Page 142 of My Dark Ever After
“He saved mine too,” I said, and I meant so much more than just today.
He had been saving me since the day he’d hit me with his Ferrari in the middle of an empty Tuscan road, but the truth was, I knew I had been saving him too.
It might have been silly to some, but as I sat there holding my man, my dad, and my sister, and my mom came running into the room with a loud sob before throwing herself at all of us, I said a prayer of thanks to Italy.
“It is fate that I am here,” E. M. Forster once said, “but you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.”
And I knew it was here in this forbidden country that I had finally found myself and the life I was meant to live.
Epilogue
Raffa
Christmas morning arrived in a wash of white. The hills and valleys extending from the villa were layered in crystalline powder that glittered in the colorless light filtering in through low, pale clouds. It seemed like something from a dreamscape, a landscape so pristine it could not exist anywhere outside the mind.
It was the perfect day to marry the girl of my dreams.
The woman who had taken my hand and led me out of my own personal hell into a future I had never dared to envision for myself.
Only seven weeks had passed since I had killed Tonio and Gemma had been returned to her family. Seven weeks of incandescent joy and grueling trials as I purged my organization of Tonio’s influence and Guinevere adjusted to life as a capo’s bride.
John and Elizabeth had stayed in Tuscany to oversee both their daughters, given that neither of them consented to return to Michigan. Understandably, the Stone parents would not be parted from either child after what they had all been through, even with John’s long-standing hatred of this country and my lifestyle. Clearly, I had underestimated the lengths the man would go to for his family.
It made for some interesting family dinners, merging the Stones with my wild, warm Romano clan and my found family of Renzo,Carmine, Ludo, and Martina, but after a few weeks, the Stones started to unwind and soften toward everyone.
It was largely due to Gemma, who was so fragile and, apparently, wildly unlike how she had been before her abduction that any conflict sent her into a blind panic only Leo could bring her back from.
But it was also because of my Vera.
After everything she had been through to be with me, it would have been reasonable for her to be bitter or afraid, spooked by the creak of a closing door or the shout of one of the children in the yard. Instead, there was a strength and vibrancy in her that had lain half hidden beneath the sand, like treasure yearning to be dug up and exposed, when she had first arrived in Italy. She moved through the world bravely, boldly, with an elegance and inner peace that transfixed me whenever I had the opportunity to observe her cooking with Mamma, Stacci, Delfina, and Carlotta or playing with the children or walking quietly with Gemma among the vines.
Guinevere was at peace. Withme.
It was a conclusion I drew again and again each day I spent with her at my side, and yet it had not once lost its wonder.
As a boy, I had yearned for a different kind of life than my father or uncle had wanted for me and assumed that when I was forced to take up their mantle, I would lose a part of my soul in the process. But Guinevere had proved me wrong. She had shown me I was still capable of goodness, even when the decision was hard, such as pardoning Leo for allowing himself to be blackmailed by Tonio. She had shown me that even though I had blood on my hands and sin on my mind, I was still capable of the kind of profound love that artists and poets had written about throughout history.
Sometimes, in the darkest hours of the night, I lay awake beside her in our bed and trailed my fingers down the knobs of her spine, over the arch of her buttocks and the curve of her thigh, just to make sure she was real. Just to know she was mine.
All that sweet curiosity and keen intelligence, that steadfast loyalty and passionate fervor, wrapped up in that slim, doe-eyed frame.
In those night hours when the familiar specters of self-hatred and self-doubt visited my bedside, it helped to touch her like that and remember that she was strong enough to survive this life. To survive me.
Not only survive it, but also thrive in it.
My huntress had started working at the Romano Group, cleaning up the mess Tonio had made of the previously entirely legal enterprise so that it would not draw the attention of Sansone Pucci’s DIA. She did not want to be CEO, because she was curious about the criminal side of my businesses too, intrigued by the loopholes and schemes we had constructed to take advantage of the government and twist their profits for our own.
“I think I have a knack for this,” she had said one afternoon, sitting in my lap in the office Carmine and I used. I had been working when she came into the room and folded herself into my lap without hesitation, clicking through the proposal I was reading as if it was her right to do so.
It was a little intimacy that took my breath away, her comfort with me and her confidence in the fact that she belonged, with me, in this house, in the Camorra and this dark world of mine.
It never failed to arouse and wow me.
So I had proceeded to show her that I had a knack too, one involving my tongue and the sweet-slick apex of her thighs.
We were both busy in the wake of Day of the Dead, Guinevere with her new work and tending to Gemma, John, and Elizabeth, but also to my nephews, who had varying degrees of trauma from the night of the fire. Zacheo in particular had imprinted on her and monopolized her time whenever he could.
Guinevere did not protest.
