Page 61 of Ruthless Grace

“You should sleep,” I murmur, closing my eyes against the sudden, heavy exhaustion pulling me back under. “You’ve been in that chair for days, Luca.”

“I don’t sleep,” he replies flatly. He pulls the armchair an inch closer to the mattress, planting his boots firmly on the herringbone floor, and retakes his watch. “I guard.”

Midnight bleeds into the early hours of the morning, and the post-op pyrexia hits.

A sharp, shivering fever settles into my bones. My teeth chatter against each other, the chills writhing beneath my skin while a hot, burning sweat breaks out across my forehead. The surgical site beneath the compression dressing throbs in rhythm with my spiking pulse.

I toss restlessly against the damp sheets, a low, frustrated moan escaping my throat as the fever fog muddies my thoughts, dissolving the clinical armor I spent a lifetime building.

“Gia.”

A large, warm hand covers my forehead, checking my temperature with gentle, reverent familiarity.

“Luca,” I whimper, my eyes flying open in the dark. The fever is stripping away my defenses, tearing down the walls I erected against my husband, my family, and my own history. “I’m cold. God, I’m so cold.”

He doesn’t hesitate. He kicks the armchair back, climbs right onto the edge of the mattress, and pulls me up into his arms.

He is so careful, sliding his large frame around my right side, tucking my head beneath his chin while keeping his left arm locked rigidly away from my sore chest wall. He wraps the heavy cashmere throw and a down quilt around my shaking shoulders, pulling my burning body flush against his hard, heat-radiating chest.

“I’ve got you, cara,” he whispers against my hair, his Italian slipping past his teeth like a prayer. “I’m right here. Let it burn out.”

“I missed it,” I sob suddenly, the words bursting out of my chest before I can swallow them back. The fever has unlocked the vault, pushing past the surgical protocols, past the Boss spine, straight into the dark, festering wound I have carried since the night my father died.

Luca freezes, his hand pausing where it was rubbing soothing circles into my back. “Missed what, Giada?”

“The labs,” I whisper, my voice cracking into a ragged, broken gasp against his collarbone. Tears stream down my cheeks, hot and humiliating, soaking into his white dress shirt. “The months Papa was fading. Everyone said grief. I was a doctor with no authority in that house, but I read every workup they ran on him—over the attendings’ shoulders, off printouts I wasn’t supposed to touch.”

Luca holds me tighter, his breathing stopping entirely as he listens to the confession I have never given to a living soul, not to Dante, not to Nico, not to anyone in this city.

“There were microscopic markers—trace alkaloids in his blood work that didn’t fit grief, didn’t fit his heart, didn’t fit any renal chart I had ever studied,” I choke out, my fingers curling frantically into the fabric of his shirt, bunching the cotton in my fists. “I saw the anomaly, Luca. And I let the men with the titles explain it away as kidney failure. I trusted their monitors more than my own instincts. Then his heart stopped at Mama’s table, and my hands were on his chest, and I still didn’t see it. My father was poisoned under my nose... and I saw the proof first, and I said nothing.”

The secret is out. The guilt that has been eating my soul alive since the day of my father’s funeral is finally laid bare in the dark.

I wait for him to speak. I wait for the Don to confirm my failure, to tell me that a woman who couldn’t even save her own father has no business wearing a surgeon’s ring or a Donna’s title.

Luca doesn’t move.

He doesn’t issue a cold judgment. He doesn’t offer hollow, meaningless platitudes.

Instead, his scar-seamed hands slide around my back, lifting me just a fraction higher against his chest, anchoring my weight entirely against his own strength. He presses his lips to my temple, kissing away the hot sweat of my fever, his heart hammering a heavy, thunderous rhythm against my ear.

“You were his daughter first, Giada,” Luca rumbles, his voice thick, rough, and breaking with an uncharacteristic, raw emotion. “You were a girl with a textbook standing in a house full of monsters who had been playing this game for decades. You don’t get to carry the weight of every death in this city—and you damn sure don’t get to blame yourself for a poison planted by cowards.”

I let out a long, ragged exhale, the suffocating weight in my chest loosening just a fraction under the immovable mass of his conviction.

“When you called me principessa in the brownstone,” I murmur softly into the dark, my fingers resting against his lapel, “it broke something inside me. My Papa used that word. It was his name for me until the day he died. Hearing it from you felt like a weapon—a reminder of every debt I was traded to pay.”

Luca’s arms tighten around me instantly, his breathing hitching against my hair.

“I didn’t know,” he whispers, his voice rough against my forehead. “I swear to you, cara, I didn’t know it was your father’s name for you. It was just a jab—something to force you to look at me instead of through me. The second I saw you under Vance’s lights, I was done playing games. I swore I’d never use that word against you again.”

“Thank you,” I breathe against his throat.

He isn’t holding me hostage. He is holding my guilt so I don’t drown in it.

I don’t pull away. I slide my right arm around his waist, pressing my forehead into the crook of his neck, breathing in the scent of cedarwood, gun oil, and rain that clings to his skin.

As the fever slowly breaks and the first pale sliver of dawn begins to bleed through the leaded glass windows of the estate, I let my eyes drift shut against his chest—not running, not fighting, but finally, truly resting in the dark.