Page 1 of My Dark Ever After
Chapter One
Guinevere
Wind whistled across the icy peaks of the Huron River and cut through the streets of Ann Arbor, buffeting me like a secondary gravitational force as I fought through the early snowfall across the University of Michigan campus. Bundled in layers of cashmere, swaddled in a thick scarf pulled up over my nose, with a beanie protecting my ears and forehead, I had only a thin swatch of skin exposed to the stinging bite of the brutally cold October day, but I was still frozen.
If I was being honest, I had been since I got off the plane from Italy two months ago.
It was as if all the warmth in my blood had been left behind in that godforsaken country. My warmth, my happiness, and half my heart.
My boots crunched through the freshly fallen snow as I walked from my yoga class back to work in the State Street District fifteen minutes away. Only locals and the slightly insane voluntarily walked outside in weather like this, but I was desperate for anything to distract me from my current state of affairs.
I was back home in Michigan, working for a father who’d barely spoken to me since I’d broken his trust by going to Italy despite the vow I’d made never to set foot in his mother country. My mother, as always, had taken his side, so although I had to work with him and saw herat our mandatory Sunday family dinners, I’d never felt so distant from my family. To make matters worse, the few friends I’d made at college seemed so far away from me after my summer abroad. I found myself uncharacteristically furious at them for their petty complaints.
My sister dropped dead at twenty-six,I wanted to scream at them.
The man I fell in love with is a stone-cold killer,I wanted to divulge.
How can you think this is the be-all and end-all in safe, quaint Ann Arbor?I wanted to demand.
Instead, I stayed quiet while they talked about their lives, retreating deep inside myself to a place I wasn’t sure I liked. A place filled with seething shadows that clutched at me, hooking beneath the flesh like talons and threatening to drag me even deeper into my own darkness.
I was sick of the mundane. Routine and schedule and predictability. It made me feel like I was losing my sanity. When I’d returned home, my father had given me the job he’d threatened to take away for staying in Italy against his wishes, saying that it would ground me, and all it had done was drop the bottom out from beneath my feet so I felt like I was in a free fall.
I’d tasted freedom and passion, the sucking black hole of despair, and the shivering bite of terror, alongside the heady mead of lust and a veritable bacchanalia of sin.
How could I go back to water, having become drunk on wine?
Before Raffa, I’d always felt that pull, a low-grade weight in my belly that hungered for sin, for the rough edge of sex, for the bright pain of anger followed by the blood-warming satisfaction of revenge. I’d read books likeThe Count of Monte Cristo, watched action movies filled with violence, and read erotica on a private web browser in the dark of night, alone in bed with my hand between my legs.
It had been enough.
Or at least, I hadn’t known then what a shallow form of satisfaction it was.
And now I did.
All the things I had accused Raffa of being—a cold, merciless killer, a skilled liar, a vengeful villain—they were the very things I’d gravitated toward in literature and film and fantasy my entire life.
The hypocrisy kept me up at night, even though I told myself fiction and reality were two totally different mediums.
Killing a man for trying to hurt me wasnotromantic.
Raffa had taken Galasso’s life without a qualm. And even though Galasso was a predator, he was still something to someone.
He should have been turned over to the proper authorities, right?
But the authorities never would have found the man who’d threatened me and, most likely, countless other women in his past.
I growled under my breath as I reached the revolving doors of the Beaumont Building, which housed my father’s firm, stomping my feet free of snow before pushing into the warmth of the marble foyer.
I was distracted from my thoughts by the sight of a man sitting in the waiting area before the security turnstiles. There was nothing remarkable about him, and normally I might not have noticed him at all. But discovering your lover is a mafioso after weeks of thinking he’s Prince Charming opens up an awareness in a person that is hard to quell.
Something almost like paranoia.
And I knew I’d seen that man before, not just earlier that day, loitering outside the coffee shop beside our offices, but also the day before, jogging through the park on a parallel route to my own.
I knew he was the same man because he had dark hair buzzed nearly to the scalp, with an oval patch of silver just above his right ear. It wasn’t exactly distinctive, but again, I’d taken pains to be more observant since the summer, and I knew this was my third time in two days crossing paths with him.
In a small city like Ann Arbor, it wasn’t unusual to run into people you knew—it happened almost daily—but something about this suited man with his stern countenance tripped an inner alarm.
