Page 103 of My Dark Ever After

Even Renzo’s mouth twitched this time.

“So,” I drawled. “Pronti?”

Ready?

“Partenza,” Ludo offered.

Set.

Raffa and I locked eyes as I waited for him to say the word. Instead, he reached out to put a hand on my shoulder. A smile was already forming on my lips when he slid his foot in front of mine so I tripped, and, using the hand on my shoulder, he controlled my fall to the ground.

Only when I was down and he was separated from me did he call out, “Via!”

Go!

“Caspita,” I cursed in Italian as I heaved myself to my feet and took off after the men, who were still laughing as they sprinted down the winding road.

They were all taller than me and undoubtedly fitter than me, given that I had taken up serious exercise just in the last few months, but they only beat me by a handful of yards, which I took as its own accomplishment. Then I remembered that Ludo had a healing gunshot wound and still finished before me, and I felt a little less vindicated.

I bent over, gasping for breath with a hand to the stitch in my side, when I reached them where they were waiting at the bottom of the hill.

“Bravissima, Guinevere,” Renzo praised me in that quiet way of his, stepping up beside me to squeeze my sweaty shoulder.

“Very impressive,” Raffa agreed, staring at me from his habitual pose, arms crossed, legs spread like those of a fighter braced for combat. His sweaty hair curled around his forehead and ears, and there was that small, half-moon grin on his face he’d told me was made just for me.

“You should see her fight,” Ludo added, stretching out his thickly muscled tree-trunk thighs. “She is weak, but very fast.”

I rolled my eyes at my friend and flexed my minimal biceps. “Who’re you calling weak?”

Raffa chuckled, reaching out to run rough fingertips over the thin-skinned underside of my arm. When I shivered, his smile turned predatory.

“You look stronger,” he admitted. “You are certainly faster than when we ran together in Florence.”

“I told you I took MMA classes and I started running a lot in Michigan.”

“Why?” he asked, head cocked, something working behind those eyes the color of sun-bleached pennies.

It was a good question, and until that moment, I hadn’t had a great answer for it. “I think,” I said slowly, “I wanted to be prepared to defend myself in case I ever came back.”

Raffa only leaned back a quarter of an inch, his expression hardly shifting, but I knew him well enough to know that he reeled away from my statement as if to protect himself. He stared at me, matte eyed and stern.

“Leave us,” he said softly.

Renzo and Ludo were already turning to head back up the hill.

He waited until they were gone to ask, “Are you fucking with me, Guinevere?”

“No,” I said calmly, stepping closer so the toes of our sneakers pressed together and I had to drop my head back to look up at him. “I’ve been scared. Chickenshit, my sister would have said. The truth is, even when I went home to my boring, respectable life, I felt like I was going insane. It wasn’t ... it wasn’tenoughfor me anymore. Not just because it was a life without you, but also because it felt like I was forcing on an old coat that no longer fit right. I may have been raised a certain way, but I think I was born a little different. Obviously now that I know my dad was a mafioso, that makes more sense.”

His expression was immovable.

I sighed, searching for the words that had been inscribed on my soul since before I had even met him. As I had often done in life when my own words failed, I found another way to give meaning to what lay inside me.

“Giovanni Boccaccio said, ‘You must read, you must persevere, you must sit up nights, you must inquire, and exert the utmost power of your mind. If one way does not lead to the desired meaning, take another; if obstacles arise, then still another; until, if your strength holds out, you will find that clear which at first looked dark.’”

I took Raffa’s hands in my own, rubbing my thumbs over knuckles I knew had bruised and split after fighting.

“I know he was a Renaissance humanist and probably didn’t mean for me to interpret it this way, but that’s what happened to me. I had this hunger inside me that no amount of reading or studying could quench. I thought I longed for Italy itself, the nation and the culture, but even though I love it here, how rich and warm it is, how unjudgmental, I know I was looking in the right place for the wrong thing. All along, every time I dreamed of fucking in the darkness, of villains and their cutting words and antiheroes with their tragic pasts, I was yearning for you. Preparing my mind and spirit to accept you for who you really are. My Raffa, but also,capo dei capi,meus Rex Infernus.”