Page 13 of My Dark Ever After
“It’s not that simple, Raffaele,” I snapped. “My father still won’t talk to me properly after I defied him and went to Italy the first time. You’re asking me to irrevocably damage my relationship with my father.”
One slow blink of those annoyingly beautiful lashes. “Better a damaged relationship than mourning his second daughter, no?”
“I’m not going to Italy with you,” I repeated firmly. “Please, take me back to my apartment so I can get cleaned up.”
“And then what?” he demanded, shifting closer, teeth glinting in the orange light spilling in from outside. “You can protect yourself from all the things that go bump in the night? You are a fawn, not a huntress. They will eat you alive.”
“You think I came home after almost being shot in the head and thought, meh, I’m fine being defenseless?” I scoffed, but my belly tossed and churned. I felt sick with fear and anger and the impossibility of going to Italy and remaining in Michigan. “I’ve been taking MMA classes twice a week.”
Something like a smile seized Raffa’s mouth before he bit it off. “You think two months of MMA is going to stack your five foot nothing, a hundred ten pounds soaking wet against a trained mafioso?”
A noise of frustration bubbled up my throat. “I think I could take you by surprise.”
“Oh?” The word was a curl of smoke through the space between us, heady enough to drug me. “I would like to see you try.”
Lust pulsed between us in time with our heartbeats, tangible enough to feel, to touch.
I sat on my fingertips to keep myself from reaching out.
With a suddenness that made me gasp, Raffa lashed out with one hand, palming my entire throat, fingers folding around my pulse point with just enough pressure to make me feel the drag of breath through my airway. There was a knife in his other hand, sparking in the passing streetlights like stop-motion film as he lifted it from somewhere hidden to press it featherlight against my cheek.
“You think because I am a made man that I have no rules or morals, but you are wrong. I am Rex Infernus, and in the world that I rule, I am the one who makes the rules as I see fit. No one acts against me, little fawn, not without serious consequences.” The knifepoint skimmed the ridge of my cheekbone and moved down to the corner of my mouth, where he pushed the flat of the blade into the center of my lower lip as if testing its plushness. “You have unmasked me, so there is no point in pretending any longer that I am not the kind of man who would make any man suffer magnificently for any second of pain they gave you. I would skin them with this knife. Butcher their organs into mash. And keep them alive until the very last moment so they could feel every second of agony.”
I was breathing too hard. The sound of air rushing through my lungs was like that of the ocean churning violently through rock. It should have been fear coursing through me, or anger.
But it wasn’t.
Arousal moved hot and slow through my veins, volcanic. If he’d pressed his tongue to my lips beside the skin-warmed edge of that blade, I honestly might have erupted.
“I am who I am to keep those I care about safe.” He was whispering now, a husky drawl that steamed up the knife between us. “You are one of those people, whether you like it or not. And I will keep you safe, even if it is from yourself.”
“I’m not going with you,” I said, but the words were threadbare, my conviction buried under drifts of lava at my molten core.
The edge of his mouth curled into a cruel little smile as he dropped the hand from my throat and moved the hand holding the knife into my hair. He kept the blade away from the strands as he threaded them between his fingers to tug my head back so he could duck down to nose at the thrumming pulse point in my neck.
“I would rather have you alive and hating me than dead. So hate me if you will, Guinevere, but you are going back to Italy with me, and there is nothing you can do about it.”
I yelled at him.
Which was strange because I don’t think I’d ever yelled at anyone before in my life.
But when you realize that you’ve fallen in love with a man who seems like an angel only to discover he is the absolute devil, it’s only fair to lose your mind a little.
The anger, though, didn’t get through to him.
It was only when I exhausted myself, the last of the adrenaline drained from my shocky, weak limbs so that sorrow and helplessness could seep through me in their wake, that Raffa seemed to care.
Men can never withstand a woman’s tears,my sister Gemma had told me one night after she returned home tearstained but euphoric from a date. Her college boyfriend at the time hadn’t wanted to take her to her silly high school prom, but the moment she’d started to cry, he’d capitulated.
It was shocking to see Raffa’s steely resolve waver as he watched me dash a hot tear from my cheek as I twisted toward the window to look at anything other than him.
“I have to take you,” he said quietly. “How could I live with myself if you died because of me?”
It was a fair question, but it did nothing to mitigate the fact that abandoning my life in Ann Arbor was reckless and foolish and potentially life ruining. What would I have to return to when all was said and done? An estranged family and no career.
I mentioned that to Raffa, but he merely gave me one of those minuscule shrugs and said, “You are very smart, with two degrees and work experience. You might not work for your father again, but you will be able to find other employment. If not, I will help you.”
I shuddered to think what Raffa’s offer of “help” might entail.
