Page 34 of My Dark Fairy Tale
The former far outweighed the latter.
Because the only real reason I could cling to was that having a holiday romance with a well-known mafioso was dangerous, even if she did not know I wasnella mafia.
But looking into those wide eyes as rich as the earth after fresh rain, I saw too much trust and innocent curiosity to let the ruinous longings in my chest taint such a thing of beauty.
“That asshole deserved it,” I told Ludo finally with a shrug, as if I hadn’t been filled with rage as I beat into Galasso’s ugly mug, leaving it irrevocably uglier than I had found it.
“You know I don’t care much about the why of things,” Ludo admitted. “But what did the poor bastard do?”
I cracked the top off a soft-boiled egg with one strike of my spoon. “He tried to take a woman against her will.”
The sound Ludo made was lupine, a snarling kind of whine like he was both distressed and enraged by the idea. This was why he, Renzo, Martina, and Carmine were my closestsoldati. They had a moral compass; it just didn’t point to the usual true north. We had internalized rules, a code adopted from the Camorra but skewed by our judgments.
No harming women or children. No stealing from the old.
These two tenets alone were almost unheard of in our world. The ’Ndrangheta were infamous for abusing their women, but it happened across every clan, and the Mafia made tens of millions of euros every year off scamming the elderly.
We stuck to what I was comfortable with: agromafia business, money laundering, and transportation of every kind of illegal good. These activities were relatively easy to hide or fob off as someone else’s error if we were ever caught, though that had only happened once, in the beginning, when one of our shipments was seized by the Pietra clan on the coast of Pisa. Barrels of cocaine in shipping crates of textiles imported from the United States.
We had blamed it on a scapegoat in the Pietra clan itself and never smuggled goods in that way again.
We had moved on to small electric submarines that came into port at night nearly undetected.
This was the modern Mafia. We avoided warfare in the streets and bragging, obvious symbols of our trade—such as the color red or gaudy gold jewelry—and lived instead like quiet, officious white-collar gentlemen. We rarely met in large groups and communicated through codes that were rewritten every year to keep the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia (DIA) from deciphering our inner workings if they were ever successful at hacking our systems.
So it was not a surprise that Ludo took umbrage at Galasso without having to understand the reason I’d wanted him killed.
That was the kind of trust and loyalty you could not buy with money.
Its only currency was blood.
And once, as a boy, I had saved Ludo from a group of teenage thugs much older than us who decided to attack him for being ungainly and slow thinking. They did not realize, as I had from the start, that a slow processor did not equal stupidity.
Ludo was worth more than fifteen other capos from my territory.
“I would have beat his face in with a hammer,” Ludo told me earnestly, “if I had known.”
I waved away the sentiment. “I know,fratello, but this was for me to do.”
“Because of the girl?” he asked, and when I raised my brows at him as I sipped from my double espresso, he grinned lopsidedly. “Renzo and Carmine watched you in the restaurant. They said you put on quite a show. They said she was pretty like something in one of your expensive paintings.”
I would not mention that I had already searched local auction houses to see if there were any worthwhile paintings of Guinevere’s namesake for sale. It was disgustingly sentimental, but I knew I had to have one for the day when she would leave. If I could not have her, the house could benefit from a symbol of her beauty and innocence.
“She is captivating,” I admitted, staring into the dark coffee the same luxurious shade as her eyes and all that heavy hair. “She makes me curious.”
“About her?”
“Yes,” I mused, almost to myself. “And about me.”
“Buongiorno,” her light voice called from the kitchen a moment before Guinevere appeared in the doorway, dressed in a loose white linen shift dress that seemed precariously close to falling off her shoulders and exposing her entirely. When she turned slightly to face Ludo, I saw the low dip exposing half her unblemished back.
My mouth went dry as dust.
“Buongiorno,” Ludo greeted her, getting up from his lean against the balustrade to cross to her, offering a big, square-fingered hand to her. “Ludovico. Call me Ludo.”
“Guinevere,” she echoed with a jaunty smile, her hand entirely engulfed in his. “Call me Guinevere.”
“You don’t like Gwen?” he asked, dropping her hand and extending his toward the empty chair across from me.
