Page 92 of My Dark Ever After

Ginevra scoffed. “We hardly imagined Mariano—John—would ever show his face again. Let alone to help Romanos break into our home.”

“You kidnapped my daughter,” Dad snapped, stepping away to face her with me tucked under his arm. “You gave me no choice.”

“To be fair, we thought we were saving her,” she insisted. “The Venetian told us Raffaele was keeping her hostage to stop us from turning on him.”

Behind her, Giulia got to her feet and moved gingerly toward Dad.

“Mariano?” she whispered, trembling hands lifting to him as she approached. “Bambino mio?”

“Si, Mamma,” Dad said softly, bending so she could put her hands on his face. “I’m here.”

I watched as Giulia, completely uninterested in the body of her dead husband, took her missing son’s face in her hands and started to weep. And I wondered if more good things than bad had come out of being kidnapped by my father’s family.

It took hours to resolve the chaos.

Raffa had called in the Burette family, which include Stefania, the woman who insulted me at a gala my first time in Florence, and enlisted the reluctant help of the Albanians, who disappeared as soon as the compound was taken. There were bodies littered like festive decor around the grounds, a line of seven fallen soldiers on the front gravel drive like toppled GI Joes, two floating belly-up in the pool, another at the bottom of one staircase, limbs akimbo.

Raffa’s men hauled them in wheelbarrows down the hill to the incinerator the Pietras kept to cremate their horses and sheep when they died, feeding them into the machine until black plumes of smoke drifted over the triangular treetops.

Inside, Ginevra corralled Giulia into her room for a rest, and then transferred her sons to a recreation room that was unharmed in the attack so they could lose themselves in video games while the adults talked.

We adjourned to the front living space because Carmine had driven a reclaimed military G-Wagon into the back of thecastello, right through the wall of windows.

Raffa did not leave my side.

Even when Martina rushed me and lifted me from my feet in a bone-crushing hug that said everything she could not find the words to express.

I missed you. Thank God, you are safe. Don’t do that to me again. I love you.

“I love you too,” I murmured into her hair only to have her drop me unceremoniously on my feet and push me lightly in mock distaste.

I was still grinning when Renzo clamped both hands on my shoulders to give me a gentle shake of recognition and admiration.

“Good work in there,” he said, jerking his head to indicate the panic room. “Got him right through the heart.”

“Yay for me,” I joked a little woodenly.

Now that the adrenaline was leaching away, I felt off balance and vaguely nauseated.

He cuffed me gently on the chin to reprimand my self-deprecation and shifted away so Carmine could come through and kiss my cheek.

“A mali estremi, estremi rimedi,” he told me.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

“You did well, Vera,” he promised. “A woman worthy of a crown.”

The way he waggled his eyebrows and slid his gaze to Raffa, it was obvious he meant the kind of crown worn by the queen of the underworld.

But it was Ludo who made me cry.

He gathered me up in his arms, uncaring of his still-healing wound, and hugged me with his whole body, even though it was unbearably gentle.

“I would not have smiled for a long time if you had died,” he told me somberly in English. “You have brought joy to more than just the boss. I hope you know.”

I had to swallow past the tears twice to say, “I hope you know he is not the only one I have fallen in love with.”

He didn’t smile when we parted, but the nod he gave me felt like an initiation into the inner sanctum I hadn’t had until that day.