Page 14 of My Dark Fairy Tale
Martina laughed that barrel laugh again. “He’s my boss, I guess you could say. And he can be ... kind. He’s just not known for it outside his family and small circle of friends. You are the exception, it seems.”
I thought she meant it as a compliment, but it only planted a small seed of unease in my belly. If Raffa wasn’t usually this nice a guy, who was he really?
Chapter Four
Raffa
Bruno Cardona hung from his hands in the damp, wine-musk-scented cellar of Tenuta Romano like a sprig of drying rosemary in my mother’s kitchen. He was currently unconscious, head limp between his shoulders, hair dull with old sweat, and face covered in blood from a gash above his forehead and another through his lower lip.
Two weeks ago, he’d been a trustedsoldatoin my organization. He had worked down in Naples with the Camorra outfit under Damiano Vitale for years before coming north to join my ranks, and he’d come highly recommended. He was in possession of a special skill set I needed for my operations up north, someone with experience in olive oil harvest and fraud, and ties to the Corporazione Mastri Oleari, one of the entities that verified extra-virgin olive oils. He had helped my outfit rake in millions of euros over the last four years from our agromafia pursuits alone.
Then, on a Thursday night when I was waiting for my driver to pick me up in Rome, someone on a Vespa had sped up the straight in front of the restaurant I was waiting beside and opened fire on me with a semiautomatic.
I’d ducked behind a Lamborghini almost immediately, but one of the bullets had taken a chunk out of the meat of my bicep. Shouts frominside the restaurant sounded the alarm, and thefiglio di puttanatook off without getting the job done.
The job being my murder.
It had been a very long time since someone had tried to take out the capo of the Toscana Camorra. Four years, in fact. When someone had successfully put a bullet between my father’s eyes.
It seemed my brief era of peace had ended.
Unhappily for Bruno, I had recognized two important details about my shooter.
He was left handed, and he was wearing a black jacket with an SSC Napoli football team logo on it.
Little things, but didn’t they say the devil was in the details?
It meant my would-be assassin was from Naples, the heart of Camorra Mafia territory.
My territory, if only by proxy.
While Damiano ruled Campania, it was my family who reigned supreme in the north.
Oh, tourists thought the Mafia only existed in Sicily, maybe in the heart of Naples, but no farther. Even Northern Italians loved to bury their heads in the sand, claiming the camorristi were a disease of the south.
We were not.
We were everywhere inside the country, with branches extending all over the globe.
New York, London, Buenos Aires.
We’d just gotten smarter than the gold-chain-wearing, swaggering mafiosi of the eighties and early nineties who thought they were invincible. We’d learned from the crackdown on the Cosa Nostra in Sicily and adjusted.
I ran a multimillion-euro business out of the heart of Tuscany, and I’d never personally had any issues with the carabinieri. It was almost unbelievable what a few well-greased palms would buy you in local politics.
We might not have had any trouble with the police, but rival families were another matter entirely. Every criminal syndicate wanted a foothold in Italy’s north, with its bustling industries to launder money through, its countless tourists to scam and extort, its thriving ports.
But only one could rule.
And that man wasme.
Something I had been certain Bruno understood until I’d seen that SSC Napoli patch and known in my gut it was my rabid-fansoldato. A man who had also known my schedule in Rome.
“Wake him up,” I ordered Renzo.
My cousin stormed forward with a bucket of icy well water and tossed it over Bruno’s limply hanging form.
He came sputtering to life, thrashing and gasping for breath like a fish out of water.
