Page 83 of My Dark Ever After

“Hello,” I said. “My name is Raffaele Romano.”

“What’s happened to her?” he asked almost before I was finished rolling the secondR.

I wished I could have proven his assumption incorrect, but there was no getting around the truth.

“It seems your family, the Pietras, have taken her.”

The pause that followed did not feel like true quiet. It came down the phone line like a silent scream, something with force that hurt my ears even without sound.

“When?”

“The day before yesterday—”

“And you are only just calling now?” he bellowed.

“I did not know until fifteen minutes ago that Guinevere was related to them. How could I when she did not know herself?”

I found myself holding my breath, because there was a chance I could have been wrong about it all. Her knowing, her role in my life.

Leo’s suspicions when he’d first met her echoed back at me.

“Fuck,” John Stone cursed viciously. “Fuck! She only found out the same day she was taken. I’m still not sure how.”

Ah.

We had tracked the GPS on the Maserati Philippe had been driving, so I had known they went to the Uffizi, but I had assumed it was just to pass the time viewing some of her favorite pieces while I was meeting the Albanians.

But the Uffizi archives were just the place she would visit if she had an inkling about the truth.

Unbidden, my lungs collapsed, punctured by my continued ache and longing for this brilliant slip of a girl who could see rhyme where there was barely any reason.

“Something must have triggered her to finally put it together. She and one of my men had been searching for some time for answers about her ancestry.”

John snorted rudely. “There was hardly anything left to find. I scrubbed most of my identifying records when I left that godforsaken place. How did you discover the truth if she didn’t tell you?”

“I have a talented sleuth on staff. When this is all said and done, he will help you remove even those trace amounts, but for now, I need your help.”

Another pause, this one a vacuum, as if John had reared away from the phone.

Finally, he said, “A Romano asking me for help. I never thought I would see the day.”

“Nor did I,” I snapped, impatient and at the end of a very short, very frayed rope that tied me to Guinevere. “Now, will you do as I ask to save your daughter from those vultures you call your family?”

Even though Guinevere had always spoken highly of her father, going so far as toraveabout him, I had not seen a glimmer of anything in my own observations to warrant her praise.

Until, without hesitation, he said, “Anything for her.”

Finally, something to bond over.

Chapter Nineteen

Guinevere

They kept me locked in a room in the basement for four days.

Four.

Truthfully, I did not expect to be kept longer than two. That was how much faith I had in Raffa and his crew and their ability to get through any obstacle to reach me. Raffa had literally saved me from being taken by thugs while I was an entire ocean away from him in Michigan. Surely, he could do the same here in his own country, in his own territory.