Page 43 of My Dark Ever After

Of course, we had shared a basic attraction from the start, and I was sure if I’d been another kind of woman, he would have seen me off with a wad of cash to the nearest hotel, but that wasn’t how it had gone.

I wondered if I wasn’t so unlucky as I had always believed.

Raffa’s words from my last week in Florence in August echoed in my head:sfortunato al gioco, fortunato in amore.

Unlucky at cards, lucky in love.

And then his words from the night before ...

There is nothing I would not give you. Nothing I would not do for you.

I knew in my bones they were spoken from the heart. He would do whatever it took to make me happy, even if it made him unhappy.

And the truth was, I did not want Raffa to be unhappy.

He had so obviously been unhappy for a long time when we met, and I thought it would be a crime if he stopped laughing that throaty chuckle and smiling that almost boyish, mischievous grin.

But could I be the kind of woman who fought—and killed—for what I wanted and those I loved? Even though I technicallyhadthe night before, I couldn’t say actually ending that man’s life had been my intention. It was more an accidental by-product of my desire to stop him from shooting Ludo.

Could I ever go into a situation with premeditated murder in my mind? Because if I stayed here with Raffa as anything other than his reluctant hostage, I knew there might come a day when I would need to.

“How many people have you killed?” I asked suddenly, shocked by my own frankness.

Raffa only blinked as he settled across from me with theCorriere della Sera. It was flipped open already to an article with a bold enough headline that I could read it upside down.

Suicidio! L’uomo salta dal campanile di Impruneta.

So that was how they’d spun it. That the man had committed suicide after drinking too much wine at the local festival. I had toadmit, it seemed plausible. It cowed and scared me slightly to wonder at the reaches of Raffa’s Camorra. That they could rewrite history so clearly when there had been an entire piazza of citizens who must have heard the gunfire even over the live band.

“I do not count,” Raffa said before snapping open the newspaper crisply and perusing a different headline. “To do so would be ...inopportuno.”

I had to cede that to him. “Okay then, have you ever killed women? Children?”

Raffa dipped the newspaper so he could narrow his eyes at me, that pale-maple brown almost bronze in the bright autumnal morning light.

“Why are you asking me this?”

“Why aren’t you answering?” I countered, dropping my fork to the plate. “You told me to ask the hard questions.”

A surprisingly proud grin curled the edge of his mouth, and I noticed that he hadn’t shaved that morning, his stubble an inky spill across his firm jaw and square chin. I wanted to drag my teeth along that bristly edge.

“So I did,” he agreed. “No, I have not killed children. Just because I kill when I must does not mean I do not have a code.”

“You didn’t say you haven’t killed women,” I noted.

He shrugged. “I am what some would call a progressive capo and what others would callun’idioto. I have female capos in my organization who are more frightening than most of the men in the outfit.”

“Are you going to make this about equality?” I asked, a little burst of shocked laughter stuttering up my throat. “Really?”

He arched a brow. “I am not making it about anything. I am merely saying that, as you have observed yourself, gender does not matter tola mafia. If you are involved, you have equal opportunity to die.”

“So you have killed women?” I persisted.

Raffa rolled his eyes. “Guinevere, I have three sisters and a mother. I have not killed a woman before, but that does not mean that someonesomewhere in my organization has not. Ascapo dei capi, I am responsible for them all.”

I thought about it for a moment and nodded curtly. “Okay, I suppose that’s fair.”

He inclined his head magnanimously, and I couldn’t help but laugh as he meant me to. It was crazy, really and truly, that he could make me laugh the morning after I’d ended a life, but there we were.