Page 68 of Ruthless Grace

Silvano freezes, his gun raised, his jaw set, before slowly easing his weapon back into his holster on his Don’s absolute command.

Nico, panting like a rabid animal, his own knuckles split and dripping blood onto Nonna Rosa’s hardwood floor, pulls his fist back to strike Luca a second, brutal time. Luca stands unarmored, willing to take every blow my bloodline can throw at him to honor his pledge to me.

Before Nico’s second blow can land, I move.

I don’t scream. I don’t flinch. I step directly into the strike zone, planting my body flush against Luca’s chest, putting myself squarely between my twin brother’s bleeding fist and my husband’s bleeding mouth.

Nico’s fist halts an inch from my face, trembling violently in mid-air.

“Step back, Nico,” I command, my voice a quiet, razor-sharp order that carries absolute authority. “Touch him again, and I will personally sever your radial nerve.”

Nico pants, his chest heaving, his dark twin eyes locked onto mine, drowning in a mixture of unbridled rage, grief, and terror. “Gia... he kept you from us. You could have died!”

“He saved my life, Nico,” I say, my voice steady, unyielding, and ringing true across the quiet room. “He built a sterile procedure room under his own roof. He brought in Arthur Vance. He slept in an armchair night after night watching me breathe. And when I demanded that my family not see me vulnerable, he took my secret and guarded it with his life. He took your punch tonight because he swore an oath to respect my dignity. Now put your hand down.”

Nico stands there for three long, agonizing seconds, his knuckles dripping blood onto the floor. Slowly, his hand drops to his side. He steps back, turning his face away as a ragged, choked breath escapes his throat.

I turn around in the circle of my husband’s presence. Luca stands towering over me, a thick ribbon of blood running down his chin, his dark suit stained, his expression carved from unshakeable, devotional granite.

He doesn’t look at Nico. His gaze shifts across the head of the table, locking onto Dante.

Across the white linen tablecloth, Dante stands frozen, his hands braced flat against the mahogany, his breathing shallow. For the first time since my brother traded me, the crushing guilt in Dante’s eyes gives way to something unarmored and profound: a Don recognizing the man who bled for his sister without asking for absolution.

Luca holds Dante’s gaze in the stillness, unblinking, letting the silence carry a weight no written treaty could ever match. A silent, unyielding pact between two Dons forged in blood on Santoro ground.

Beside the table, Cassia watches Luca with a quiet, profound realization dawning in her eyes. Izzy and Mila look at the blood on Luca’s collar, then at the way my hand rests flat over his heart, reading the unspoken truth that no underworld treaty could ever forge: Luca Valentino did not treat me as a hostage. He took a bullet for my honor.

Luca reaches into his breast pocket, pulling out a white linen handkerchief, and calmly dabs at his split lip, his dark eyes shifting back down to mine.

“Pass the rigatoni, Dante,” Luca says, pulling my chair back out for me. “Your sister shouldn’t be standing on a healed incision.”

I meet his eyes, a faint, iron-willed smile touching my lips as I sit back down at the Santoro table—knowing that while the underworld outside is closing in, the man bleeding beside me has already burned the rest of the world to ashes.

28

LUCA

The iron-reinforced doors of the Valentino estate slam shut with a concussive boom that echoes through the high-vaulted foyer and rattles the glass in the overhead sconces. Silvano Moretti’s voice comes through the encrypted earpiece tucked in my collar: a flat, urgent directive ordering a Level-Two perimeter lockdown after the Russo scouts were spotted tracking our convoy off the expressway.

The deadbolts throw themselves home with a metallic crunch. The outside world—the wars, the leaking informants, the blood-soaked ledgers—vanishes behind three inches of solid oak and forged steel.

The Commission, her brothers, the whole underworld: none of them saw the armchair beside her bed. They didn’t see me sitting in the dark, watching the slow rise and fall of her chest, keeping a silent, terrifying vigil over a woman whose body was recovering from a surgeon’s scalpel.

When Dante stood frozen at Nonna Rosa’s table tonight with his hands braced flat against the wood, when Nico looked at me like he wanted to put a blade through my throat for keeping her oncology scare a secret, I took it. I stood there, carved from granite, taking their rage without offering a single word of defense. Because Gia asked for privacy, and a Don does not betray his Queen’s mandate.

My hand comes up, my fingers curling into the wool of my suit jacket as I turn slowly to face her in the quiet foyer.

Gia stands with her back flush against the dark paneling, her dark silk blouse unbuttoned at the throat, her chin lifted with that maddening, razor-sharp poise. In her dark eyes, there is no lingering exhaustion: only the fierce, challenging spark of a woman who just survived her final post-op evaluation and watched her husband take a room full of mobsters’ rage on her behalf.

I close the distance between us in two steps, but as my hands reach out for her hips, my fingers hesitate. My hands, the hands that have broken bones, signed execution orders, and managed an empire, hover an inch from her waist, trembling with a micro-tremor of pure, agonizing restraint.

My mother died in a pool of her own blood delivering me into this world, and my father spent thirty years reminding me that my existence cost him the woman he loved. The fear is buried deep in my bone marrow: if you touch what you love, you break it.

When I finally touch her, I do it like a man handling spun glass. My thumbs barely brush the curve of her waist. My touch is feather-light, painfully gentle, reverent to the point of torture.

Gia’s eyes narrow. She doesn’t lean into the soft, fragile touch. She freezes, her jaw locking into a hard, rigid line of pure Santoro defiance.

“What are you doing, Valentino?” she asks, her voice low, cool, and dropping into that razor-sharp surgical register that cuts straight through my armor.