Page 79 of My Dark Fairy Tale
“I have the shipping manifests from the port authority,” Ludo explained, interrupting my thoughts. “But there are thousands of them. I would have asked some of our men to help look through the figures, but ...”
“But we do not know who we can trust when there is obviously a traitor in our depths,” I concluded. “Fine, we do not leave this room until we find evidence of whoever is working with the Albanians. Unless—Carmine?”
He shook his head with a wince. “Drita caught me fucking Regina again. Let’s just say we are not on good terms. I doubt she would tell me anything other than a creative way to cut off my own balls.”
Renzo snorted, but then, he had always found his brother’s womanizing ridiculous.
“Then, we look,” I declared warily, thinking of Guinevere alone in my bed. “I refuse to believe these incidents are not tied together. Pucci fucked up tonight asking if the family had ties to Livorno. It proves that someone turned them on to us, and that party clearly has ties to the region.”
I pulled out my phone to update Leo and frowned when I saw a new text from him.
Leo: Sorry about being rude to your friend. Bad day, but it isn’t an excuse. How long is she in town for?
It had been sent a few hours ago, when I was still at the Pitti Palace, but as I stared at the screen another text came in.
Leo: Did she mention if she had a sister at all?
Raffa: Why the fuck are you so interested in Guinevere?
He responded immediately.
Leo: She reminds me of a girl I used to know. She wasn’t good news. Bad memories. I’ll stop.
Instead of responding, I put the phone down on the table, irritated with his bad opinion of Guinevere when he did not even know her.
“Okay, email sent,” Ludo announced a second before everyone’s devices pinged with the new message.
“Good, get to work,” I commanded, pulling up the files on my computer and resigning myself to a very long night.
We worked for so long, the sun was a blush on the horizon by the time someone knocked at the closed door.
“Come in,” I beckoned in Italian, assuming it was my housekeeper or Servio.
Instead, Guinevere stuck her head through the door, hair tousled from sleep but face washed clean of last night’s makeup. She was wearing one of my button-up white silk shirts, and I bemoaned the fact that I could not take her back to my bed and remove it with my teeth.
“Well, this is one boring after-party,” she quipped, noticing Martina in her dismantled suit sitting shoulder to shoulder with Renzo on the couch, a tablet in her lap and a computer in his. Ludo was where he most liked to be, on the floor, back pressed to the bookshelves, hisphone, tablet, and computer open around him. Carmine had fallen asleep some time ago in the chair across from my desk, mouth open for a trail of drool to leak down his chin.
I smiled tiredly at her, opening my arms in silent appeal. She read my cue and tiptoed across the layered Persian carpets to my side, hesitating only for a moment before climbing into my lap. The feel of her in my arms dragged the chaos of my brain down to the depths of my gut like an anchor so that for the first time in hours, my mind fell quiet. I pushed my nose into her hair to seek out the rosemary scent of her shampoo and kissed her head because my lips were already there.
“You should be asleep,” I murmured.
She snorted. “Pot, meet kettle. What are these?”
Her fingers were shifting through the papers I had printed out and laid over my desk, the white littered with red as I tried to look for patterns.
“Shipping manifests,” she muttered at the same time I did. “Why would an investment banker be looking at these?”
“A company we have in our portfolio has been accused of committing fraud using shell companies,” I lied smoothly, letting my hands wander to her hair, then braiding it before I was even aware I was doing so. It was soothing to have that thick silk in my fingers, mundane work to busy my hands so my brain could take a moment.
“Mmm,” she hummed, but her eyes were flying over the pages as she spread them out over my palatial desk. “Do you have a pen somewhere?”
I finished the braid and handed her a pen in exchange for the hair elastic she pressed into my hand. She returned to her task, and I leaned back in the leather chair to watch mildly as she scoured the figures. It would do no harm for her to see the details when she had no clue what we were looking at them for or how we planned to use the information.
In fact, if I had been thinking clearly, I might have asked her to take a look. She had proven herself more than capable at Fattoria Casa Luna with the Zhang-Liu Imports debacle. Guilt screeched across mybones like nails over a chalkboard. Thanks to Guinevere’s aid, the CEO was currently food for the fishes at the bottom of the Shanghai harbor and the entire company had been dissolved after the COO admitted to fraud after I had sent men to politely suggest prison was a better sentence to serve than an eternal sleep.
It was not right to involve my innocent American girl in my underworld, however tempting it might have been to utilize her smarts and take comfort from her company in the shadows. This was why I was a reluctant mafioso, because the King Below did not deserve a woman wreathed in sunlight and daydreams.
She was too good for this world, and her association with me was enough to taint her without my exposing her to the violence, retribution, and lies ofla mafia.
