Page 12 of My Dark Ever After

“And so you came?” I said, a little stupidly, staring over his shoulder into the dark and neon blur of the passing nightscape. “Just like that.”

“Guinevere,” he said, all exasperation and heat, his fingers gently pinching my chin so I was forced to meet his gaze. “I would have been on the next plane out if you so much as broke your little toe.”

“Feeling guilty, eh?”

A subvocal growl purred at the base of his throat, and his eyes looked so dark then, devoid of light as we passed under a bridge. “I would have taken any excuse to see you. It was the hardest thing I have ever had to do, keeping myself in Italy and away from you. Do you not understand that?”

“No, I guess I don’t,” I murmured, prying my face away from him.

It was so easy to say the words, those sweet Italianate phrases of love and affection that seemed to roll off his tongue with uncharacteristic ease. It was much harder to illustrate love and trust in action, and Raffa had proven he didn’t trust me, and therefore, I honestly felt, he could not love me.

At least not like I had loved him—didlove him.

A sharp exhalation ruffled the side of my hair. He took my limp hand in his, rubbing a thumb along my bloodstained skin as if it didn’t bother him.

“If you do not want to believe that I love you, then at least believe this: I would do anything to keep you safe. And yes, that means I would happily take a red-eye to America. Yes, I would rip a man apart with my bare hands for so much as leering at you. Yes, I would raze this whole city to the ground if it turned against you. No one is safe from me but you,” he vowed darkly, eyes deep enough to swallow the world. “If you believe anything of me, believe that.”

Looking at him in the dim interior of the car, shadows cutting his handsome face into something stark and terrifying like a death mask, I could believe it. He had shown how violently he felt about me before—the rude driver, Galasso, the intruder. It was a ferocity that I inspired in him that was never aimed my way. As if I was his dark muse.

I shivered, but it wasn’t from the cold.

It was from the feeling it gave me—like a key fitting into the lock of the darkness at the heart of me and slowly clicking open.

I opened my mouth to say something—Thank you, maybe, orI hate you for making me feel this way, like violence is a love letter—but the partition in front of us whirred as it lowered, distracting me.

“The plane is ready for takeoff, boss,” a man said from the front seat. “We should be there in twenty.”

“Plane?” I asked, blinking owlishly. It suddenly occurred to me to question, “Where are you taking me, Raffa?”

His hand tightened around mine, his calluses catching on the curves of my hand, fingers metal bands around my own. When I looked up into his eyes, they were the color of the inside of a flame, a pale yellow so bright they burned.

“Home,” he declared. “I am taking you home.”

Chapter Four

Guinevere

“Absolutely not,” I declared, yanking my hand out from between Raffa’s. “I’m not just going back to Italy with you.”

“You are not safe here,” he reminded me, his entire body taut and poised like that of a predator about to pounce. “How can I keep you safe when you live across the world from me?”

“We broke up!” I shouted. “Exactly so I would not have to be involved in this kind of mess. I’m not going back to Tuscany with you to become ensnared in it further. I think it’s fair to say you can’t keep me safe even when I’m in your bed, given an intruder almost blew my head off on my last night spent in your home.”

Oh, he flinched. Like I’d slapped him full across the face. No, like I’d punched him, closed fist, all my weight behind it. The skin of his cheeks flushed, surprisingly visible in the dark interior of the car, as if I really had hit him.

I watched as his throat worked around a hard swallow and his eyes clenched closed for a single second before he fixed them on me again.

When he spoke, it was in the voice of a capo, a made man of the Italian Camorra.

“You will come home with me until I put down the dogs who stalk us both, Guinevere. In this, I do not care about your opinion. You canrage. You can call me the devil. You can think this means every awful thing you have imagined about me since you learned I am inla mafiais true. I do not care. Your safety comes before anything.”

“Even if it means I despise you?” I seethed.

“Even then,” he agreed with a solemn head tilt.

“Be reasonable,” I tried to suggest calmly, though I couldn’t believe his audacity. “I have a life here. A job. A family. And both of those are entangled. I can’t just disappear without people worrying about me.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “So call them. Make something up.”