My Dark Ever After (My Dark Mafia Romance, #2)

by Giana Darling

I decided then and there I did not like the di Conte family very much.

Or it is him. It’s one of them

He adopted Leo legally, but he also fostered half a dozen of our soldati when they were boys, Michele and Philippe among them.

“Your uncle was implying that if I asked you to give it all up for me, you would,”

I will always have a dark heart, and therefore we will always have a dark ever after.

I wish only for Guinevere’s love and safety.

And perhaps a few well-placed soldati to keep an eye on her for the rest of her life.

“No,” I mused as I held the door open for her again, checking over my shoulder to see that Philippe was doing as I’d asked and collecting Guinevere’s note from the basket.

I wondered if Raffa knew what he was doing in keeping me away, stoking the fires of curiosity and hidden desire until they burned under my skin.

Because I truly believed there was no deeper level of hell than a life without Raffa Romano at my side.

Knowing him and loving him made it easier to know and love myself.

“My baby’s baby,” she whimpered, clutching at her grandson even as she kept her eyes pinned on me.

“I will never set foot on Italian soil again,” Dad spat like a curse. “Good, then I won’t have to see you for a while,”

The Stone girls were not big on self-preservation, clearly.

My heart panged thinking about Ludo back at the villa.

He was going to be almost as pissed off as Raffa when they discovered me gone.

“Hey, stop that,” I said suddenly, a little too loud.

There is nothing I would not do for you. Even start a war.

Pride blossomed like a night-blooming flower in my chest when I watched my cacciatrice call for help and slip out of his grasp,

Was I wrong to have done so?” “Yes,” I shouted when Renzo relayed the information.

“The Venetian and the Pietras have at least one man who truly knows me,”

“We all saw it,” Ludo agreed with a grunt. “But now she is with the wrong family, and we have to get her back.”

“Anything for her.” Finally, something to bond over.

Raffa had literally saved me from being taken by thugs while I was an entire ocean away from him in Michigan. Surely, he could do the same here in his own country, in his own territory.

And if it was taking a little longer, it was only because he would eviscerate them when he was done.

That the idea of killing could be so immediate in my fantasies.

And I felt it was true in that moment, staring at a stranger who shared my blood and feeling certain I would end him if he so much as 228laid a finger on Raffa or Martina or Renzo, Ludo, or Carm. On any of the Romanos who had taken me into their home.

They were batshit crazy.

I would go where he went—be it prison or the ER or any circle of Dante’s hell. I would be his partner in all things. The queen to his King Below.

He’s coming, I thought desperately as I struggled not to swallow water and fought to breathe. He will always come for you.

How could anyone focus enough to answer questions when they were fighting for every breath?

If this was hell, I would cross it over and over if it meant being with Raffa.

“He’s here.” I thought it was a sob crawling up my throat like a rat through a pipe, a sensation that almost made me gag, but when it emerged, it was laughter.

I laughed again.

In the wake of surviving this horror on my own, giving Gaetano and Eduardo nothing, and knowing that Raffa was not riding in on his noble steed as my Prince Charming but cracking open the very earth to find me, as Pluto had to reach Proserpina, I felt freer than I ever had before.

“He wants them to know he can come for them at home in broad daylight, with the house full of soldati, and still win.”

“I’m glad you broke the G naming tradition,” I said, which prompted my aunt to laugh. “It was a bit much.”

“I am safer out there than you are,” I countered. “They’re here for me.”

It was ironic that this kind of man was exactly whom Dad and Raffa had warned me against, thinking themselves inherently monstrous too.

I could say with a clear heart that they were not.

“You will not shoot us,” he proclaimed. “This is your first time holding a gun, if I had to bet.” It wasn’t.

Without a second’s hesitation, I pulled the trigger.

Gaetano stared at me as if he had never seen me before. Which was funny, in a way, because I had never felt more myself.

My grandfather froze, his mouth puckering in tart surprise, while behind me Ginevra gasped. Then again, I did too.

The door pushed open farther, and John Stone, born Mariano Giovanni Pietra, stepped into the room wearing a bulletproof vest over his dress shirt, a semiautomatic rifle strapped across his chest as casually as a fanny pack.

Behind him, Raffa emerged in his own bulletproof vest, blood from a shallow cut weeping down his neck. His eyes immediately found mine, darkening as they took in my damp clothes and hair, the blood spatter from the fallen soldato at my feet.

Without hesitation, he stepped around Dad and pistol-whipped Gaetano, who fell to his knees with a sharp cry.

“They filmed it to send to you,” I said, surprised that my voice did not waver even though it was rough from choking on water and crying out with distress. “They waterboarded me for information about Raffa. About you.”

Raffa cursed viciously in Italian, but it was my dad who shocked me.

John Stone, the same man who was a leading financial adviser and owner of the largest investment firm in the Midwest, the man who followed his routines like gospel, without deviation, who volunteered at the local homeless shelter and held me every single time I cried, stepped up...

“I knew you would find me,” I told him, clutching at his wrists, the gun still held in one hand as I did so.