Page 77 of My Dark Ever After

Raffa.

Somewhere out there going mad knowing I had been taken.

Gaetano’s hand was an iron vise around my biceps, and he took me inside what was clearly a small castle. It was grander than Villa Romano, with marble floors and curling staircases to the second level. Old walls had clearly been taken down to make the main floor mostly open, built around the two central staircases. In the back, stone had been taken out to allow for a huge panel of windows to let in natural light. Under other circumstances, I would have fallen in love with it.

The house was filled with people, at least a dozen, all of whom were staring at me.

What thehellwas going on?

“Famiglia,” Gaetano said in a voice that boomed and crackled like sound over speakers. Everyone held still to listen, a vibrating anticipation echoing throughout the room. “Ci è stata restituita.”

My family, he said, she is returned to us.

Um . . .

What?

I blinked as a few women started to cry, and everyone else clapped somberly, as if after a particularly resonant eulogy.

“What is going on here?” I whispered, only because I didn’t have the breath in my lungs to speak louder.

Gaetano turned me to him by the shoulders, a grin folding the skin back away from large white teeth. “I am sorry it took us this long to retrieve you.”

“Retrieve me from where, exactly?” I asked, completely dumbfounded.

A frown pinched the skin between his thick brows before he looked beside us to my aunt, who winced slightly.

“You were held hostage,” he said almost soothingly, rubbing my shoulder. “By those cretins the Romanos.”

I blinked once, twice, before slightly hysterical laughter bubbled up my throat. I tried to cup it in my hands at my grandfather’s worried expression, but it just kept spilling between my fingers.

“I think we better talk privately before we celebrate,” my aunt stepped forward to say, placing a gentle hand on my back to push me toward the hallway to the right of the open-plan area.

Gaetano nodded, speaking rapid-fire Italian to a few men, who instantly converged on him while my aunt led me down the dark hall toward the back of the house.

We stopped at the door to an office, where I was pushed unceremoniously into a high-backed leather chair before a palatial desk. Unlike Raffa’s offices in the villa and palazzo, this was chaotic, stuffed with books, files, and loose papers trapped under lamps, empty plates, and oddities like a skull painted with laurel leaves and a trophy of a man fishing. It was dark and seemed cramped because of the mess and the old, chestnut-stained furniture, but there was something comfortableand charming about it that put me more at ease than the modern, open-concept house had done.

I wondered if my father had sat in this chair as a young man, and tried to make sense of the surreal reality unfolding around me.

It took a few minutes for Gaetano to join us, the tap of his cane heralding his progress down the hallway, but no one spoke a word until he filled the doorway and made his way behind the desk.

“I wasn’t kidnapped by the Romanos,” I said as soon as he sat down, sitting straight in the chair, hands folded as if they’d take me seriously because of my prim bearing. “If anything, Raffa Romano saved me. More times than I can count.”

My aunt scoffed. “Thatbastardowould not save a cat from drowning.”

“He saved this American girl from a sexual predator,” I snapped at her. “You do not know him.”

“Nor do you,” Gaetano said, folding his hands and propping his elbows on the desk to peer at me over them. He spoke English beautifully, with that same gramophone warble that came from old age but that gave his speaking voice a resonant quality. “You are just a child in a foreign land with foreign ways. You do not know of what you speak.”

It was my turn to scoff. “I know that Raffa Romano is thecapo dei capiof the Northern Italian Camorra. I know that therefore you should not be acting against him, but one of your family killed his father without provocation.”

“Shut your mouth,” my aunt ordered.

“Ginevra.” Gaetano silenced her with a raised hand. “Let her speak.”

“Thank you. As I was saying, I know more than I should if I was merely a captive of the Romanos. When Raffa found me, I had no money, no clothes, and no identification. He took me in, and ...” I faltered for the first time, my damp fingers playing with the hem of my silk shirt. “I fell in love with him because he is a good man.”

“Tell me,” Gaetano urged, a kind, grandfatherly smile on his creased face. “Did you know he was Il Gentiluomo?Il mafioso?”