Page 128 of My Dark Ever After

To think I had doubted she could handle this life.

She was clearly born for it.

I was on them before I could think to move, gathering Guinevere and Zacheo in my arms, peppering their sweat-slicked, sooty faces with kisses.

“My huntress,” I breathed against her cheek before taking her mouth in a kiss. “What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking I needed to get to Zacheo,” she croaked, leaning her forehead against mine. “He’s taken to wandering off into the grove to search for fairies lately. I knew where he might be.”

“So you risked yourself?” I demanded, holding her face in my hands, smoothing the ash from her cheeks.

Her bloodshot eyes were defiant as they stared up into mine. “You aren’t the only one who would risk their life for this family.”

The foundation of my heart shook like tectonic plates, shifting to make room for even more love to take root inside me.

“You are the fiercest, bravest woman I have ever known,” I whispered through my thick, heat-scorched throat.

Guinevere gave me a tremulous smile as Zacheo nuzzled into her neck with a whimper.

“But do not ever scare me like that again,” I demanded. “Now that I have you, I refuse to live without you. Is that understood?”

“Si, Raffa, lo capisco,” she agreed, leaning heavily into my side as Carlotta came racing around the corner yelling for Zacheo.

He squirmed from Guinevere’s arms, dropping down to the ground with a cry as he ran for his mother. I watched them reunite, mother and son sobbing as they held each other. Behind them, the rest of my family—our family—appeared, walking to the edge of the terrace beside us to watch the flames eat away the side of my family’s centuries-old olive grove.

“I’m sorry,” Guinevere whispered as we watched it disappear.

The sirens were louder now, the fire trucks winding up the hill toward us.

“It’s just a grove and just a house,” I murmured back as I pressed her into my side and gathered my mother under my other arm when she wandered close. “It is these people that make it a home.”

“I’m sorry about Leo,” she amended. “I can’t imagine how much that must hurt. Gemma lied to me, and it wasn’t even maliciously done, but it still aches in me like a bruise.”

The pain of Leo’s betrayal was like a lance through my sternum, something impossible to breathe around without pain.

But I knew the antidote to pain like this.

I had been a made man for long enough to know the only thing that could quell this hurt was good, old-fashioned revenge.

And I intended to have it.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Raffa

Ludo tracked the car with the drone as far as distance would allow, which gave us just enough time to jump into our own car and gun after him.

I did not want to leave Guinevere or the rest of my family, not when my fiancée and nephew were being treated for smoke inhalation, not when the house was uninhabitable because of lingering smoke as the firefighters put out the raging olive grove fire.

But these were the choices I was faced with ascapo dei capi.

Their safety came before their comfort, as much as I would have loved to be there to tend to them.

As long as Leo remained at large, he would come for me and mine.

And that was unacceptable.

We stopped just long enough to visit the armory in the barn, thankfully on the other side of the fire. Equipped with guns, ammo, bulletproof vests, a smoke bomb, and a handful of grenades, Renzo, Carmine, and I went after the man who had once been one of us.