Page 86 of My Dark Ever After

“No, of course not. Why would I kill one of my only remaining blood relatives?” he asked, irritated with me enough that the thin, loose skin around his neck wobbled. “There are many stages between life and death, Guinevere. This is something I could teach you, if you consented to help us now.”

“Help you how?”

The door creaked open, and Eduardo appeared holding two large ceramic pitchers and a pretty designer silk scarf, kind of like the one Raffa had used to tie my hair back on our ride out to Livorno.

“Tell me about Raffa Romano and his outfit,” Gaetano suggested, flicking invisible lint off his suit pants.

I sat silently, letting the quiet stretch on and on.

“Eduardo,” Gaetano said with a heavy sigh, gesturing toward me with a nod. “Perhaps you will have an easier time convincing her than I.”

The whipcord-lean man stepped away from the middle of the cleared room, where he had placed the pitchers beside the chair, and came for me.

I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting the open hand slap that hit me over the ear. Pain and static erupted in my head, my vision fuzzy and white, my senses deafened by a loud ringing.

Vaguely, I was aware of Eduardo picking me up to carry me over to the chair in the center of the room and secure me with something by the ankles and wrists.

When my head cleared enough to make sense of things again, I was locked to the chair, with the end of my braid tied into the rope around my wrists so that my head was forced back at a painful angle.

“I am sorry for this, Guinevere,” Gaetano murmured from his spot to my left. “But this is the only way to ensure Romano shows up in the piazza tomorrow. He needs to see how much you are suffering and imagine how much you will suffer still if he does not do as I’ve asked.”

“Vaffanculo,” I spat at him as Eduardo reached for the pitcher filled with water and draped the beautiful orange silk scarf over my face. “When Raffa comes for me, I hope he leaves killing you until last so I can be the one to put a bullet between your eyes.”

Gaetano’s laugh was muffled as Eduardo started to pour water over my face through the silk until I felt like I was drowning.

He’s coming, I thought desperately as I struggled not to swallow water and fought to breathe.

He will always come for you.

“What is the security code for the palazzo in Firenze?” Gaetano raised his voice to be heard over the rush of water in my ears.

It was the first of many, many questions.

Eduardo waterboarded me for a long time.

They interrogated me about Raffa, his business dealings and family, and then, when none of that proved fruitful, they asked me about my father.

My continued silence resulted in the questions devolving into threats.

Did I want to see Raffa tomorrow after he’d been killed?

Maybe they would place him in my bed while I slept so the blood would soak the sheets and wake me with a chill.

Maybe they would serve me his eyeballs, plucked intact from his head, on my breakfast tray Sunday morning.

Maybe they would hunt down my father all the way in Michigan so they could meet my mother and invite them for a friendly visit. Would that properly motivate me?

At some point, I couldn’t even hear them anymore. Every single one of my senses and every atom of my being was focused on not asphyxiating. If I’d had the wherewithal to think beyond that, I might have criticized the torture technique. How could anyone focus enough to answer questions when they were fighting for every breath?

The sunlight spilling through the one window in the room was thick and syrupy with midday heat by the time he peeled the silk from my face for the last time and swept out of the room without untying me.

Gaetano had left a while ago.

He said it distressed him to see me suffer.

I would’ve laughed at the memory, but I was still struggling to drag air into my waterlogged lungs. My desperate gasps rasped too loudly in my ears, panic making the laborious act even more difficult.

It felt like I might never breathe properly again.