Page 80 of My Dark Fairy Tale
“What did you say you studied in university?” Renzo was asking her when I clued back into the conversation around me.
“I have my MBA with a concentration in finance,” she mumbled around the lid of the pen, shifting papers and circling names without any obvious reason. “I’m good with numbers and finding patterns.”
“You do not need to help us. It is late, and you had an ... eventful night. You should sleep,” I declared, a little too forcibly because it was so easy to give in to temptation with the weight of her in my lap and the sight of her wildly intelligent brain sifting through this problem like a threshing machine, separating the wheat from the chaff.
She paused, looking over her shoulder at me for a moment before taking the pen lid out of her mouth and sticking it on the end of her pinky as if she was afraid to lose it. Only then did she curl into me, hand to my cheek, nails scratching lightly through the stubble as she searched my face.
“I can, if you want me to. But you are tired, Raffa, and clearly unsettled. I want to help, if you’ll let me. You have come to my aid so many times, it’s really the least I can do.”
“You do not need to pay me back for anything,” I reminded her sharply, because she was right—I was tired and stressed, and my filter had burned down to the stub.
“This isn’t about payback,” she promised me softly, tilting her forehead against mine so that thoseocchi di cerbiattathat had first caught my attention were all I could see. “This is about me doing something for you because I care about you. If I can ease some of the weight on your shoulders, I’m happy to. I’m honestly honored I’m in a position where I’m allowed to help you.”
“Because—”
She pressed the hand with the pen lid on her pinky nail to my mouth to stop me.
“Because you matter to me,” she concluded with a brisk nod before turning in my lap to address the papers once more, popping the lid into her mouth again as if she needed it to think.
I stared at her as emotion moved through the rusty joints of my body, easing the weight of responsibility and the resulting loneliness I had not realized I felt before now.
I knew Guinevere had the kind of soul that complimented old women on their beauty and smiled at strangers just to brighten their day for a single moment. I knew she was driven and determined; planning a solo trip to Florence after being sheltered her whole life was hardly for the faint of heart. I knew she was the loveliest creature I had ever had the privilege to touch. That I could close my eyes that moment and perfectly reconstruct the pale lilac of her eyelids and the bend in her soft brows, the way her long neck sloped into a slim shoulder.
She was the kind of woman who had inspired artists in Italy throughout the centuries. Dante’s Francesca, Petrarch’s Laura, and Botticelli’s Simonetta. A fleeting force of beauty in their lives, like a shooting star whose impression lingered in their souls forever, leaving an indelible mark. Even a kind of insanity that would not diminish with time.
I thought, sitting there watching Guinevere circle her own patterns in blue ink, her mind working furiously behind those dark doe eyes, that I had found the star that had lit up my own life and unwittingly changed it forever.
And any resistance I had to her involvement evaporated in the heat of that starlight.
“Do you see?” she asked me, bouncing in my lap in excitement.
I leaned over her back, pretending as if my entire world had not just shifted slightly on its axis with the simple act of having her sit on my lap in the early hours because she wanted to help carry the weight of my world.
I wondered dangerously if she would feel the same way after knowing exactly what it was we were doing here.
“You see,” she said again when Renzo, Martina, and Ludo had crowded around behind us to look at her discovery. “There are only two discernible patterns. The first is the names of the companies. Do you see how they all reference the one before? They cycle every month, but the basic principle is the same. It’s a kind of cipher.”
She laid out three pages from the month of May to show us the pattern with a tap of her pen by each company listed for the shipment.
“It’s a bastardized anagram mixed with a Caesar shift.” She spoke so quickly her tongue almost tripped over the words. “So they start with the first shipment of the month. Here it’s Porca Pronto exporting pork products from Livorno, and then a week later, Capitale dell’Olio importing bottles of olive oil from Greece, and then ten days after that Itauba Construction with a shipment of construction materials. Do you see it?”
“No,” Renzo grunted.
But my mind was whirring because I did.
“They use three letters from the first business in the next, starting from the fourth letter,” I explained before Guinevere could.
Her response was to absolutelybeamat me. “Exactly. It’s obviously used as a signal to whoever is receiving shipments for them at the portauthority. I mean, they have to be doing something more than money laundering with a scheme like this. It’s fairly brilliant, even, but I would have to see how far back it goes because these are only for May and June.”
So obviously the Albanians had set up shop with new contacts when we’d first told them we were breaking our contract in April and then implemented a new process with whoever was bringing in their drugs. It wasn’t as sophisticated as our scheme, which relied heavily on submarines and technology to cover our tracks and to limit human error at the port authority, but it was still clever.
And my girl was shrewd as hell for figuring it out with just a glance at the papers on my desk at six in the morning.
“I can find the origin company much better now,” Ludo muttered, already moving to grab his computer, then resting it on one forearm as he typed with the other hand on his way back to my desk. “It will take time, but they have given many more data points that can be traced to them.”
“Eccellente,” I told him, but I was staring at Guinevere, honestly a bit in awe of her.
“Ottimo lavoro,” Renzo bestowed on her, lifting a big hand to clamp it over her shoulder, then giving her a little shake the way he would have done to Martina or Carmine.
