Page 104 of My Dark Ever After
He stared me down with the brutal weight of his glare, an expression I knew had made men much larger and more powerful than me cower. I only blinked placidly back at him, waiting for him to accept my truth.
“What does this mean?” he asked finally, arms crossed so tightly—protectively—over his chest that the muscles in his arms bulged like coiled rope beneath his burnished skin.
“It means I love you, Raffa, and it changed my chemical makeup. Or exposed it, maybe. I want to be with you. I want to stay with you. And I want you to make me ready for anything that may come for us.”
“You are prepared to sleep beside a man every night knowing exactly who he is? Criminal capo and all? That it won’t stop,ever, the violence of this life. That there will never be a cap on the men who might die atmy hands. Even God in Dante’sDivine Comedyhad to cast out rebel angels to protect his peace.”
“Are you equating yourself with God?” I asked with a grin.
He shrugged, that quintessentially Latin expression that was oddly elegant. “God below, maybe. My point stands. We all do what we must to survive. We must be a little bit selfish to succeed. And my definition of success has always been looking after those who matter most to me. Nothing, not even your judgment, will stop me from doing what needs to be done in that regard.”
“So you’d kill for me,” I said, not a question this time because he had told me so before.
Already proven so again and again.
He peered at me the way a philosopher would study an ethical quandary, as if I was a fundamental question that would remain unanswered all his life and haunt him even in his sleep.
“I would die for you,” he said softly.
I sucked in a sharp breath, somehow surprised by his answer.
To kill was one thing. It was aggressive, action oriented, something that left a moral stain on the heart.
But to die for someone?
That was wholly more complex. It took real courage to die knowingly and to do it protecting someone else. To place your life so literally before another’s.
Knowing Raffa, it meant so much more that he would give up everything he had worked so hard for, worked to safeguard, for me.
Guinevere Stone, twenty-three-year-old Midwesterner with a chronic illness and some serious baggage.
In Raffa’s eyes I was nothing so mundane. I was a shooting star across a dark night, a fairy-tale creature come to life, a fawn who was prepared to blossom under his tutelage into a predator worthy of hunting at his side.
It meant more, but it also terrified me.
The idea of a world without Raffaele seemed impossible. His presence had its own gravity, his smile, when it came, like a second sun. That he mightevernot be around set off a series of responses inside me that mimicked a panic attack. Something I hadn’t experienced since I was a teen.
My throat closed up, breath stoppered at the back of my mouth, lungs squeezed tight like stuck edges of cling wrap.
“Guinevere.” Raffa’s voice hit me like a slap, jarring me out of that horrified stasis into taking a shuddering breath. “Where did you go just then?”
“To a place where you don’t exist,” I whispered honestly, still deeply rattled by the idea. “I could handle my own death much easier than yours.”
Raffa’s mouth did a complicated pattern of moves—flexing into a grimace, curving into a pout—before edging into a shocked little smile and then flatlining entirely.
“You are so young, Vera. Do not even say that. You do not understand the weight of what that means.”
“Don’t tell me I don’t understand the weight of death,” I snapped, lunging forward with the force of the fire ignited in my belly, flaming up my throat. “Living with hyperoxaluria type 1, I’ve been aware of the possibility of my own death since before I was diagnosed as a child. My partner in the medical program died after her body rejected her liver transplant a year before I was set to have my own kidney transplant. Gemma, healthy, beautiful, vivacious Gemma, died when she was twenty-six of a heart attack one night, asleep in her bed. Ithrew a man off a buildingwith my own two hands and watched him crack open in the piazza below me, knowing I would have to live with his death forever. And I killed again yesterday, knowing it was my life or his, and I did not hesitate. I woke up this morning, not from a nightmare of killing those men, but from one where you were killed instead. There were tears on my face when I opened my eyes.”
Without my understanding why or filtering the urge, my hand lashed out to wrap around Raffa’s throat, thumb digging into his carotid artery to feel the heavy tap of his pulse against my skin.
Then, rolling to my toes so I could speak that much closer to his bent head, I hissed, “I’ve danced with death my entire life, and it wasn’t until I danced with you that first time in Florence that I started to understand what all that experience had prepared me for.”
Raffa scoffed, but his hands found the curves of my hips, fitting there like they were handholds carved into my body just for him. “Falling for death incarnate in real life?”
“Falling for a man who would die before he let anything happen to me,” I corrected. “You said you did not want a weak woman to hide behind you and turn a blind eye to what you do, and I won’t. I want to know everything. But in exchange, you have to understand something too. You fell for a woman who would happily die before letting anything happen to you.”
Almost before I had finished speaking, his hands were on me, digging into my ass to lift me into his arms, mouth already slanting down over my still-moving lips. Vaguely, I was aware of him shifting us as I slotted my hands into his sweat-damp hair and thrust my tongue back over his own, eating the groan out of his mouth like a glutton greedy for more.
