Page 101 of My Dark Ever After
“She sleeps like the dead when she feels safe,” he said finally, his voice coarse with emotion. “Though I still don’t know how my sweet girl could trust someone like you, Romano.”
I would have shrugged if she was not in my arms.
“You saw what I did to get her back from the Pietras,” I said instead. “She trusts that there is nothing I would not do to make her safe and happy.”
“Even if ‘safe and happy’ means letting her go?” he asked.
“I could ask you the same,” I said, before continuing to the stairs. Only when I was about to ascend beyond his vision did I stop to add, “She will never be rid of me, Stone. Even if she wants to go back to America, I will watch her the rest of her life to make sure nothing gets in the way of her joy. Even if that thing isyou.”
John Stone said nothing as I carried his daughter to her bedroom and laid her carefully to rest, but I knew that was not the end of our feud.
Because John thought he was fighting for what was right for his daughter, thinking it was the same thing that was right for himself.
And I knew Guinevere was the only one who could make that decision.
As much as I wanted to use every ounce of my control and influence to make certain she made the only one I could live with.
Staying in the dark with me forever.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Guinevere
I dreamed that I was sitting at a café in Florence, waiting for Raffa to pick me up. When he pulled up in the red Ferrari Spyder, I hesitated, suddenly unsure about getting into the car with him even though I was desperate to join him. He watched me from the open window of the car with a patient smile on his lips, fingers drumming against the metal.
Just as I stood up to finally join him, the car blew up. A car bomb or something that completely eradicated the vehicle and everything inside it. Including Raffa.
I woke up crying.
As I blinked up at the ceiling with tears leaking down my cheeks, I knew I could no longer deny the truth.
There was only one path my life had been directing me down all these years, and it led through hell all the way to the throne of the devil himself.
A man who would break through the crust of the earth to find me. A man who had sacrificed again and again just to see me happy. A man who deserved the world and who somehow saw his happily ever after inme.
I didn’t know where he was emotionally after last night in the barn, and I cursed myself for giving in to exhaustion instead of holding out to explain exactly how I felt, but I could still make amends this morning.
After a quick shower, where I was careful not to submerge my face beneath the spray because of the lingering nightmare of being waterboarded, and then the administration of my medicine, I went downstairs to grab something to eat. Four days without my meds wouldn’t kill me, but I had to make up for the lack by drinking even more than my usual gallon of water a day and sticking strictly to my diet.
It was early enough that the kids were just gathering their bags to go off to school, so I paused to kiss them all on the head and give Zacheo a big hug.
“Are my parents still asleep?” I asked Angela.
“Yes. I expect they will sleep until lunch, so I am making something good.”
“And Raffa? Is he up yet?” I grabbed an apple from the bowl on the island.
“He is meeting with Renzo. That is not a good breakfast, though, Vera!” Raffa’s mother tutted at me in Italian. “Sit and let me make you something.”
“No, thank you,” I insisted, having caught sight of Ludo waiting for me outside as he had every morning before the Pietras took me. “I have a busy morning, but I promise to eat a big lunch.”
“You are too skinny!” she called, but I was already slipping past Carlotta out the front door and jogging over to the side of the house, where Ludo was doing push-ups one handed to take the strain off his still-healing side.
Without hesitation, I sat cross-legged on his back.
“You think this makes it more difficult?” he grunted as he lowered himself again.
“It should.” I chomped into my apple and took in the gorgeous fall morning over the Tuscan hills. “But it’s mostly to prove that you absolutely shouldnotbe doing push-ups two weeks after getting shot.”
