Page 74 of My Dark Ever After

I jerked, my head slamming against the window as I recoiled. A shaky laugh escaped my mouth at the sight of an elegantly dressed woman sitting by the window across the aisle from me. She was handsome, with a strong jaw and thick brows over liquid brown eyes.

“Not really,” I said, even though it wasn’t much of an answer. “Just relieved to be going home. I thought I was going to miss the train.”

She smiled at me, a closed-lip expression that was more considering than it was warm.

“You do not sound as if you should be able to call Italy home.”

I had become incredibly fluent in Italian, but I knew my accent continued to give me away. “I’m from the US. Originally,” I tacked on, because it felt good to tell a stranger this was where I was going to stay.

“And how do you like my country?” she asked, shifting her body to angle toward me, settling in for a longer conversation.

I was exhausted, so weary my head swam. I hadn’t had enough water to drink today, and it was starting to affect me. But politeness was so deeply ingrained in me, I did not even think of ignoring her.

“I like it enough to now call it my home,” I confessed with a small smile, eyes flickering back to the entrance to the car. “It’s as Robert Browning said: ‘Open my heart and you will see Graved inside of it, “Italy.”’”

“Poetic,” the stranger said. “But I understand the sentiment. The country and its foibles have taken much from me, yet I could neverpart from it. Not even when others in my family have left it behind for good.”

“I tried.” I shrugged. “But somehow, here I am again.”

“Somehow,” she mused before getting up to cross the aisle and take the seat facing mine. “Perhaps you should tell me the story.”

I arched a brow at her, unconsciously mimicking one of Raffa’s expressions. “Do you often ask people for their life stories?”

She lifted one shoulder and opened her gloved palms. “It is why I deign to take the train.”

That startled a laugh out of me.

“Let me guess,” she said in that low, smooth voice. “It involves a man.”

“Doesn’t it always?” I asked dryly.

“Yes,” she agreed. “Though not always one’s lover.”

“It sounds like you have a story too.”

“I do.” She looked out the window at the smeared Italian countryside rushing by. “Would you like to hear it?”

“Sure,” I said, because I would.

It was that insatiable curiosity that had always gotten me into trouble. Happily, I seemed to be out of harm’s way for the moment, though my gaze kept vigilant watch on the door for Philippe.

“I was born into a family of men with only a fragile mother to keep me company. She tried to raise me to be a good, sweet girl, but the influence of my four brothers and my father kept me from staying in the kitchen, attached to her apron strings. My younger brother was my best friend because, unlike the other boys, he always invited me to play. We were inseparable until he turned eighteen. Then my father took him from me and turned him into something neither of us liked very much.”

Her eyes were glazed by distant memories, her lip firm but caught between her teeth as if she was afraid it might tremble.

“I hardly saw him for the next five years. Only on the night I was planning to run away with my lover to get married did he appear in the doorway of my hotel room in Rome. My boyfriend was beside him, a gun pressed to his head. My brother shoved him into the room on hisknees and closed the door behind him. He told me our father had sent him to remind me of my one duty as a girl in the family. Marry for the advantage of the family, not for love.”

What kind of family,I thought as my heart picked up speed,had rules like that?

Thefamily.

La mafia.

A chill settled over me like an icy cloak.

Behind the woman, the train car doors hissed open mechanically and revealed Philippe. He looked tousled, panting hard with a wildness to his expression as he searched the car until his gaze landed on me.

And then he relaxed visibly, shoulders collapsing, his tread heavy like that of the man at the end of a marathon who sees the end in sight.