Page 58 of Ruthless Grace

I stand up from the desk, leaving the transit ledgers behind, and walk upstairs to the east wing two at a time. When I push open the door to her suite, Gia is awake. She is propped against the velvet pillows of the king-size bed, her left arm held stiffly against her side, her dark eyes locking onto mine with sharp, immediate tension as I cross the room holding the burner phone out to her.

“It’s Vance,” I say quietly, handing her the phone. “He won’t talk to me. Patient privilege.”

Gia’s jaw tightens. She takes the phone from my palm. With a calm, practiced thumb, she presses the screen, taps the speaker icon, and places the device down on the dark wood nightstand right beside her contract.

“Dr. Vance. This is Dr. Santoro,” she says, her voice steady and controlled. “You’re on speaker with my husband present. Give me the results, Arthur.”

“Dr. Santoro,” Vance’s voice fills the quiet bedroom through the small speaker. “The core needle biopsy results are back, and they are indeterminate. Atypical cells—and the pathology is discordant with what we saw on the ultrasound.”

Gia’s breath catches. As a chief trauma surgeon, she knows exactly what that means. “Atypia. Discordant.”

“Correct,” Vance continues, his tone absolute. “Furthermore, the mass measures eighteen millimeters with irregular borders—well over our safety threshold for simply watching and waiting. Leaving a lump of that size and uncertainty in place is medically unsafe. A formal surgical removal—a lumpectomy—is non-negotiable. We need to take the entire mass out to get a clear, final diagnosis and ensure clean margins.”

Inconclusive. The ghost is not laid to rest. The pressure cooker seals tighter. Gia has to walk into an operating room and submit to a formal surgical excision while carrying the ghost of her mother, who withered away under white lace sheets in the Santoro compound.

“Schedule it,” Gia says, her voice dropping into the flat, unyielding register of a trauma chief. “Not at the hospital.” Her eyes find mine. “Luca built a full procedure suite here at the estate. We will prep it to your specifications and send you the inventory. I want it handled quietly, away from the general hospital board and my brothers. I am managing this privately.”

“Send me that inventory tonight,” Vance says. “Rest up, Dr. Santoro. I’ll see you in the OR.”

The line goes dead.

The electronic beep of the disconnected call echoes in the cavernous bedroom, leaving behind a heavy, suffocating stillness.

I don’t walk out. I don’t leave her to process the diagnostic limbo alone. I pull the armchair to her bedside and take her cold hand in mine, my fingers wrapping tightly around her knuckles.

“You heard him,” I murmur, my voice rough and low. “A lumpectomy.”

“I know what an inconclusive biopsy means, Luca,” she whispers, her dark eyes flashing with a brave, brittle light. “ I know the odds.”

“You don’t have to carry it alone,” I say, my thumb stroking the back of her hand. “Whatever Arthur finds in that OR... I am right here.”

She looks down at me, her expression softening just a fraction before she pulls her hand back to adjust her ice wrap. “I have charts to review, Valentino. Go back to your port manifests.”

I stay by her side, refusing to move an inch, until her breathing evens out into the heavy rhythm of recovery. Only then do I stand up, walk to the door, and head back down to my study.

I sit back down at my mahogany desk, staring at the old transit ledgers, the same manifests I have obsessively audited a thousand times, searching for the microscopic flaw in the Santoros’ execution route.

Before I can lose myself in the ledgers again, a heavy, urgent knock raps against the study doors.

“Don Luca,” Fausto Carbone’s voice calls through the wood, strained and laced with tension. “You have an unannounced visitor at the iron gates. Renzo Santoro. He claims he’s crossing over to deliver legacy shipping documents regarding the port alignment, but he insists on speaking with you face-to-face.”

I narrow my eyes, my hand dropping to the gun in my holster. Renzo Santoro. The Underboss. The man I believed pulled the trigger on my brother.

“Let him in,” I say, my voice dangerously calm. “Disarm him at the threshold, and place four men outside this door. If he so much as blinks wrong, put him down.”

The study doors swing open.

Renzo Santoro steps across the threshold, shaking the New Orleans downpour from his coat. He is unarmed, carrying only a worn, water-stained leather portfolio stuffed with archival folders and old photographic negatives. He wears the polished, cordial mask of a Santoro underboss playing estate politics, but his dark eyes are heavy with a grim, exhausted gravity.

“Don Valentino,” Renzo says smoothly, offering a brief, mock nod of respect. “A gloomy night for port audits.”

“Save the pleasantries, Underboss,” I snap, standing up slowly from my leather chair. “You don’t cross the river at midnight to talk about shipping lanes. What do you have?”

Renzo doesn’t flinch. He steps forward and drops the heavy leather portfolio onto the center of my desk blotter.

It hits the mahogany with a thud, scattering a few loose pages across my ledgers.

“Open it, Luca,” Renzo says, his cordial mask dropping entirely, his voice raspy and stripped of all posturing. “Read the forensic recovery notes from the night your brother died. The ones Dante buried so our families wouldn’t tear this city to pieces.”