Page 11 of Ruthless Grace

He reaches into his dark charcoal suit jacket, pulls out a heavy, silver fountain pen, and unscrews the cap with a single, smooth twist of his fingers.

He doesn’t look down at the yellow legal pad. He doesn’t read a single line I just wrote. He doesn’t even glance at the Sunday Dinner Clause.

His dark, unreadable eyes stay locked entirely, relentlessly, onto mine.

“I don’t need to read it, Dr. Santoro,” Luca says softly, his low baritone dropping an octave, vibrating with a dark, velvet raspy heat that sets every nerve ending in my body on fire. “Your rules are the first thing you’ve ever given me voluntarily. Draft whatever boundaries you want, doctor. You’re still coming home with me.”

My breath hitches in my throat.

Luca leans forward, his silver pen meeting the yellow paper. In three swift, precise strokes, he scrawls his signature across the bottom of the draft—Don Luca Valentino—in thick, dark black ink.

He caps his pen, slides it back into his breast pocket, and steps back.

“Until the wedding, principessa,” Luca says.

He turns on his heel, his dark coat sweeping behind him, and walks out of Dante’s study without looking back, the heavy oak door clicking shut behind his exit.

The silence left in the room is suffocating.

I stand at the desk, my heart hammering against my ribs, staring down at the bold, black signature drying on the yellow legal pad.

Slowly, deliberately, I grip the top of the yellow page and tear it off the pad with a loud, sharp rip.

I turn toward Dante.

My eldest brother sits behind the desk, his head buried in his hands, his broad shoulders hunched under the crushing weight of what he has just done to his sister, and the vow he just broke to our dead mother.

“My marriage is not your absolution, Dante,” I say, my voice cold, flat, and stripped of all warmth. “I am doing this to protect Nico and this family. But don’t you dare look at me for forgiveness. You broke your vow to Mama, and that debt stays on your books.”

I turn and walk out of the study, my mother’s emerald ring turned tight against my knuckle, leaving all four of my brothers standing in the dark shadows of the room.

4

LUCA

The interior of St. Louis Cathedral smells of burning frankincense, melted beeswax, cold river stone, and ancient, rotting sins.

Sunlight streams through the high gothic stained-glass windows overhead, throwing jagged shafts of crimson, cobalt, and gold across the polished marble nave. High in the vaulted ceiling, the low, resonant hum of the pipe organ vibrates through the stone floorboards, rattling the pews with a deep, subterranean pulse.

I stand alone in the deep shadows of the rear aisle, leaning my shoulder against a granite pillar near the holy water stoups.

On my left wrist, the stainless-steel face of Matteo’s watch catches the crimson beam spilling from a depiction of Saint Jude. The shadow cast by the cathedral pillars tells me mid-morning mass has ended, and the private baptism is about to begin.

I stood in this exact cathedral once before, leaning against this exact granite pillar, in the same black suit I had already worn to two funerals of my own. It was Salvatore Santoro’s funeral. The Don of New Orleans was lying in an ornate mahogany casket at the altar rail, surrounded by three hundred weeping mobsters, federal agents in trench coats, and wreaths of flowers.

And standing at the pulpit, speaking the eulogy in a voice that didn’t tremble once, was Giada Santoro.

She had worn a simple black dress, her dark hair pinned back, her eyes completely dry. While her brothers looked ready to tear the city apart, she had stood over her father’s casket with the terrifying, unbroken composure of a woman carved from ice. She had called him Papa. She had called her brothers her protection. And then she had walked down the altar steps, passed my pillar, and looked straight into my eyes for one second too long.

A look that had burned a hole through my chest.

I unbutton my cuffs, turn them back, and roll my sleeves up in two deliberate, two-inch folds. Sleeve-roll weather. As the dark wool clears my left wrist, the silver seam of her field sutures gleams against my muscle in the candlelight.

The double doors at the rear vestibule swing open, letting in a sudden blast of humid French Quarter air, the distant jangle of street performers in Jackson Square, and the Santoro famiglia.

They move down the center aisle like a royal procession flanked by enforcers.

Dante leads the family, in a tailored black suit, holding his wife Cassia’s elbow. But the Don who marched into my courtyard with a drawn gun looks hollowed out today. His posture is rigid, his jaw set so tight his cheekbones look sharp enough to cut glass, and his right hand endlessly turns his father’s dark onyx signet ring against his palm.