My Dark Ever After (My Dark Mafia Romance) By Giana Darling NovelM80052 My Dark Ever After (My Dark Mafia Romance) (Chapter - 1)

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

Wind whistled across the icy peaks of the Huron River and cut through the streets of Ann Arbor, buffeting me like a secondary gravitational force as I fought through the early snowfall across the University of Michigan campus. Bundled in layers of cashmere, swaddled in a thick scarf pulled up over my nose, with a beanie protecting my ears and forehead, I had only a thin swatch of skin exposed to the stinging bite of the brutally cold October day, but I was still frozen.

If I was being honest, I had been since I got off the plane from Italy two months ago.

It was as if all the warmth in my blood had been left behind in that godforsaken country. My warmth, my happiness, and half my heart.

My boots crunched through the freshly fallen snow as I walked from my yoga class back to work in the State Street District fifteen minutes away. Only locals and the slightly insane voluntarily walked outside in weather like this, but I was desperate for anything to distract me from my current state of affairs.

I was back home in Michigan, working for a father who’d barely spoken to me since I’d broken his trust by going to Italy despite the vow I’d made never to set foot in his mother country. My mother, as always, had taken his side, so although I had to work with him and saw her at our mandatory Sunday family dinners, I’d never felt so distant from my family. To make matters worse, the few friends I’d made at college seemed so far away from me after my summer abroad. I found myself uncharacteristically furious at them for their petty complaints.

My sister dropped dead at twenty-six, I wanted to scream at them.

The man I fell in love with is a stone-cold killer, I wanted to divulge.

How can you think this is the be-all and end-all in safe, quaint Ann Arbor? I wanted to demand.

Instead, I stayed quiet while they talked about their lives, retreating deep inside myself to a place I wasn’t sure I liked. A place filled with seething shadows that clutched at me, hooking beneath the flesh like talons and threatening to drag me even deeper into my own darkness.

I was sick of the mundane. Routine and schedule and predictability. It made me feel like I was losing my sanity. When I’d returned home, my father had given me the job he’d threatened to take away for staying in Italy against his wishes, saying that it would ground me, and all it had done was drop the bottom out from beneath my feet so I felt like I was in a free fall.

I’d tasted freedom and passion, the sucking black hole of despair, and the shivering bite of terror, alongside the heady mead of lust and a veritable bacchanalia of sin.

How could I go back to water, having become drunk on wine?

Before Raffa, I’d always felt that pull, a low-grade weight in my belly that hungered for sin, for the rough edge of sex, for the bright pain of anger followed by the blood-warming satisfaction of revenge. I’d read books like The Count of Monte Cristo, watched action movies filled with violence, and read erotica on a private web browser in the dark of night, alone in bed with my hand between my legs.

It had been enough.

Or at least, I hadn’t known then what a shallow form of satisfaction it was.

And now I did.

All the things I had accused Raffa of being—a cold, merciless killer, a skilled liar, a vengeful villain—they were the very things I’d gravitated toward in literature and film and fantasy my entire life.

The hypocrisy kept me up at night, even though I told myself fiction and reality were two totally different mediums.

Killing a man for trying to hurt me was not romantic.

Raffa had taken Galasso’s life without a qualm. And even though Galasso was a predator, he was still something to someone.

He should have been turned over to the proper authorities, right?

But the authorities never would have found the man who’d threatened me and, most likely, countless other women in his past.

I growled under my breath as I reached the revolving doors of the Beaumont Building, which housed my father’s firm, stomping my feet free of snow before pushing into the warmth of the marble foyer.

I was distracted from my thoughts by the sight of a man sitting in the waiting area before the security turnstiles. There was nothing remarkable about him, and normally I might not have noticed him at all. But discovering your lover is a mafioso after weeks of thinking he’s Prince Charming opens up an awareness in a person that is hard to quell.

Something almost like paranoia.

And I knew I’d seen that man before, not just earlier that day, loitering outside the coffee shop beside our offices, but also the day before, jogging through the park on a parallel route to my own.

I knew he was the same man because he had dark hair buzzed nearly to the scalp, with an oval patch of silver just above his right ear. It wasn’t exactly distinctive, but again, I’d taken pains to be more observant since the summer, and I knew this was my third time in two days crossing paths with him.

In a small city like Ann Arbor, it wasn’t unusual to run into people you knew—it happened almost daily—but something about this suited man with his stern countenance tripped an inner alarm.

He looked, almost, like Carmine, Raffa’s associate back in Florence. Suave, suited, and inexplicably dangerous despite the veneer of civility.

Without thinking it through, I veered toward him.

He glanced up with a surprised blink when I stopped just before the seat where he was scrolling through his phone. A quick peek showed he was looking at food reels on social media, and I wondered if I was being unduly suspicious.

“Hello, I think I saw you here this morning. Is there something I can help you with?” I asked sweetly, but one hand was curled inside the mouth of my purse, around the can of pepper spray I’d started carrying.

He blinked again, his face utterly expressionless in a way that made me shiver. And then, suddenly, he smiled. A bright, wide grin that could have been handsome if I’d found anyone attractive since I’d met Raffaele Romano.

“Are you Ms. Stone?” he asked, standing and swiftly buttoning up his blazer in a move that was utterly seamless and reminded me, as most things seemed to, of Raffa. He offered a square-fingered hand. “Your father mentioned you this morning, actually.”

“My father did,” I echoed, taking his hand reluctantly. Noting the calloused ridges not typical of a wealthy man.

“In our introductory client meeting,” he elaborated in a flat American accent. “My name is Tom Kirkpatrick. I just moved here from Washington, and your firm comes highly recommended.”

My spine softened slightly at the information.

A prospective client.

It would explain why he was around the building. And really, it wasn’t unusual for people to run through the many parks in the city. It was one of the appealing aspects of living here.

I let out a long sigh and smiled back at him. “Well, why don’t we go up together and get to know each other a bit. If you decide to do business with us, we will be working together closely.”

“I hope so,” he said a little too baldly, then ducked his head with a wince as if he was embarrassed by his enthusiasm.

Last year, I might have blushed and tried to flirt with the handsome older man. It would have flattered me to know he was interested, that he thought I was pretty.

Now, his attention moved through me like a cold draft, emphasizing the emptiness within me.

It lingered as we stepped into the elevator, his voice a dull drone in my ears.

---

It was late, and the glass walls of our twentieth-floor office were black reflective mirrors highlighting the fact that I was seemingly alone. Everyone had long since gone home for dinner, to their families or friends.

I didn’t really have either at the moment, so I stayed.

Burying myself in work because even when everything else went to hell in a handbasket, I was good at my job.

The best, second only to my dad.

He’d trained me for this since I was a girl. While most girls doodled in coloring books and played with dolls, John Stone gave me puzzles and taught me to play chess. When I was older, we spent weekend mornings racing to finish the New York Times sudoku puzzles and playing math games over pizza at the dinner table.

Gemma and Mom had left us to it happily, focusing on their shared love of food, wine, and fashion. It wasn’t that Gemma wasn’t smart enough to participate, but her skills lay in languages and sensory disciplines.

If sometimes I watched Mom and Gemma cooking and laughing in the kitchen and wanted to join them, I never acted on the impulse.

I gritted my teeth as the pencil in my hand broke, a splinter of wood lodging in my forefinger. A bead of blood pooled, and I brought it to my mouth to suck it clean.

“What are you still doing here?”

I snapped my head up to see Dad standing in the doorway to the conference room. Even though it was long after hours, his suit was still totally immaculate, cuffs buttoned, tie perfectly flat against his chest and knotted close to his throat. You never would have known he had old, faded tattoos beneath the silky fabric, only a handful of symbols and Latin words along the backs of his shoulders and the base of his throat. Even at home, he never went shirtless, always covering the marks as if they were scars instead of art.

John Stone gave buttoned up new meaning.

But God, I loved him.

He’d been my hero when I was growing up.

Some of my friends didn’t understand my often blind love for and loyalty to him, but they didn’t know what it was like to be so sick as a child you might die. To go to bed every night wondering if this was the time you wouldn’t wake. To have that fear be such an elemental part of your life and then to trust the man who told you each and every one of those nights that he would see you in the morning. That he would be there no matter what, and then he was.

Even though he was an important man with a booming financial firm, he never missed a doctor’s appointment. Every time I woke up from surgery, he was there beside my bed, smiling at me. Every time I was sick and aching, he was there to hold me, to distract me. My human embodiment of hope.

I knew how lucky I was to have a father like him, and until recently I’d never thought to take it for granted. If he’d asked me to crawl over glass, I might have. That was how much I trusted him. That was how infrequently he’d let me down.

The only thing we had ever disagreed on was Italy.

His homeland and the seat of his hatred.

My ancestral country and the setting of my lifelong dreams.

Gemma had always encouraged me to visit.

Fuck him, she’d say in that flippant, slightly cruel way she had of putting down any and all authority figures. If he loves you, he won’t stop you from doing what you’ve always dreamed of doing.

But it was easy for her to say.

As the sick sister, I’d been given more attention through necessity, but they made it up to Gemma by giving her whatever she asked for. Trips around the world, designer bags, a Porsche when she turned sixteen.

We could have been raised by different parents, that was how disparate our upbringings had been.

Her words lingered, though.

Long after she moved to Albania for her year abroad.

And then she sent me that last email before she died.

Listen to me, Jinx, I know what I’m talking about. You don’t owe Dad and Mom anything. It’s your life, and you’ve fought to stay on this earth to live it. You owe it to yourself to go to Italy. I hope you find answers there like I have here. I never could have known what I would find when I started looking into who I truly am. Don’t let Dad’s lies keep you from your truth. I won’t let him keep me from mine anymore. Be brave and bold, little sister. I hope when we see each other again, we are both very different people.

It seemed too much like the hand of fate to receive a message like that from Gemma just a handful of days before she died of a heart attack.

So I’d taken it to heart despite the god-awful feeling of lying to my parents and disobeying the strictest order they’d ever set for me.

Do not set foot in Italy.

Even now, after everything that had happened, the lies and heartbreak, I couldn’t say I regretted it. My summer in Tuscany had changed me for the better.

Raffa had called me his fawn, his cerbiatta, but I felt like a stag now. Something with wariness and horns, something that wasn’t afraid to gouge if threatened.

I knew now what I hadn’t before.

There were real monsters in the world, and the most dangerous of them all had a face like an angel’s.

“No rest for the weary,” I responded finally, with a little shrug as I reached into the open bag on the seat beside me for another pencil.

He studied me for a moment, something like fond amusement warring with frustration in those brown eyes that were so similar to my own. “You always preferred to do things longhand. Unusual for kids today.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m a kid anymore,” I said mildly, my attention on the numbers set out before me instead of on my father.

The sight of him hurt me. Knowing he was there but not here, not present for me the way he always had been before.

It might have hurt less if I’d still had Raffa, but losing the only two men I’d ever loved in one fell swoop had carved me up from the inside out and left me hollow.

“No,” he mused with a weary sigh, moving into the conference room to brace his hands on the back of one of the empty seats. The light hit his face full on, highlighting the tired brackets beside his eyes and mouth. He’d always been a handsome man, but right then, he seemed like a faded photograph of someone from a long time ago. “But you won’t tell me what happened this summer to take the bloom off the rose.”

I snorted softly, dropping the pretense of work to level him with an assessing look. “I’ve told you. When you are ready to tell me about why you left Italy, I’ll tell you what happened in Firenze.”

He flinched slightly at the name of the city, a tic he couldn’t curb. Curiosity burned in me so brightly I couldn’t believe I’d ever been able to contain it. I’d always wondered about what bridges he must have burned in leaving his family and nation behind and moving to America, but I’d respected him too much to press.

No, maybe that wasn’t quite it.

I hadn’t known enough about the world to question if that past was anything more than uncomfortable. If it was dark and full of secrets that could, years later, affect me.

Now that I did, I refused to settle for silence.

And the only trump card I had to play was my own Italian history.

Dad glowered at me.

Once, it would have worked, but I’d fallen in love with a man whose glares could skin the hide off a rhino, so I only blinked in response.

“Damn it, Guinevere,” he growled, slipping the chair out so he could sink into it, hands going to his hair and mussing it for the first time all day. “I thought when we left your teenage years behind that we’d remained unscathed by this kind of rebellion from you. We had enough of it from Gemma.”

“Blind obedience isn’t something you should be proud of,” I countered, wincing at my own past naivete. “You knew how much I wanted to go to Italy. How much it meant to me. How I dreamed of it during those long stays at the hospital.” Despite myself, tears clogged my throat, turning my voice to ash. “You knew, and you never gave me any reason or backstory. You just forbade me like an antiquated king with a princess in a fairy tale.”

“You should have respected me enough to take my word for it,” he said gruffly, hands white knuckled where they were clasped over the table.

“You should have respected me enough to tell me the truth,” I retorted, scalding tears racing down my cheeks.

This was the crux of the issue with both the men in my life.

How could they respect me—love me—if they didn’t trust me with the truth?

Vera, Raffa had called me. Truth in Italian.

Yet he had offered me none of his own honesty.

He might have been gone from my life forever, but my father was not. There was still hope there. I just needed him to explain himself so I could explain myself to him and we could finally reach some kind of understanding.

“Have you ever considered not telling you the truth was to keep you safe?” Dad demanded, slamming a palm flat to the table as he leaned across it. “Did you ever consider I would cut out my own heart before putting you in harm’s way and that keeping you from that blood-soaked country was the least I could do to keep you safe? I left for a reason, Guinevere.”

“And I went for my own reasons,” I replied, suddenly exhausted by the fruitlessness of this conversation. An imitation of the one we’d had every week since I came home in August. “Until we can be honest with each other, we can’t fix this rift between us. Are you happy with the way things are?”

The question was bloody, a raw hunk of flesh I carved out of myself to offer to him.

Do you see the way I bleed because of this? I tried to convey. Do you see the way I ache to make things right?

But Dad only stared at me, a vein throbbing in his forehead.

“I love you, Dad,” I said after a long moment of silence. “But if I learned anything this summer, it’s that I have to love myself more than anyone else if I want to be healthy and happy. And I refuse to pretend I’m okay with you keeping secrets from me that affect my own life.”

“We can fix this,” he said with fervor, opening his hand to me even though I was too far away to take it. “Just put my past to rest, where it has lain buried for years, and look to the future with me. I-I can’t say I will forgive you easily for going to that place behind my back, but you’re home now, and if you promise not to go back again, we can recover.”

A bitter laugh coughed up my throat.

Because I could promise that, really.

It wasn’t like there was anything for me left in Italy but broken promises and shattered dreams.

So why was it impossible to make that oath?

The idea of never returning was too final, ripping out the last roots of the love that had seeded, grown, and flourished in Tuscany.

It would eliminate the faint whisper of “what if” that haunted me in the darkest hours of the night, when I couldn’t sleep for the memories.

Despite everything, I could not make that oath.

The idea of never seeing Raffa again stabbed through me like a cold blade, even though I knew it was one of my own making. I had decided to leave him.

But, a small voice in my head murmured, he didn’t come after you. He hasn’t contacted you at all since you’ve been gone.

Despite that, I couldn’t bring myself to utter the words to repair my relationship with my father and risk permanently deleting all hope of Raffa from my heart.

“I won’t do that,” I said finally. “That shouldn’t be what this hinges on. If I go again—which I do not intend to do at all right now—then I’ll give you the courtesy and respect of telling you. But I won’t make that promise. It’s my life, and I have to be able to do as I please. Maybe you can’t understand that, but after being sick and sheltered for so long, I need this independence. Even though what happened in Tuscany changed me, it wasn’t for the worse. I’m stronger now. And part of being strong means assuming responsibility for myself instead of hiding behind my parents. Even when I love them.”

Dad stared at me, throat working as he swallowed convulsively. When he spoke, he stared at his open palms as if they held the secrets to the universe. “I should have realized before this.”

“Realized what?”

His gaze snapped to mine, dark eyes the same shape as my own and filled with fire. “That you are too much like me to understand how to put aside your pride and make the right decision.”

Without waiting for a reply, he pushed out of the chair and stalked out of the conference room. I watched with tears drying tight on my skin as he went to his corner office and then reemerged a moment later in his coat and scarf, with his briefcase.

He did not spare me a look as he left the offices.

The only thing that remained in his wake was the cold, dark office and the pile of numbers I had been trying to drown myself in. Left with nothing else to do, I dove right back in and hoped the clarity of mathematics would clear my tumultuous soul.