Page 99 of My Dark Fairy Tale
Renzo gave her his best unimpressed stare, which was effective on almost everyone but Martina.
“Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed.” She leveled a finger at him and then swung it into my face. “None of us have ever seen you happier.”
I lifted my shoulder in a slight shrug but had to hide the beginnings of a grin behind my wineglass.
“Oh, Raffa,” she said, seeing it anyway, softening into my side. “What are you going to do about it?”
My sip of wine turned sour in my mouth, and I had to force myself to swallow it.
Was that not the million-euro question?
“There is a tension between what I want to do and what I know is the right thing,” I confessed.
Renzo considered me with the full weight of his keen attention. “You have not hesitated to do what you want for a very long time.”
“It is not just about me,” I snapped, then sighed. “If I ask her to stay ... I would have to tell her everything. She either hates me and leaves on the next plane out, or she finds a way to love me still and I subject her to a lifetime of danger as my woman.”
“She leaves on a plane in two days whether you tell her or not,” Renzo prompted.
“And the man I know would not let anything happen to his woman,” Martina decreed with her chin in the air, her eyes flashing with memories.
The night she had finally told me her truth. The night her husband had ended up dead, impaled on the edge of my knife.
I slid my arm around her waist and hugged her into my side. “I would die for her tomorrow if it meant keeping her safe for the rest of time. Loving her like that ... can you not see how wrong it feels to ask her to stay?”
“She would,” Renzo said, looking into the informal living room where Guinevere was still talking with her friends. Ludo was at her shoulder, too, drinking a Sanpellegrino in solidarity with Vera because he was like that. Of us all, he had the best heart, so it did not surprise me that those two had struck up a quiet, lasting bond.
One of my soldiers, Gustavo, whom I had known since our youth, approached Guinevere to introduce his wife, who was a history professor at the university.
Guinevere’s face lit up.
“I know,” I murmured, because I could feel her love like a light on my face every time she looked at me. “But she thinks I am her hero, a Prince Charming in my red Ferrari saving her on the side of the road. What if she knew I had a body in the trunk, hmm? What if she knew how many people I had killed?”
And how much I enjoyed it,I thought but did not say.
Martina made a sympathetic noise in the back of her throat before dropping her cheek to my shoulder, and Renzo moved to stand on my other side, close enough to bump my shoulder. Sandwiched between the two, I felt grateful that Guinevere had opened my eyes to the beauty in my life that had already existed.
“Thank you,” I told them. “For putting up with my miserable ass for all these years. I would not be here without you.”
If they were surprised by my uncharacteristic show of effusiveness, they did not bat an eyelid. Instead, Martina lifted her beer toward us both and waited until we raised our wineglasses before saying, “Per sempre.”
Forever.
I could toast to that and take comfort in the fact that no matter what I chose to do, I had myfamigliato fall back on.
“For what it’s worth, though, boss,” Renzo said. “I think you should ask her to stay. She thinks you are better than you are, yes, but I think you both believe she is better than she truly is too. She is smart, Raffaele. If she has been looking, and she has, she will have had the opportunity to draw her own conclusions. She just didn’t want to.”
It was an interesting argument, one I hadn’t considered.
Guinevere was darker than she appeared. She adored the harsh crack of my voice commanding her to do things her sweet, dirty mind had only dreamed in her most depraved fantasies. Admitted that she feltsafe when I broke the finger of thestronzowho had called her a whore outside Fortezza da Basso. Crowed with glee watching as the trap she had helped lay for the Grecos snapped into place around their necks in the Ligurian Sea.
Oh yes, she had a dark side, and it called out to me like whispers in the night. I could even believe it was one of the reasons she was so drawn to me.
But self-perception was such a tricky business, and I should know that best of all.
Guinevere’s parents had told her to be good and do good her entire life. They had reinforced that she was the good sister, the good daughter, so heavily that I could feel the physical tremors of joy when I called her a good girl in the bedroom.
Nowgoodwas a label she had given herself as much as anyone else had.
