Page 71 of My Dark Ever After

Chapter Sixteen

Guinevere

By the time I left the Uffizi, I knew three things.

The first was that all those late-night, dark-coded cravings I had experienced my whole life had a root cause. I might not have been born intola mafialike Dad or Raffa, but clearly it was part of my birthright and part of my destiny.

It was impossible not to believe I’d met my fate when Raffa hit me with his car that night on a lonely, random Tuscan road. That forces beyond our measure had orchestrated our meeting because we were meant to be.

Even when I’d fought it, my heart had been inextricably his from the moment he curled me into his bare chest and read to me from Dante’sDivine Comedywhen I was sick.

I brought out the best in him, I thought, and that did not necessarily mean I brought out thegoodin him. It meant that I made him happy after years of turmoil and loneliness. It meant that I gave him a safe place to play the hero he’d always secretly wanted to be but had never been given the chance to play.

And he brought out the best in me too. Again, not thegoodby its most basic definition. He made me fiercer and more honest. He gaveme the freedom and security to be who I truly was and go after what I really wanted.

Raffa had added spice to the banality of my life, the heat I had been longing for since I was that sick girl daydreaming in her hospital bed.

So why had I condemned him for it? How ridiculously hypocritical of me to crave the burn and say I was unable to stand the intensity.

What a stupid lie I’d force-fed myself to maintain the image my parents had drummed into me. How ironic that they were liars too.

My entire world as I’d known it had been eviscerated, and in its wake, I was determined to rebuild myself from the ashes in exactly the image I wanted.

Brave and bold, like Gemma had always encouraged me to be.

A huntress instead of a fawn, like Raffa knew I could be.

Someone who pursued her pleasure, societal judgment be damned.

Which led to the second thing I had decided.

I wasn’t going home.

Even if things did not work out with Raffa, my heart and soul had imprinted on Italy. I knew in my bones there was no other place for me in this world. The vibrant people, the food and culture, the history, the very smell of the cypress trees, and the view of endlessly rolling grapevines intermixed with golden fields of hay and thickets of olive trees.

Fate had led me here, and I was not going to spite it again by leaving.

And the third?

I could not live happily in a world where I was not with Raffa.

He was not a Prince Charming, but hadn’t I always turned my nose up at those heroes? Two-dimensional, shallow expressions of female fantasy.

Raffa was so much more than that.

He was troubled and dark, but he had a moral code, even if it was skewed. He put his family before everything and stood by his friends no matter what. He’d killed Martina’s abusive, piece-of-shit husband because in his mind that was the punishment for putting your hands on a woman he loved. He’d broken a man’s finger because he had called me a whore.

I understood now, after killing someone to save Ludo and myself, that sacrifices were called for in the life he’d been born into, and there was no escaping it unless you wanted to roll over and die yourself. With stakes that high, it was no wonder that violence bled into non-life-or-death situations as well. It was a punctuation mark on an order. An oath someone unwittingly wrote in blood not to fuck with you again.

Whenever I’d read about antiheroes or fantasized about deviant, toe-curling seductions, I had been thinking about Raffa. Before I even knew him, a part of my heart had hungered for him. To deny the part of myself that longed for violent delights was to deny myself the love of a man who was not by any definition good but was wholly good for me.

Perfect for me.

The only hard question that remained was this.

Was I good enough for him?

“Andiamo,” I said to Philippe as I strode through the exit, the Italian stumbling behind me in his haste to catch up.