Page 110 of My Dark Fairy Tale
Half an hour later, I was in a private room in the station, wrapped in a shiny emergency blanket with a lukewarm paper cup filled with thick espresso. The officer, Domani Lastra, was middle aged, with a soft, open face and big gray eyes that looked at me with sympathy as I spun a yarn about the events of the evening. When I was finished, he looked at me for a long, silent moment, then sighed and reached over to pat my hand on the table before he told me he would be right back.
There was a metal cabinet in the corner of the room, just clean enough for me to make out my warped shape and the vivid red of blood still splashed across my face and chest.
I shuddered as I thought about red being Raffa’s favorite color.
Revulsion rolled through me, and I gagged into my hand, breathing hard so I wouldn’t throw up on the table. Blood was gross enough to have all over me. I didn’t want to add vomit.
I closed my eyes when the nausea passed and focused on fighting the tears that burned in the back of my nose.
I would not cry over Raffa.
I refused to soften myself toward the man who had been my first and only lover.
The least of his crimes was lying to me blatantly, intentionally, for the last six weeks, so why did it hurt more than any of the others?
I felt more alone than I ever had before when just hours ago, I had thought I’d finally found a home where I could thrive, with people who understood and loved me.
Who I had thought I understood enough to love in return.
So then why hadn’t I told Lastra explicitly that Raffa had killed the intruder?
Why, when the time came, had my mouth opened and silence spilled out?
I knew his name more intimately than I knew my own. My mouth had formed those consonants and vowels when I was moved to tears, to pleasure, to laughter. It would, even now, I knew, be the last thought stuck in my head if I ever suffered from dementia.
So. Why. Could. I. Not. Speak. It?
Instead, I’d told Lastra that someone had broken into my room at the palazzo and threatened me. Someone in the house had killed him before he could hurt me, a murder of self-defense, but I’d run away from the scene before I could get a clear grip on the details. When he asked me why I’d run from the people who saved me, I told him the truth. I’d grown up in small-town Michigan, where the most violence I had ever witnessed was when my neighbor hit her husband with a rolled-up newspaper after discovering he’d had an affair. Running had been a survival instinct I had no experience to curb within myself.
The point was, I told Lastra, there had been a murder.
I told him the address and insisted he send help even though, obviously, the threat had passed.
He assured me dryly that, as he was a police officer, he would send help to the scene.
I wondered if Raffa and the others were okay.
I tried again not to cry.
Shock was setting in, quaking under my skin like shifting tectonic plates, redefining who I was and what I knew for the second time in six weeks.
Because if this was all alie, then who was this new Guinevere Stone?
There was a brief knock on the door, Lastra’s deep baritone asking in Italian if he could come in.
I called out my agreement, curling the crinkly blanket tighter around my shoulders as if it could shield me from the events of the night.
Lastra opened the door and stepped into the room.
But he did not close it behind him.
Instead, a familiar face appeared around the door, followed by a body I had spent hours worshipping.
Raffa Romano. Dressed in a three-piece suit like those Carmine favored, his hair perfectly in place, not a speck of blood on him.
I shot out of my chair, the metal screeching across the floor, then banging onto its side. As Raffa moved farther into the room and Lastra closed the door, I pressed myself into the corner across from them and fought the primal urge to hiss.
“What are you doing here?” I shouted in Italian, looking wildly at Lastra. “This man! You can’t—! Please, take him away.”
