Page 61 of My Dark Fairy Tale
I had purchased the crumbling church in the town next to Villa Romano simply because it had once been beautiful, and I wanted it restored instead of demolished for housing. I had helped to fund the continued excavation of the gladiator training grounds outside the Colosseum in Roma, even going so far as to buy a block of buildings in order to demolish them for the sake of discovering and preserving our history. I had killed Martina’s husband because he was eroding her day by day in front of my very eyes and I could take it no longer, and I had allowed Pamina to become capo of her territory after killing her own husband for the same kind of abuse. I had helped Guinevere because I could not resist such a beautiful woman lost and alone with the odds stacked against her.
Not much of a moral code, one founded on keeping beauty intact instead of one of honor or justice, but it was the only one I had.
“I wanted a good life for my family long after I am dead,” Imelda added, peering at me with cunning gray eyes the same color as thatmarble wolf. “Isn’t that why you are where you sit today?Capo dei capiof everything you swore you’d never touch?”
“It is easy to have good intentions when the stakes are low,” I conceded. “There is nothing I would not do for my mother and sisters. For my chosen family in the Camorra.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “This is our way, I think. Family before all else. It is not something foreigners understand well.”
That was true, but I considered Guinevere and wondered if there was another exception there. The dead sister who had given her a kidney, the mother and father she lied to in order to give them peace of mind so she could have some freedom. The future she was intent on following because it was what they wanted for her even if she did not want it for herself.
“You care for her,” Imelda said, a note of awe in her words.
Frustration wrapped a firm hand around my throat and squeezed. “She is ... interesting.”
“Interesting and lovely.”
I chuckled, because that word would never be free of the memory of Guinevere’s wine-soaked skin and breathy, surprised moans of pleasure.
“Yes, lovely.”
“You deserve such loveliness. I know you do not agree, but it is true. Everyone needs happiness, Raffa. And if you are worried that you are too much the villain to deserve it, consider that unhappiness will only drive you further into the dark. I know that is not the kind of man you wish to be in thirty years. The kind of man your father was.” She got up and came around my desk to press her cheeks to each of mine. “Chi non risica non rosica.”
He who does not risk does not get the rose.
It was an Italian proverb my mother had used my entire life, so it was fitting that her best friend would use it now to taunt me to take a chance on Guinevere.
“There is no future if I tell her, and there is no future if I do not,” I admitted as she pulled away. “She is going back to America in a month.”
Imelda shrugged one shoulder and walked toward the door, stopping only to throw back, “Is she?”
Chapter Fourteen
Guinevere
I spent the rest of the week at the apartment and threw myself back into my original plan for my vacation as if I was not missing Raffa nearly every moment I wasn’t with him.
Even though I had almost nothing to go on, I endeavored to find records of my father and his relatives in the area. I knew his given birth name—Mariano Giovanni—even though he had changed it to John when he moved to America, and I remembered that he once mentioned going to the Uffizi on a school trip from his village, so I knew he had been raised in the countryside close to Florence. I did as much research as I could on online genealogy sites, but there was absolutely nothing linking John Stone to anyone in the country. So I went in person to the state archives office, and then, when that failed, I met with a priest at the Basilica di Santa Croce to ask about getting access to church records, which I had read were much more thorough. Though he was kinder than the official at the state archives, the priest informed me that unless I had a last name, there was almost no way he could help me. Mariano and Giovanni were both incredibly popular names, especially for the generation of men born during my father’s time.
A dead end.
One that didn’t surprise me but still hurt somewhere deep inside, where the longing to truly belong to this magical culture and country throbbed like a beacon.
Still, I found other ways to absorb and assimilate. I took a weeklong language class that I almost forgot I’d signed up to take, each session four hours in the morning and afternoon. It was an immersion class, and I left every day feeling as if my brain was stuffed with Italian cotton, verbs and conjugations coming out my ears. I had a mind for math and patterns, and I made the entire undertaking easier by breaking down conjugations into simple formulas and tessellations. All that work was worth it, because when I met Raffa for dinner after class on Tuesday and again on Thursday, he was shocked by my progress and insisted we spend both meals speaking in Italiano.
Outside of our two dinners, we only found time to take a joint run through the city to the top of Piazzale Michelangelo to watch the sunset. We were both sweating profusely in the thick July heat, my fancy running clothes so saturated from my running the hilly steps that I might have been embarrassed if Raffa hadn’t led me to the stone railing overlooking the city center and wrapped his arms around my waist. He pressed his nose into the hair behind my ear and licked a stripe up my salty neck.
“Divino,” he murmured.
And just like that, I felt somehow radiant.
It was a kind of magic that he had to make me feel like he only saw the best version of me, even when I was at my worst.
There had been live music in the piazza, and artists splashing colors across canvas to replicate the famous view as the sun broke open on the rooftops and spilled rose gold light through the streets.
It was magnificent.
“I saw the realDavidtoday,” I told him as we stood looking out over the Arno and the glowing red rooftops.
