My Dark Ever After (My Dark Mafia Romance) By Giana Darling NovelM80052 My Dark Ever After (My Dark Mafia Romance) (Chapter - 14)

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

Raffa did not let me join him for his meeting with the Albanian Mafia.

“If you were my partner,” he said with an easy shrug, “it would be different. I would introduce you to the Albanians so they knew who reigned with me. As it is, it is better for you to remain unseen. We do not need more criminals with a memory of your name and face than are necessary.”

It irritated me, but the only person I could be annoyed with was myself.

I wanted to be there beside him, both because I wanted to support Raffa and because I was rabidly curious about the inner workings of his business. With every subject I learned about, there were that many more questions to ask. I turned the idea of the Camorra business structure over and over in my brain like a Rubik’s Cube, studying its bizarre and wonderful complexities.

I thought that, if given the chance, I might have a lot to offer such an outfit.

I wondered if Raffa knew what he was doing in keeping me away, stoking the fires of curiosity and hidden desire until they burned under my skin.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I whispered to myself as I banged my head back against the seat.

“Mi dica, signorina?” Philippe asked from the front seat.

“I need to go for a walk,” I said, suddenly desperate to get out of the car. “Can we?”

My bodyguard/driver peered at me in the rearview mirror, obviously weighing my desires against whether or not his boss would crucify him for taking me away somewhere.

“I can text him to let him know where I’ve gone,” I suggested. “He might not see it right away, but it will mean he won’t worry. Please, Philippe, I don’t know when I’ll be back in Florence.”

He sighed, rubbing a hand over his buzzed head. “I see why the boss likes you,” he muttered. “Americans are persuasive.”

I huffed a shocked breath of laughter. If I was more persuasive, I would be at the meeting with Raffa, Renzo, Carmine, and Martina.

We were close enough to the Duomo that I headed there automatically. Even in mid-October, the city was thriving, packed with tourists looking through their telephoto lenses and locals swerving deftly through the masses. I loved the hodgepodge of Italian, English, and other languages, the sound of a street performer singing one of Raffa’s favorite songs by Pavarotti.

Philippe followed soundlessly behind me, but his presence didn’t feel oppressive. After what had happened in Impruneta, I was grateful for a bodyguard.

When we reached the Piazza del Duomo, I ducked into the cathedral, which was free to the public, and wandered the illustrious interior. It gave me goose bumps to think about the first stone being erected in the 1200s, to know that so many lives had touched this place and been touched by its existence in return.

It didn’t surprise me that my feet took me to Domenico di Michelino’s painting of Dante and scenes from The Divine Comedy.

It was ironic that Raffa had read to me from the volume and that we both liked to quote the famous Italian poet when the story had specifically been crafted as a warning to people not to sin and forfeit their immortal souls. Each of the nine circles of hell had its horrors, and none of them were sugarcoated.

Did I want my liver pecked at by a bird of prey every day for the rest of time?

Did I want to be as Sisyphus was, eternally rolling a boulder up an endless hill?

Raffa liked to say he was the only god in his life and he made his own rules, and something of that philosophy must have rubbed off on me.

Because I truly believed there was no deeper level of hell than a life without Raffa Romano at my side.

Even if, in the end, when I closed my eyes to greet death, I faced eternal damnation. Better to have lived free and well than not at all.

I had to think even Dante, with all his moral wisdom and posturing, would have sinned with his beloved Beatrice if he had been given the chance. It was easy for him to write that he “never allowed Love to govern” him when he had never once met the object of his affection. Knowing her, being intimate with her, could he still have allowed reason to rule?

I was a reasonable person, a numbers-based, fact-oriented thinker.

Yet the love I had for Raffa and the feelings he had unearthed inside me about life and myself defied all my previous expectations and experiences.

Knowing him and loving him made it easier to know and love myself.

And the truth was, we were not so different as I thought we should be.

He was a good man born to the dark, and I was a girl born in the light who had always yearned for something peeking out at me from the shadows.

Eravamo come due gocce d’acqua.

Two drops of water. Made of the same substance.

Anime gemelle.

Identical hearts or twin souls.

“Scusi,” a female voice said from over my shoulder.

I turned, startled out of my reverie to see an elderly woman staring at me with wide eyes. She was dressed entirely in black, her silver-streaked dark hair a vivid contrast, her eyes a brown so deep they seemed almost black.

“Io ti conosco,” she murmured, reaching out with a shaking hand to clutch at my forearm. Her knuckles were like the gnarled roots of a tree, big diamonds winking from a ring on every finger, even her thumb.

I know you, she’d said in a thin, wavering voice.

“I’m sorry,” I said in Italian, placing my hand over hers. “You don’t. I am just visiting from America.”

“No,” she insisted, and suddenly her frailty fell away like a shroud, her grasp on my arm painfully tight, her thin lips twisted into a snarl. “I know you. Why do you lie?”

“I’m not lying,” I argued, gently but firmly trying to pry her hand off my arm.

Philippe moved forward from where he had taken a seat to wait for me in a pew just a handful of yards away, but I shook my head. She was just a confused old woman. I didn’t want to frighten her with big, stern-faced Philippe.

“Why do you lie?” she repeated, her voice getting louder so that we were starting to draw attention. “Why did you leave without saying goodbye?”

“Nonna.” A preteen boy who was all limbs and knobby bones appeared at her side, taking her arm and shooting me a helpless smile that was half grimace. “I am so sorry. My grandmother is not very well.”

“It’s okay,” I said as he helped remove her hand from me. “Just a misunderstanding.”

“My baby’s baby,” she whimpered, clutching at her grandson even as she kept her eyes pinned on me.

“Signora Pietra.” An older man wearing clerical robes hustled out a side door and offered his arm to the elderly woman. “Please, why don’t you come sit in my office for a moment and calm down.”

Something in the back of my mind lit up, an internal alarm I wasn’t even aware I had set up.

“Pietra?” I asked, stepping forward as they started to move away.

The preteen boy shot me a wary glance and helped hustle the group faster toward the door, then closed it behind them with a resounding thud without answering my question.

There was something working at the back of my brain, chewing over a problem I half remembered.

It had started germinating when I’d seen Beatrice’s supposed tomb.

“Pietra di Beatrice” had been inscribed on the side.

Pietra. Another word for “stone.”

Sasso, masso, roccia, Leo had said before he was cut off.

He might have finished by adding pietra.

My heart tripped into a sprint, knocking so hard against my rib cage it ached. I scurried over to Philippe, who was standing just on the other side of the pew, having watched the entire interlude with the elderly woman.

“Philippe, can you take me to the Uffizi?” I asked in Italian. “Raffa said they would be a while, and there is something I would like to see.”

He frowned at me. “They will be done soon, Guinevere. I think it best if we go back to the car and wait as Signor Romano wanted.”

“Please?” I asked, utilizing the doe eyes that Raffa liked to refer to so much. “It won’t take long.”

He sighed wearily but nodded, walking toward the exit with his hand on my arm to keep me by his side through the swarms of warm bodies.

I bit my lip to keep giddy laughter from escaping, my knee jiggling with restlessness the entire drive to the Uffizi’s Historical Archive and Research Department. Usually, you needed an appointment and a supervisor to visit the archives, but a quick search on my phone helped me figure out a plan to get through the protocols. As soon as we parked, I leaped from the car even though I was aware that Philippe was shadowing me.

“Buongiorno,” I greeted the woman at the front desk. “I know you typically need an appointment to visit, but I was hoping to visit my aunt Simonetta. I’m visiting from Pistoia as a surprise.”

“Oh.” The receptionist, who wore a name tag that read Paola and looked almost as ancient as some of the records she guarded, beamed at me. “That is so sweet of you, dear. Margharita, isn’t it?”

“Frederica,” I corrected, just in case she was testing me instead of showcasing some memory loss in her older age. “But my sister’s name is Morena—maybe that’s who you are thinking of.”

“Ah,” she said, even brighter than before, sinking slightly into her chair as she relaxed. “Of course—Morena is off at school in the south. Well, Simonetta should be in her office. I assume you know the way?”

I nodded. “Of course.”

“Well then, just sign in and I’ll let you through.”

She pushed the attendance sheet toward me and watched as I carefully wrote “Frederica Abate.”

“Thank you, Paola,” I said with a warm smile as I started to move toward the turnstiles, holding my breath for a moment before they gave way and let me through into the archives.

I turned to see Philippe frowning after me before he reluctantly took a seat in the reception area to guard me from there.

I was grateful for the space, because I had no idea what I would find if my hunch was right, and I wanted to be able to process it in peace.

It wasn’t my first time in the archives. I’d visited once with Ludo in the summer, so I knew where to go to find the documents from the early seventies, when my father was born somewhere in the region. There were no other people in the stacks with me, but I couldn’t help feeling on edge, as if someone might come across me at any second and arrest me for my curiosity.

At worst, they would make me leave.

So why did it feel like I was on the edge of a cliff, staring down at the churning sea below, my toes hanging over the rock?

My fingers trembled as I came across the year 1973 and then caught on the section of surnames starting with P. I took the entire file out of the metal drawer and carried it to a table in the back behind stacks of utilitarian shelves.

Piazza, Piccola . . . Pietra.

There were only four births in the region that year with the last name Pietra.

And one of them was Mariano Giovanni Gaetano Pietra.

Born March 3, 1973, outside Pistoia, Tuscany.

My pulse boomed in my ears like thunder after the lightning strike of new information left me paralyzed.

“Oh my God,” I whispered as my fingers shook the paper too hard for me to read it.

I didn’t need to read the information again to know.

This man was my father.

Setting the papers carefully aside, I pulled out my phone to do some digging. I was no hacker like Ludo, but I had been trained to investigate companies we wanted to invest in thoroughly enough to bank on their return, so I had more than enough skills to find what I needed.

Especially because I remembered the name Pietra from discussions Raffa had with his soldati.

A family in the Camorra that ostensibly worked under the umbrella of Raffa as capo dei capi, but that had, lately, been rebelling against him. They had bad blood, he’d said, because they had killed his father.

Bile rose in my throat at the implications and settled, bitter enough to make me gag on the back of my tongue.

“Please, no, please, no,” I whispered as I searched deeper and deeper through the internet, checking Italian forums and newspaper archives until I found what I had hoped so deeply not to find.

Gaetano Pietra welcomed his third son on March 3 with his wife, Giulia; named Mariano Giovanni after his paternal and maternal grandfathers. He will be baptized next Saturday at the Cathedral of Saint Zeno.

My head thunked against the table as my spine suddenly lost its rigidity.

Someone who was very thorough had gone through and scrubbed most mentions of the mafioso’s third son from digital existence, but this article in a small local paper remained, with the announcement of his birth.

I killed his two eldest sons in retribution, Raffa’s words echoed back to me.

My lover had killed my uncles.

My father’s family had killed Raffa’s father.

What were the odds?

My mathematician brain tried to calculate them and found it wasn’t as far fetched as it should have been.

I had come to Florence because I knew Tuscany was where my father had been born. Of course, meeting Raffa had been incredible serendipity, but the odds of meeting someone associated with the Camorra who might have known my father’s people didn’t seem unlikely. If Raffa had six hundred people working for his outfit, not including the dozens of capos who operated in other regions of the north, there had to be hundreds of cogs in the machine that would lead me back to the Pietra family.

But still.

My vision blurred as I exited the internet app on my phone and dialed a number I knew by heart.

“Hello?”

“Dad.” The word fell out of me like an anchor, dragging me down, down, down into panic. “Dad, I need to know . . . are you related to a man named Gaetano Pietra?”

The silence that echoed back at me was colossal. I had the sudden, incredibly surreal feeling of being alone in the Arctic tundra, surrounded by ice and endless quiet.

“Where did you hear that name?” Dad said finally, voice textured with weariness.

“Cazzo,” I breathed.

“Modera il linguaggio,” he barked out of habit, only this time the parental admonishment was said in rusty Italian.

“Dad, what the fuck?” I said, ignoring his warning to watch my mouth. “Were you a part of the Italian Mafia?”

It made so much sense I felt ill and dizzy with it. The metal edges of my phone cut into my fingers from how hard I was holding it.

His sigh seemed endless. “I left that behind when I was a much younger man.”

“So yes,” I surmised. “How . . . ? God, I have so many questions I don’t even know where to start.”

“Start with how you discovered this at all. Is it because of that man, Raffa Romano?” His words lashed at me through the phone.

“You are in absolutely no position to be high and mighty about Raffa when you were in the Camorra yourself, Dad,” I snapped back.

“So he did follow in his father’s footsteps, then.” He made a noise at the back of his throat like a dying animal. “Fuck, Guinevere. When I saw that photo of you in the paper with him in August, I did some asking around, and everyone said he was clean.”

Despite the circumstances, I grinned, a feral expression to match the wicked pride I felt that Raffa was so good at his job.

“This isn’t about Raffa. It’s about you having lied to me my entire life. No wonder you didn’t want me to come to Italy.”

“Yes, no wonder,” he shouted. “You do not know how dangerous it is for you to be there, Jinx. With your luck, someone could figure out who you are related to. Raffa Romano could find out! And you do know what he would do to the granddaughter of one of his rivals? Your mother and I would never see you again.”

“How could you let me exist in the world not knowing something this big?” I demanded. “Even if I had just been traveling through France and England, how could you have known I wouldn’t run into someone who might recognize me?”

“It was incredibly unlikely anyone would recognize you out of context and based on looks alone, even if you did bump into someone who once knew me. The odds were minuscule. I calculated them,” he said with a scoff.

Of course he had, just like I had tried to.

“Only, you betrayed my trust by doing the one thing I ever asked you not to, and you spent the summer in Italy. You met a fucking mafioso, for Christ’s sake, Guinevere. I thought I raised you better than that.”

“I didn’t know at the time,” I seethed. “Though if I’d had all the information about my family and my background, maybe I would have recognized the signs.”

My mind was reeling like I’d gone for a spin on a merry-go-round and couldn’t get off, the wheel just spinning faster and faster until all my thoughts swirled into a chaotic muddle.

“If Romano is in the Camorra, you need to leave him. Now,” Dad was saying, urgency vibrant in his tone. “I’ll buy you the next flight out of Florence. Come home, and we’ll figure out how to keep you safe. He obviously found you once before, but—”

“He saved me once before,” I corrected. “Raffa wouldn’t hurt me, even if it meant saving his own life.”

I knew as soon as I spoke the words that they were true. Raffa would move heaven and earth to keep me safe and happy, despite the fact that, recently, I hadn’t done anything to deserve that kind of devotion.

God, I thought, I had judged him so harshly when my own father was just like him.

“How can you have raised me on this intense rhetoric about being good and kind in a world that is anything but? When you know its dangers and atrocities better than almost anyone? Instead of arming your daughter, you declawed her and left her vulnerable to predators.”

“Predators like Raffa Romano.”

“No. Never Raffa.” Dark, bad, and dangerous to know he might be, but Raffa would never hurt me, and more than that—more than my dad—he wanted me to be both his cerbiatta and his cacciatrice. His fawn and his huntress. “He is the only one who wants to help me make myself a weapon.”

“You don’t need to be a weapon, for fuck’s sake. You’re just a girl. Your life is in America as a financial adviser. You have a serious chronic illness, Guinevere! Come home, and I’ll protect you.”

“I am more than just my illness, Dad. How many times do I have to say that? I’m not some frail princess you can stuff away in a tower,” I argued, fury building inside me, turning the confusion and despair into something actionable. “I should have known the truth so that if anything came for me, I could defend myself. Now, you’ve left me in an impossible situation, and I’m playing catch-up. If anything happens to me, Dad, it will be your fault for not trusting me with the truth.”

He made a sound like I’d run him through with a blade.

“I don’t know if I can forgive you for keeping this from me,” I whispered through the mass of emotion in my throat, which was clogging it like debris in a drain. “This is just . . . too much.”

“We can speak about it when you get home. I’ll tell you everything you want to know,” he promised, and I could feel his desperation through the phone. “Just come home—now.”

“No. You can’t keep me safe there. They already got to me once before.”

“The break-in,” he murmured. “The police said it was a disgruntled employee from the Enrich Company, but I should have recognized the shoddy cover-up. It must have been Romano’s business catching up to you.”

“Maybe, but how can you be sure it wasn’t yours?” I countered.

“They haven’t found me in two decades,” he said shortly. “There is no way.”

“Well, apparently the Pietra family has reignited the feud with the Romanos, so who knows. Maybe they’ve been searching for the long-lost heir to the throne for a long time now, and they’ve finally found you to bring you home.”

“I will never set foot on Italian soil again,” Dad spat like a curse.

“Good, then I won’t have to see you for a while,” I said calmly before slowly ending the call and blocking his number.

When Mom called minutes later, I muted hers too.

I sat in the enormous, mostly empty archive room for a long time after that, just staring into space as my brain worked.