Page 14 of Ruthless Grace

“Valentino,” she replies, her voice smooth, flat, and colder than the marble font behind her. “I see you survived the holy water.”

A dark, genuine amusement flickers in the pit of my stomach. “Barely,” I say softly, my voice dropping an octave so only she can hear the deep, velvet rasp beneath the words. “The font was cold. My estate pool is warmer.”

Gia’s jaw tightens, her left thumb turning my ring once against her knuckle. “I don’t swim in enemy waters, Valentino.”

“You will tomorrow,” I reply.

I pull back my left cuff and check Matteo’s watch one final time.

I raise my eyes to Dante. The Don who sold his sister sits on a mountain of guilt that will eat his soul alive for the rest of his reign, and we both know it.

“Tomorrow at the altar, Santoro,” I say, my voice cool and absolute as a court order. “Don’t keep your sister waiting.”

Dante’s jaw clenches so hard I hear his teeth grind together, but he doesn’t say a word. He can’t. He signed the paper. He took the trade.

I turn on my heel, my dark suit coat sweeping behind me, and push through the oak doors of St. Louis Cathedral into the sweltering New Orleans sun.

Outside, Jackson Square is alive with music, street painters, and tourists, the Mississippi river air thick with heat and jasmine.

I walk toward my waiting black sedan parked at the curb, my heart beating with a quiet, feral, unholy triumph.

Tomorrow at the altar, she takes my ring and my name. And after the reception, she officially leaves her family’s East Wing to step behind my iron gates.

And she is never walking away.

5

GIA

The cold bite of steel against skin is something I understand. A scalpel in a wet glove, a hemostat slipping past a carotid sheath. Those have logic. They have parameters.

A stranger’s copper-tipped tape measure pulling tight across my ribs does not.

“You’ve lost weight, chère,” Marguerite Beaumont says, her French accent clipped and dry as old parchment, dropping into the back of my neck before I can even unbutton my collar. “Or perhaps you simply never had any meat on you to begin with. Stand straight. Do not slouch like a student who has spent thirty-six hours over a cadaver.”

I don’t slouch. I don’t breathe in, either. I keep my spine locked into the rigid posture I learned the day I stood at the St. Louis Cathedral pulpit in black wool, holding my family together while my father went cold in the ground.

Out in the front showroom of Marguerite’s Boutique on Magazine Street, the air smells of old cedar, machine oil, and the sweet rot of Magazine Street heat rolling in every time the front door shifts. Izzy is sitting on a velvet settee near the window, her phone face-up on her knee.

Every forty seconds, the screen lights up blue, she looks down, and the micro-tension in her jaw resets. Nothing from Sofia.

The rehabilitation facility across town, the quiet apartment downtown where her sister is trying to live with a mother who survived a bottle only to drown in silence: it’s all running on a razor’s edge in Izzy’s head. She split herself in two to sit here with me today, because that is what you do when your soon-to-be sister-in-law is being fitted for a marriage she didn’t ask for.

Nobody asks how I’m holding up. Not Dante, who is currently enduring Nonna Rosa’s glacial silence across an empty kitchen table. Not Nico, who went nuclear in the study and hasn’t slept since.

And certainly not Marguerite, who is currently pinning three yards of charcoal silk foulard across my left shoulder with the terrifying efficiency of a woman who has buried half of New Orleans and dressed the other half for leverage.

“I want something plain,” I say, my voice flat, operating at the exact pitch I use when calling out instrument trays to a scrub nurse during an arterial bleed. “Dark. Forgettable. A high neck, long sleeves, no embellishment. Something that disappears the second I walk into a room.”

Marguerite stops. The brass-headed pin between her teeth clicks against her molar. She smells perpetually of beeswax and pressed linen, and possesses the only pair of eyes in the Catholic parish that do not soften when they look at a Santoro name.

“You are asking me for a shroud,” she says, her fingers pausing against my collarbone.

“I am asking for clothing.”

“You are asking to hide,” Marguerite corrects, stepping back with a sharp rustle of wool skirts. She crosses her arms, her gaze sweeping down my frame with clinical, pitiless assessment. “And you have come to the wrong shop. I dressed your mother for the Broussard. I dressed her again when she went into the ground behind the compound. And I dressed you in black wool to bury your father. I know what this house does to its women.”

My thumb moves automatically, turning the emerald-and-gold ring on my right hand one slow quarter-turn against my knuckle. I don’t touch the four-carat black diamond sitting on my left ring finger. I leave it cold, unacknowledged, an enemy anchor I refuse to soothe.