Page 1 of Ruthless Vow
PROLOGUE
DANTE
The incense coats my throat like ash.
St. Louis Cathedral, crowded wall-to-wall. Standing room only. The stained glass throws colored light across the pews like judgment, and every time the doors open, the July heat rolls in, thick enough to choke on.
Half of them have come to pay respects to Salvatore Santoro. The underboss from the Ninth Ward who clawed his way to Don of the most powerful family in New Orleans. Who held it with iron fists for thirty years.
The other half have come to watch his son stumble.
I don’t stumble.
I sit in the front pew with my spine straight and my face carved from stone. I give them nothing. Let them look. Let them measure. Let them wonder if the Santoro empire crumbles now that Papa is in the ground.
It won’t. I’ll bury every last one of them before I let that happen.
My hands want to shake. I don’t fucking let them.
Renzo sits at my right. Silent. Dangerous. His eyes never stop moving, scanning the crowd, cataloging threats, doing whatRenzo does. My brother has mastered violence to the point that I forget he’s capable of anything else.
Nico is to my left. No smile today. Even Nico knows better than to perform at a funeral. But his grief looks careful. Rehearsed. Like he’d practiced in the mirror until the angles were right.
Marco stands apart from the rest of us. Fists clenched. Jaw locked. He has the same look Papa used to get right before he hurt someone. That coiled, contained fury that charges the air, lifts the hair on every neck within ten feet.
Gia touches his arm. He leans into it, just a fraction, before catching himself and pulling back. She’s the only one he lets close.
When Gia walks to the pulpit in her black dress, surgeon’s fingers steady at her sides, I hold my breath. My youngest sibling, twenty-seven years old, saving lives in the OR while her brothers end them in warehouses.
Don’t crack, I think. Don’t give them anything they can use.
She doesn’t.
She talks about Papa before the grief hollowed him out. She tells them about him sitting in the front row at her medical school graduation, the only time Papa ever left New Orleans. About how he called herprincipessauntil she told him she was too old for it.
“He called me that anyway,” she says, her voice clear over the silent cathedral. “Every time. Until the end.”
Her voice cracks. Once. She keeps going.
That’s my sister. Tougher than half the men in this room. And every one of these bastards is watching for the fracture.
The room is still. Every enemy, every ally, every shark circling our bleeding family. All of them hanging on every word she says.
She doesn’t mention the years after Mama died.
The study door always closed. The whiskey at three in the morning. The way Papa looked through us like we weren’t there, searching for someone else in our faces.
Some truths aren’t for funerals.
Gia knows exactly who’s listening and what they’ll do with a weakness if they find it.
After the service, they gather for me. The receiving line stretches across the cathedral steps, and I shake palms until mine aches. Sweat gathers at my collar. The gray sky presses down like a lid.
My jaw hurts from clenching. I can’t remember the last time I ate.
Three of these men are lying to my face. I know which ones. They don’t know I know. That’s the only advantage that matters right now.
The Benedettis send a representative. Not their Don. A consigliere with a slick smile and a soft handshake. The kind of grip that says he’s measuring my bones, wondering if they’ll snap.
