Page 35 of My Dark Ever After

Our eyes locked for one unnaturally elongated moment, the previously pleasant mask he’d worn to convince me to go with him quietly eradicated by fury and disbelief.

I felt his weight give way under my hands, the rush of air as his body tipped over the ledge, legs kicking up to try to regain some semblance of balance. A foot kicked me hard in the shoulder, a parting blow before he was suddenly gone.

I lunged over the stone wall to watch, morbidly fixated and horrified by my own actions, as he went tumbling through the air to land with a sickening thud in the piazza. The wine revelers nearby screamed and scrambled away while one or two noble people ran to the fallen man’s side to see if they could help.

There was no help for him.

He was dead, and I had been the one to kill him.

When a hand clamped over my shoulder, I screamed before I remembered that Ludo was up here with me. I turned to find his face pale and sheened with sweat, one hand pressed to his side, blood bubbling between his fingers.

“Grazie,” he murmured, reeling me in for a hug against his uninjured side. “Grazie, amica mia. I am sorry I could not stop him before you had to.”

I curled into Ludo’s body, oxen-strong and steady even with a serious wound. He smelled like cypress trees and gun oil. It shouldn’t have been comforting, but it was because it reminded me of Raffa.

“I killed him,” I whispered into his chest. “I killed someone, Ludo.”

“Si, Guinevere,” he agreed in as soothing a voice as I had ever heard from him. He led me toward the stairs with one arm around my shoulders, as if I was the injured one. Even though my shoulder ached and I felt close to vomiting, I wrapped my arm around Ludo’s waist in an effort to support him too as we started down the spiral stairs.

“I’m a killer,” I breathed as the dead man’s face flashed in my mind like a strobe light at a disco, something epilepsy inducing that jerked through my entire system.

“No,sei colei che mi ha difeso,” Ludo grunted over the chaos of the door at the base of the tower slamming open against the opposite wall and multiple footsteps thundering up the steps toward us.

“It doesn’t matter why I killed him,” I murmured, knowing that taking a life had shifted something fundamental, tectonic, inside me, revealing dangerous cracks in the foundation of my soul for something hot and hazardous to seep through. “Only that I did.”

Chapter Nine

Raffa

I was meeting with six of my most trusted capos in a restaurant in Siena when my phone vibrated in my pocket.

Usually, I would not have answered during such a meeting, but I had set a special tone for Guinevere that thrummed like a heartbeat against my thigh. There was very little that could have made me ignore a call from her, and it certainly wasn’t half a dozen of the most powerful men (and one woman) in Italy.

“Scusate,” I murmured to them as I stood, buttoned my blazer, and stalked out of the closed restaurant dining room into the back hall to take the call. “Guinevere?”

The sound of a scuffle came through the phone line, punctuated by a vicious, almost metallic thud.

“Guinevere!” I snapped as my heart tripped inside my chest and broke into a sprint. “Vera!”

When she did not answer, I stormed back into the room, where Renzo waited by the front door.

“Call Ludo and Carmine. Find out where Vera is,” I ordered, the phone still at my ear so I could hear what was going on. Then I turned to my capos and said, “Thank you for your time, friends. Somethinghas come up. I trust you will do as we discussed. There is a healthy bonus for whoever unveils San Marco.”

“Do you need help with this emergency?” Pamina Riva, the only female capo in the northwest, known infamously as La Vampira for her bloodthirsty ways, offered with a sharp grin.

“No,grazie, Pamina,” I replied just before a voice came through the phone.

“I am not here to harm you,” a male voice said distantly. “I am a friend.”

A growl worked itself up my throat like something rancid and bilious.

“The car is out front,” Renzo told me, his own phone in his hand, fingers flying.

I made for the door without further comment until I heard Pasquale, the son of capo Ernesto Ricci, mutter, “Never thought I’d see the day Il Gentiluomo was under the thumb of a woman.”

Without pausing in my stride, I called out, “And I never think you can get any stupider than you already are, yet you constantly find ways to prove me wrong. You will double your dues to the family for three months for your son’s insult, Ernesto.”

A sound of outrage exploded from his mouth, but Renzo was already opening the door for me.