Page 15 of My Dark Fairy Tale

I took a drag of my cigarette, studied the long line of ash at its end, and flicked it to the floor.

“Bastardo,” Bruno cursed when he gained his bearings, hurling insults at me as if they were knives.

They weren’t, and they did nothing to hurt me.

“Bruno, Bruno,” I scolded lightly, strolling forward to the edge of the dirty puddle pooling beneath his bare feet. “Do not bite the hand that can kill you.”

“I don’t deserve this. I am a good man,” he countered. “A good man for you. Haven’t I made you money?”

I arched a brow, studied the butt of my cigarette again, and then lashed forward with my free hand to grip Bruno hard by the throat. The tip of the lit tobacco sizzled satisfyingly as I pressed it to his wet cheek. He hollered and jerked, but I had a good grip on him and did not let go.

“Understand something,” I suggested mildly. “I may not have wanted to become a made man, but fate saw fit to take that choice from my hands and anointed them in blood instead of ink. I do not fight fate. So here we are. You and me. They call me the Gentleman Mafioso, but that is misleading, is it not? You know me better than that.”

I wrenched his head toward me, a scream slipping from his contorted mouth as the pressure seared through his shoulders.

“You know the secret,” I whispered as I flicked the damp butt to the floor and exchanged it for the knife from my belt, pressing the blade into Bruno’s anxiously jumping Adam’s apple. “You know I might not have wanted this life, but I am very, very good at it. I like to get creative, bending the law to my whims. I enjoy looking for new ways to make money. But what I really love?”

I cut a long, thin slice across his neck just to watch him bleed. Not enough to kill him.

Not yet.

Just enough for him to come to the inevitable conclusion that if he did not turn on whoever paid him, he would die.

In a way that I would find long, slow, and highly enjoyable.

“I love to kill those who would come after me and mine. And I like to do it in a way that sends a message to everyone else who has ever thought to try.”

I stepped back, dropping my hold on him abruptly so his body swung on the chains like a macabre church bell, heralding my kind of communion.

“What do you think, Bruno? Are you ready to talk, or would you like to be my messenger?”

In the end, it turned out he was both.

“How is she?” I asked Martina the moment I got through the door of the palazzo later that day.

Even in the midst of skinning a man alive, I’d thought of the small American girl back at my apartment.

There was no reason she should have inspired such curiosity in me.

She was just a girl.

Not more than twenty-five and not at all my type.

I liked my women tall and curved, soft edges and round handholds. I liked them mature and independent, almost detached, so they would ask no questions and I would have to tell no lies.

But . . .

There was something about Guinevere.

Perhaps her helplessness called to my baser self.

I didn’t think that was it, or all of it, though.

I found myself intrigued by her contrasts: She was a silly girl who trusted strangers but one who quite literally laughed in the face of danger after being chased by a man and hit by a car. One who teased me, a grown man, a stranger, like she had the right to when grown men who had known me for years would never dare.

It was an irreverence, a charming one, like she knew the world had big teeth, but she was going to explore it anyway. Armed with a mocking self-deprecation and keen curiosity that made her a glaring beacon for bad men.

Like me.