Page 108 of My Dark Fairy Tale
They knew Raffa was a monster masquerading as a man.
They knew, they knew, they knew.
I was still screaming.
The sound echoed off the high ceilings of the house as I raced through the first floor and stampeded down the stairs in my bare feet, slipping slightly on the marble because they were slick with blood.
Blood.
By the time I made it to the bottom, I was going so fast, I could not have stopped if I’d tried. Voices were starting to sound behind me, but I couldn’t focus on those.
I had to keep my eyes trained on the doors at the end of the huge foyer, and when I reached them, I threw myself against the heavy wood while I twisted the knob, forcing it open faster than the old, ornate hinges wanted to move.
They screeched painfully, but I was still screaming, so I didn’t notice.
Cool night air hit my face, shaking some clarity back between my ears.
The police.
That was where I needed to go, to the police station.
I couldn’t think beyond that to what I would say, what I would do, once more caught without a phone or ID, in a little nightgown the same maple-brown shade as Raffa’s eyes.
The cold eyes of akillerthat I had stared into countless times, believing they were the windows to the soul of a man I loved.
I ran.
Turning on my heel on the pavers, I sprinted toward the Arno. The sun was just a faint glow on the horizon, so I wasn’t sure if the police station would be open, but I remembered where Raffa had taken me to make my statement in Santa Croce.
There were a few people in the streets. A small group of drunk youths around my age who laughed when I passed in my silk nightie at a sprint. An older man, his dog peeing against a graffitied wall.
I kept running.
All the way across the Arno and to the left down to the police station.
It didn’t look open to the public, but there were lights on within, so I raised my fist to pound on the empty door ...
... and found I could not bring my fist to connect with the glass in the frame.
I stood there, swaying slightly, as I sucked in deep, long inhales, and the lack of motion, the time to breathe, cooled the hot rush of panic in my blood until I was as inert as volcanic rock. Trapped in my body while my thoughts battled each other.
As much as instinct urged me to knock on that glass and report a murder, I physically could not bring myself to turn Raffa in.
It was more than the simple fact that, in however brutal a way, he had saved my life.
It was every moment that had led to this one, every moment where I had believed the very best of him. His touch on my shoulder when he was retying that red dress, his mouth on my breasts through the wine-soaked gown, and the feel of him inside me under the starlit night only a handful of hours before this. The way he’d made me fall in love not only with this country and him but also with myself. Exactly how I was.
After years of my being sheltered and controlled for my own good by my parents as we all fought to discover how to live with my primary hyperoxaluria type 1 diagnosis, where it felt as if my condition defined me more than any of my other characteristics did, it had been such an overwhelming blessing to have someone like Raffa admire and care for me. He had made me feel safe and strong, smart and captivating. Worthy of the kind of love I had only ever read about in epic poems.
I sobbed right there in the street, catching it in one hand like I’d thrown up my sickly, bleeding heart.
Raffa was not the kind of hero from those poems, and clearly, I was too silly and naive to be any kind of heroine.
Because seeing Raffa kill that man so coldly had locked a pattern into place I had been too blinded by rose-tinted love to ignore.
The broken skin on his knuckles when we danced in the restaurant, the way he’d threatened Wyatt at the winery, the two different companies trying to steal from his investments, and the calm, eerily cold way he’d reacted and then exacted retribution, at least against the latter. I shuddered to think what he might have done to the people at Zhang-Liu Imports, but part of me knew he hadn’t just turned them in to the police.
Even the scene where he’d confronted and broken the finger of the driver who had called me a whore took on a new light. What once had almost aroused me now seemed to be one scenario in a pattern of violent behaviors.
