Page 47 of Ruthless Grace

My thumb unconsciously traces the rim of my scotch glass.

The heavy oak door to my office swings open without a knock. Silvano Moretti steps across the threshold, his tailored coat heavy over his broad shoulders, his weathered face lined with the sharp, cynical gravity of the Old Guard.

“You’re ignoring the council, Luca,” Moretti says, tossing a leather briefing folder onto the corner of my desk. “Russo’s enforcers probed Berth 9 two hours ago. They tested our response time on the border line, and you’re sitting here auditing freight manifests yourself instead of ordering an immediate retaliation strike.”

“I audit the manifests because Berth 9 carries an internal leak,” I say, not raising my eyes from the log. “And I don’t launch strikes until I know which of my own capos sold the access code.”

Moretti leans over the desk, his calloused knuckles planted flat on the dark wood. “The capos are talking, Luca. The Old Guard is whispering that the Santoro girl has softened you. They say Don Valentino is too distracted playing house with his new bride to notice Russo circling our gates.”

I slowly raise my head. The temperature in the room drops to sub-zero. I lock my eyes onto Moretti’s until the older man imperceptibly stiffens.

“Tell the Old Guard that my marriage is not council business,” I rumble, my voice dropping into a flat, subterranean threat. “And if any capo whispers my wife’s name in a dark corner again, I will personally cut out his tongue and pin it to the board at Berth 9. Am I clear, Moretti?”

Moretti’s jaw flexes. He stares at me for two long seconds, searching my face for a flicker of hesitation. He finds none. He gives a single, stiff nod.

“Clear, Don Luca.”

He turns on his heel and exits, the heavy oak door clicking shut behind him.

Once the door closes, the quiet returns, heavy and suffocating. My left hand drifts across the desk.

Matteo was the brother who should have ruled. He had the light, the warmth, the effortless grace. I was the spare, the dark, calculated weapon built for the underworld’s wet work. When Matteo burned on that road, a piece of my soul died with him.

I swore over his cold grave that I would never again fail to protect someone who belonged to me. I would build a wall of iron and blood around my bloodline, and no one I loved would ever bleed again.

And now, Davide Russo is testing my borders. Hunting my wife.

I grip the steel edge of the watch on my wrist, the metal biting into my skin. Four minutes went missing the night my brother died, I think, a dark, ferocious resolve locking over my chest. Not one second goes missing for my wife. I unlinked the car tracker, I told her.

I gave her my live location. I gave her the illusion of victory. But I didn’t pull my tail team. A Don doesn’t leave his wife unmonitored when a rival family is probing his borders, especially when that wife possesses enough surgical precision and ice in her veins to slip a six-man security detail whenever she pleases.

The encrypted radio on my desk buzzes, breaking the quiet with a sharp burst of static.

“Don Luca,” Gianni’s voice comes through, low and hurried. “We have a detour.”

I don’t look up from the manifest. “Report, Gianni.”

“The Donna’s sedan just left the St. Charles corridor,” Gianni says. “She didn’t head toward the hospital. She bypassed the medical district entirely. She just pulled into the rear courtyard of an unmarked historic mansion on Prytania Street.”

My pen stops mid-line. The black ink bleeds into the paper, forming a dark, jagged stain.

“Prytania?” I ask. “What building?”

“The old Beauregard brownstone,” Gianni replies, the tension in his breath clear across the frequency. “It operates off the books, Don Luca. No sign on the door, no public listings. It’s an ultra-exclusive VIP hideaway. High-end clientele rent the suites by the hour under cash aliases. Affairs, politicians buying silence... off-the-record meetings.”

The blood in my veins turns to liquid lead.

A private VIP brownstone. Rented by the hour. Off the books.

A violent, blinding red fog detonates behind my eyes. The rational, calculating Don who manages deep-water berths and Commission truces vanishes in a single, terrifying heartbeat. In his place stands a feral, possessive monster whose chest feels like it’s being crushed under a hydraulic press.

An affair?

My jaw clenches so hard my molars ache. Has she been meeting someone in secret? A lover from her past? A Santoro loyalist? Or worse—is she meeting one of Russo’s lieutenants to hand over port schematics in exchange for her family’s total freedom?

If there is a man behind that door touching what is mine, he won’t live long enough to hear his own bones break.

“Seal the perimeter,” I growl into the mic, standing up so fast my heavy leather chair slams into the wood paneling behind me. “Nobody enters that courtyard. Nobody leaves. If a single soul attempts to step out of that building before I arrive, put a bullet in their knee.”