Don’t think about it,” Tonio said a moment later, and I looked up to see that Leo had inched forward, probably to take a shot at his dad.

Tonio crouched behind my chair so only his head was visible, still too close to mine for a clean shot.

Leo gritted his teeth, but when I locked eyes with him, he shuttled his gaze toward the window on the wall to my right. I followed it, maneuvering the cursor across the screen to scroll through records as I wasted time, and studied the vista outside. The hill sloped up slightly before falling into the vineyard, and out among the greenery I caught a metallic glimmer.

The dead weight of my heart stuttered like a failing engine as I narrowed my eyes and looked closer through the leaves.

There.

Hair that shone like burnished copper in the sunshine.

Raffa.

As if sensing my gaze, he crept forward through the vines until he was just visible through the window.

If Tonio looked up and over, he would see him.

“So you got your best friend and your love killed,” I said to Leo, letting the echo of my pain suffuse my voice. “Your cowardice took my fiancé and my sister from me.”

“I’m sorry,” Leo said, and there was true agony and contrition in his voice, a wealth of it I could not even begin to process.

He had done so much wrong, all in a bid to save Gemma.

Could I blame him?

Wouldn’t I do the same thing for Raffa in a heartbeat?

Our conversation successfully distracted Tonio, who laughed cruelly. “Love makes idiots of everyone.”

My gaze clung to Raffa as he approached out the window. He was covered in soot like Leo, but his shirt was torn open along one side, bandages evident over his ribs. Something had torn through his eyebrow, blood crusted along his nose and cheek.

It was obvious he had been in the explosion Tonio had set, but somehow he’d escaped relatively unharmed.

I just had to hope the others—Gemma!—had too.

“For love, a fawn can become a huntress,” I told Tonio before I shoved the rolling desk chair back hard into his legs and dropped beneath the shelter of the desk.

A moment later, a violent crack pierced the air, followed by the shattering of glass and a heavy thwack. I spun around to witness Tonio slipping down the wall with a slack, open mouth, a bullet drilled through the center of his brow, his brain blasted across the red walls behind him.

Glass tinkled as more fell, and then the crunch of boots on the debris-strewn floor.

Raffa had climbed through the window, stalking toward us with his huge gun trained on Tonio.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

I watched as he drilled three more rounds into Tonio’s already-dead body, the corpse jumping from the impact.

Blood sprayed my front from my close proximity.

If Raffa had miscalculated the shot by even two inches, I would have been dead instead of his uncle.

But then again, we both could have died today, and the thought of that, of the life-ending anguish I’d felt believing he was dead, rocked through me like an earthquake.

“Raffa,” I said, standing tall to face him.

The predatory expression that had turned his face to marble wavered, as if the sound of his name in my mouth called him back from a berserker rage. A moment later, his gaze turned from Tonio to me, and the last of that hardness shattered into unfiltered relief.

“Vera,” he breathed like a dying man’s last wish.

And then we were crashing into each other despite his injuries, my hands fisting in his hair, his gripping my ass to leverage me up into his arms, our mouths connected like a watertight seal for our plundering tongues. We kissed so desperately I could not breathe and didn’t care to ever again so long as I could stay safe in his embrace for the rest of my life.

“Meus Rex Infernus,” I said against his mouth. “Come to save me.”

Because he was no one’s Prince Charming, but he was my King Below. And no matter the enemy at the gates, I knew in my bones we would find a way to conquer them and live the rest of our lives in our kind of dark ever after.

“My huntress,” he whispered as he kissed my lids, my nose, the point of my chin, anointing me in his love. “You are so fucking brave. I am so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I insisted, holding him away from me by tightening my fingers in his hair. “This wasn’t your fault. It was Tonio and . . .”

I hesitated.

Because it was also Leo’s fault, even if he had been the reluctant villain to Raffa’s reluctant mafioso.

Which reminded me . . .

“Gemma,” I gasped, almost choking on the hope ballooning inside me. “Is she . . . ?”

Raffa smoothed a hand down the back of my hair. “She is.”

He turned so that I could face the room again and notice what had taken place in the few moments we had taken to reunite and reaffirm we were alive.

Renzo knelt at Martina’s side, his hands wet with her blood as he stanched her wounds. She loosely held on to his shirt, lids fluttering as she struggled to breathe, but she was alive.

And beyond that, Leo was on his knees holding on to a figure in a dirty gray dress, with blond hair I recognized even under the grime of soot and ash.

“Gemma,” I mouthed because the air had been ripped from my lungs. I tried again after sucking in more oxygen, which burned going down. “Gemma.”

Leo’s hands spasmed on her back before reluctantly loosening so that she could pull away and twist to look at me.

“Dio mio,” Dad said from beside the left wall, his hand at his neck as if his shock and joy were strangling him. “Gemstone.”

His nickname for her all our lives.

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 fucking told you.”

“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.

Soldati had 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.

“He saved mine too,” I said, and I meant so much more than just today.

He had been saving me since the day he’d hit me with his Ferrari in the middle of an empty Tuscan road, but the truth was, I knew I had been saving him too.

It might have been silly to some, but as I sat there holding my man, my dad, and my sister, and my mom came running into the room with a loud sob before throwing herself at all of us, I said a prayer of thanks to Italy.

“It is fate that I am here,” E. M. Forster once said, “but you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.”

And I knew it was here in this forbidden country that I had finally found myself and the life I was meant to live.