Page 78 of My Dark Ever After

I frowned at the moniker but nodded. “I did. Eventually.”

His smile thinned. “Not because he wanted you to.”

“Are you trying to tell me that Raffa Romano somehow found out I was related to your family before I entered the country and then, knowing I would arrive exactly when I did on the side of the road, he hit me with his car so we could meet ‘by accident’? I don’t think so.”

“Stranger things have happened,” Ginevra opined.

“Yes, like being kidnapped by my own aunt.”

“I saved you,” she argued, her expression the very same one I’d seen so often on my father’s face when he was being particularly obstinate.

“You took me from the man I love,” I declared, staring down my nose at her before leveling the same look at Gaetano. “Why should I believeyouover the man who has shown me nothing but kindness? When you have tried to kill me more than once?”

Gaetano reeled like I had slapped him. “No matter what you think of Il Gentiluomo, you cannot believe that after losing so much of my family I would order the death of my own granddaughter.”

“Maybe you did it before you knew who I was,” I suggested, crossing my arms.

If I had been standing, I would have braced my feet apart. Raffa’s power stance.

Something flickered in my grandfather’s expression, and I knew there was some truth to my accusation.

“We did not know who you were until the Venetian told us you had been kidnapped,” he admitted softly. “It was easy enough to confirm. Even one look at you.” He shook his head. “You have the Pietra pout.”

I tried to flatten my lips, which only made him smile.

“Did you try to have me killed at the Romano palazzo in August on the night of the San Lorenzo festival?” I asked. “Someone sent chrysanthemums and then sneaked into the house at night to try to shoot me in the head.”

Beside me, Ginevra bared her teeth and made a noise at the back of her throat like she wanted to rip that man to pieces.

“No,” Gaetano emphasized with a weary shake of his silver mane. “You have to understand. The Venetian told us you had been kidnapped in order to keep us in line. We had laid our feud with the Romanos mostly to rest. I lost three sons to this war, two to death and one to abandonment. The Romano clan lost their father. It was enough. Then, the Venetian came to us—”

“You know who he is?” I interjected.

Gaetano glowered as I hit an obvious pain point. “I know he is a tall man, but that is it. I have met with him twice, and both times he wore a cloak with a hood and a Venetian mask. Very theatrical. He came to me to influence me to join his campaign to wrest power from Raffa Romano.”

“So you could take over ascapo dei capi?”

“Guinevere, look at me.” He opened his hands to encompass what his advanced years had done to his body. “I am an old man with no male heirs. Ginevra does not want to take over from me, and she has two young sons who would not be appropriate choices for some time. What would happen to my family if I becamecapo dei capiand I died?”

“Whoever came next would kill them,” I murmured, because Raffa had told me the very same thing.

It was powerful coercion for the next generation to toe the Mafia line.

“Esattamente. This wasn’t what the man offered. He wants to be head of the Northern Camorra and promised retribution for our family as payment for our help.”

“You didn’t want to give it?”

“As I said, I am an old man. I want to enjoy what time I have left with my family. I do not need to begin a war when I am eighty-five, hmm?”

“Fair. So then why did you get involved?”

“When we refused, the Venetian went to the Grecos,” he scoffed. “The scum that they are, of course they joined such a farcical rebellion. They thought the reluctant mafioso would be easy to take off his throne.”

He clucked his tongue and shook his head. “Just because he did not want to be capo does not mean he is not a good one. It was not until some months had passed that the Venetian returned to us, this time to inform us Raffa had taken the daughter of my estranged son, Mariano Giovanni, hostage. He would not give us more information than some photos and the results of a DNA test he had performed.”

A DNA test?

If the Venetian had access to my DNA, then he had access tome. The palazzo in Florence, certainly, to gather hair from my brush or something of the sort.