Page 11 of My Dark Ever After

“It would seem that way,” he admitted. “I am sorry, Guinevere. Even though it is not a good enough excuse, this is the reason I did not tell you the truth about who I am. This is why, though I could no longer imagine my life without you, I did not ask you to stay. Your safety is more important than my happiness.”

“Yeah, well, honesty is more important to me than my happiness or my safety,” I said, and found it was true. “I am a grown woman, capable of making my owninformedchoices.”

“Capisco,” he said. I understand. “But you have to understand what it does to a man to know that his own actions could put someone he loves at risk.”

I thought about my father and wondered if he had done something horrible in Italy, something that had echoed across years and continents to place Mom or me in danger. It was the only reason he would keep something from me like this.

If it was a matter of my safety.

If he felt guilty because he was the one who had put a bull’s-eye on my back if I ever went back to his motherland.

“My father has been keeping secrets from me his whole life about why he left Italy and never wanted me to visit. Then, I take a chance on something for myself, to find out who I truly am in a new setting entirely of my own choosing, and I find this man. He’s kind and thoughtful and gorgeous, and most of all, he makes me feel seen. Like everything I am and everything I’m still discovering about myself is precious and wonderful.”

I glanced up at him, and our gazes clicked like magnets aligning. Neither of us could have looked away if we’d tried.

“And then I discover that everything I thought I knew about him is a lie. It’s not just about the love I had for him. It’s the way that deceit taints the love I’d started to feel for myself and this new version I’d been working on that whole time I was falling in love with him.”

“The man you fell in love with is not the lie,” he insisted, the words a sibilant hiss. “How can you not see that it is everything else that is the lie? The man I am with you is the truest me in every sense. The man I wish I could be if circumstances were different. The man I am inside the heart I gave to you.”

“I gave it back,” I reminded him coldly, because every atom of me was yearning to hold him and kiss him and love him even though he was more monster than man, more stranger than lover, really.

There was so much I didn’t know and couldn’t understand.

“I don’t want to talk about us. I want to know why they came after me when we broke up months ago and I live in a different country.”

Raffa sighed, a furious rush of air that ruffled my blood-stiff hair. “I am sorry they were able to get to you at all.”

“Wait,” I said, fighting through the myriad of emotions and the probable concussion making my thoughts blurry to realize something important. “How are you here? How could you have possibly known I was in trouble?”

Something shifted in those light-brown eyes like bodies stirring in a shallow grave beneath the earth.

“You had me watched?” I asked, more breath than voice.

A tic of muscle in his square jaw was my only answer.

“Jesus, Raffa. Are you serious?”

“Be happy that I am, or else you would have ended up dead or worse at the hands of thosebastardi.”

“Be happy? That you were essentially stalking me?” I asked incredulously.

But deep inside that locked box at the center of my being where light couldn’t reach, something thrilled at the thought.

“Si,” he said curtly. “I had you watched. You think it is because I did not respect your decision to leave me?Cazzate. I had you followed because there was no other way to keep myself away from you. How could I live without knowing if you were all right? How could I breathe?”

The silence between us bloomed like a bruise, painful right through to the bone.

“Did you know something like this might happen?” I asked, the starch gone out of my tone because how could I yell at a man who said things like “How could I breathe” about not knowing if I was safe?

“No, truly. If I had thought they would come for you, Renzo or Carmine would have been here to oversee things himself. One of my topsoldati.”

“If it wasn’t one of your men, who was it?”

“I had the capo of the New York Camorra send someone,” he admitted. “He is a good man and did not hesitate. In fact, he and his wife offered to shelter you in New York if anything should happen.”

“How did you know to come?” I pressed, because Raffa was good at providing information adjacent to what I really wanted to hear.

“His man noticed someone tailing you two days ago. He tried to track them down but lost them somewhere on campus.”