Page 110 of My Dark Ever After

“Yes, that was actually what I came in here to say. This weekend is Giorno dei Morti, the Day of the Dead. Traditionally, I host a party at the palazzo, which begins in the private cemetery. Donatella Verdi, thecapo donnain Venice, will be there, as will most of my other capos, to celebrate.”

“And to be questioned about their loyalty?” I surmised.

“Exactly. I would like you there with me.”

I blinked at him as a smile slowly broke over my face. “Yeah?”

He had not let me join him for the meeting with the Albanians because I had refused to be a part of his world, but now? Now, I would meet them all at his side.

The prospect should have worried me, maybe, but instead I felt suffused with pride that he wanted me beside him and a dark anticipation of watching my powerful man in his element.

“I’d love to,” I told him.

A tenseness I hadn’t noticed until it was gone faded from his frame, leaving behind a soft expression that took my breath away.

“Bene. We will leave a day early to have an evening alone in Firenze. I want to take you somewhere special.”

“Okay,” I whispered, a little dizzy with joy. “I’d like that too.”

We stood looking at each other with silly smiles on our faces for a long moment before the bell clanged in the kitchen, Angela reminding the stragglers that dinner was on the table.

“Come, let us see if this meal is any less painful than the last,” he joked, offering his hand to me.

I giggled but shook my head. “Distract your mom for me? I just want to finish up here—I think I was onto something.”

Raffa bent to press a kiss to my forehead and then, unsatisfied, tipped my head to place a lingering one on my mouth.

“Do not be long,” he implored before turning on his heel and leaving me to it.

I listened as he distracted his mother in the kitchen when she asked after me, and then bent over the keyboard again.

Because there was something in this mess of data that called to me, something about how each company that had been broken into hadn’t noticed anything missing. Imelda’s vineyard was one of them; then there were a textile factory outside Milan, a chain of pizza places across Europe Raffa had invested in at its source in Naples, a balsamic company in Bologna, and a turbine manufacturer in Turin.

All seemingly without connection, except ...

The Romano Group had once been invested in that same pizzeria in Naples, but they’d removed funding before expansion over four years ago, when Raffa became capo.

There was an article in theCorriere della Serraabout the Romano Group’s lost bid on a huge green tech firm out of Rome last spring and a blog post from a popular food writer about the sale of Tenuta Romano from the Romano Group to a global subsidiary three years ago because of ethical differences between Delfina Romano at the winery and Romano Group CEO Tonio di Conte.

It seemed that every company that had been targeted was a missing piece in the fabric of the Romano Group’s company.

It could have been a coincidence, but I wasn’t the kind of girl to believe in coincidences.

I believed in data-based patterns and mathematics.

I believed in fate.

And something told me that I was right about the Romano Group being the crack in Raffa’s armor. He had dismissed it too readily because of his issues with his father after he died, and it had been left too long unchecked.

I pushed out of my chair, wincing at the crick in my back, and went down the hall away from the kitchen, toward the office Leo kept at the back of the house.

The door was open, but the space was empty, Leo no doubt already gathered with the others for dinner.

I hesitated in the doorway, listening to the cacophony of dinner filtering in from outside, and stepped into the office.

There was nothing on the wide wooden desk but for a computer and a small red clock with, shockingly, a Leaning Tower of Pisa photo on its face. It was cheap and kitschy, so incongruous and unlike Leo that I frowned at it for a long moment before I started snooping.

The bottom two drawers were locked, but the top one opened beneath my hand and exposed a messy interior filled with sheavesof loose paper, notepads, pens, and a handful of notes in other denominations—American, British, Chinese, and Albanian.