Page 18 of Ruthless Grace

I look down at her: at the line of her throat, the stubborn tilt of her chin, the absolute refusal to bow. She thinks her clauses are a fortress. She thinks her clauses are going to keep her safe from me.

She doesn’t realize that every sharp word out of her mouth just makes me want to blockade every road and berth out of this city to keep her.

“Tomorrow,” I say, “you come home with me, Giada. You won’t be wearing the dress. And you won’t be hiding behind your paper.”

She holds my gaze, her chest rising and falling fast under the black velvet, refusing to back down.

“We’ll see who survives it, Luca,” she says, turns on her heel, and walks back into the house alone.

7

LUCA

Cold water over my face.

I lean over the marble basin in the dark, the quiet in this house so thick it feels like a physical weight against my spine. No staff in my bedroom at this hour. I’ve dressed myself since I could reach the closet rod, and I’m not changing that today.

I pull on the charcoal wool trousers, zip them, and button a crisp white cotton shirt. I roll the sleeves back: two clean, exact two-inch folds on each forearm. In this house, my detail reads my sleeve rolls like weather forecasts. Sleeves down means business as usual. Sleeves up means someone’s getting buried or a shipping route is getting rewritten. Today, they’re up because my skin feels too tight.

I reach for the watch on the nightstand. Matteo’s watch.

The leather strap is dark and worn soft by time and sweat. I wrap it around my left wrist and buckle it. The second hand sweeps across the black dial with a steady, mechanical tick.

Right now, out on the Mississippi River, the sun is cutting through the river fog over the shipping berths. On my wrist, the hour is already four minutes behind the world.

I don’t fix the time. I’ve never fixed it. You fix a watch, you pretend the past didn’t happen. You pretend four minutes didn’t separate my brother from a working engine and a fireball on a road only a handful of men knew he was taking.

I fasten my cuff links, staring at my reflection in the dark windowpane.

My father, Alberto, never looked at me without seeing the woman I killed coming into this world. Alessandra Valentino bled out on a white linen bed in this very estate, delivering the spare while her husband stood in the hallway and prayed for her to live. He got me instead. A kid who grew up learning the unwritten law of this family: a woman who loves a Valentino ends up in a grave.

I pull my suit jacket over my shoulders, adjust the collar, and step out into the hall.

The east wing of the Valentino estate doesn’t smell like chicory coffee, garlic, or sweet jasmine. It doesn’t smell like Nonna Rosa’s kitchen. It smells like lemon polish, cold stone, old cedar, and decades of empty rooms. There are no women here. There haven’t been since Alessandra died.

I walk down the wide herringbone floor and stop outside the heavy oak doors at the end of the corridor.

I push them open. The master suite is immaculate. Natural light filters through the sheer drapes, hitting the dark floor. High-thread-count sheets on a king-sized bed. Emerald-and-gold throw blankets folded at the foot. A brass-framed vanity.

Her suite.

I stand in the doorway, my hands tucked into my trousers, my chest tight. I spent weeks bringing contractors in through the back gates in secret while I was setting up the Commission leak for Dante. I told my lieutenants it was a private office expansion.

The adjoining door on the far wall leads to my own bedroom. That one stays shut. I take the main staircase down to the west corridor instead, stop at the reinforced mahogany door, and unlock it.

The smell hits me instantly: sterile lidocaine, isopropyl alcohol, unscented soap, and cold stainless steel.

A private procedure room. An adjustable examination table sitting under an overhead LED surgical light. Stainless steel instrument trays lined with sterile towels. On the supply shelves, arranged with mathematical precision: her glove size, her sutures, sterile clamps, vials, surgical sponges.

Everything stocked to her exact specifications. Her glove size. Her preferred sutures.

I stand in the doorway and I can’t even explain to myself why I built it.

Principessa thinks she’s walking into a cage across the river. She thinks I engineered this trade purely to strip her family of their pride and lock her away. She doesn’t know I built her an OR in my own house before I even made her brother sign the paper.

I lock the door behind me and step into my study.

Silvano Moretti is already standing near the mahogany desk, holding two dark leather folders. His hair is gray at the temples, his face carved by a lifetime of street wars and harbor disputes.