Page 17 of My Dark Ever After

That was unacceptable.

It did not matter that the would-be assassin’s brains had been blown out all over my walk-in closet. The threat had not passed.

Even if I wanted to bring Guinevere back—bring herhome—how could I do so knowing I would be putting her life in danger again?

Therefore, there was only one course of action to be had.

Find the people who were after me and mine and end them in no uncertain terms.

Not just their leaders but also their foot soldiers and informants, their women and their fucking children. I wanted to eviscerate them all for daring to go after the one woman who had ever touched my soul.

For her, I would burn down all of Firenze.

I set the Sala brothers and Ludo on the matter exclusively, because if anyone could root out the enemy, it was Renzo, Carmine, and the best hacker this side of the Mediterranean Sea. We interrogated everyone in our own clan with access to and knowledge of the palazzo who could have passed information along or helped the intruder inside.

Our search yielded nothing.

My men and women were loyal because I did not take them on without extensive trials and experience. I had not doubted them, not really, but it did not explain how someone could have entered the palazzo so effortlessly.

Unless we had another mole like that fucker Bruno who had tried to assassinate me in Rome, just days before I’d met Guinevere on that lonely stretch of Tuscan roadway.

The only thing we knew was that this San Marco character seemed to be puppeteering everything. The assassin had been wearing a traditional Venetian mask, Bruno had admitted he had been introduced to the Pietras by this man, and when we looked into the dead assassin’s identity, the man was revealed as Iacopone Basti, a supposed glassblower out of Venice.

It didn’t make sense.

Neither I nor my father had history with Venetians, especially because he had overseen the Mafia outfit out of the Venetian port for decades. Our local capos there, under the supervision of Donatella Verdi, had been happy with the status quo when Carmine and Renzo went to do the rounds. In fact, Donatella was unwaveringly loyal to us because we had backed her play for capo over her idiot brother years agowhen her father passed. The idiot brother was not the problem either. Donatella had ended his life with his own gun.

It had to be someone closer to home, but who I could not say, no matter how I searched.

The Grecos had taken over the Albanian operations in Livorno, and they had clearly expressed interest in expanding their power base, but our successful sting operation using the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia (DIA) and its overzealous deputy director, Sansone Pucci, had razed their operation to ash. While Pucci was too morally high-minded to be corrupted, the arrests had earned him national acclaim and a pay raise, and we both knew I had been the one to help him. With his attentions fixed on hamstringing Clan Greco and the rival family facing prison and a systematic dismantling, I did not think they had the power to continue to come for me.

Which left the Pietras and their hatred of our leadership. They had killed my father, so I had personally killed Gaetano Pietra’s two oldest sons. He was an old man now, in his mid-eighties, without an heir to his underworld throne, and he was grasping at power and revenge by colluding with this San Marco to come after me.

I did not view him or his people as a serious threat.

I knew where each one of them lived, worked, and bedded their mistresses.

I knew how to kill each of them without drawing the attention of the DIA. Poison, a staged car accident, a fall down the slippery stairs, or a drunken accident off one of Genoa’s many docks.

But there was no point in killing the messengers before I could get to the man using them to send the message.

Despite the acute frustration of hitting dead end after dead end, I could breathe easy knowing that Guinevere was safe from harm in quaint little Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I knew that because I had made a deal with Dante Salvatore to watch over her.

“I will not ask why you need this favor,” he had said over the phone in that strange accent that was accounted for by his upbringingin England and time spent in Italy. “Because I am a man very much in love too. And like yours, my heart was taken by a fierce woman who made me work for her.”

My laughter was a bitter cough. “This woman is almost impossible to win back.”

“Ah,” he’d said, and the sound of children’s laughter could be heard in the background. “What is it they say? The night is always darkest before the dawn. I will keep your woman safe, Romano, no questions asked.”

And then, weeks later, to wake up in the middle of the night to my phone ringing, with Dante Salvatore’s name flashing on my screen ... my blood had run cold.

There was no hesitation in leaving.

Not even with a potential mole in my ranks, not even with my mother and sisters in Tuscany, well guarded as they were, not even with the proverbial wolves at my door.

Nothing mattered as much as getting to Guinevere before any harm could come to her.

And I had failed.