Page 5 of Ruthless Grace

The truce gives him a seat at our Sunday table. It does not give him my mother’s courtyard at one in the morning: unescorted, uninvited, unannounced.

He doesn’t look like a man who knows the difference. He looks like a man standing on his own land.

His hair is jet-black, cut short and exact, framing a hard, clean jaw that looks like it has been carved from granite. Broad through the shoulders, carrying a lethal, quiet weight that reads, correctly, as a man who has never once needed to chase anything in his life because outcomes simply arrive at his desk.

My eyes drop to his left wrist.

Beneath his dark suit cuff, the gleam of stainless steel catches the faint interior light. And lower on his arm, exposed where his sleeve sits back against his wrist, is a pale, long seam of silver skin marked with immaculate suture scars.

My handwriting.

I stitched that forearm closed the night our families ran a joint raid on the port and his blood went slick on my hands. He has never had the scar revised. He has kept my field sutures etched into his flesh like a permanent mark.

Luca doesn’t move. He doesn’t reach for a weapon. He stands in the damp night air, built like patience, his lethal hands still in his pockets.

Then he raises his head.

His eyes find mine through the double-paned glass. Dark. Dark and still, giving away absolutely nothing, holding a suffocating silence that seems to swallow the entire corridor.

He isn’t looking at the medical wing security layout. He isn’t evaluating our compound defenses.

His dark, unreadable stare is locked entirely, relentlessly, onto me.

He looks at me the exact same way he looked at me across my father’s casket at St. Louis Cathedral: a look that lasted one second too long, a look that felt like a brand burned into the base of my throat.

My thumb moves involuntarily, turning my mother’s emerald ring against my knuckle. My oversized scrubs feel suddenly thin, completely useless against the dark heat radiating from his eyes across the glass.

He doesn’t speak. In all the seasons since the truce was signed, the Don of the Valentino family has never spoken a word to me. Everything he has ever said to me, entire, is one quiet sentence from a blood-slick room: Thank you, Dr. Santoro.

Luca holds my gaze for three excruciating beats.

Then, with the unhurried grace of a predator who owns the night, he tilts his head a fraction of an inch, a silent, dark acknowledgment.

He turns on his heel, his leather shoes making no sound against the damp stone of the courtyard, and vanishes into the dark shadows of Mama’s garden.

I stand alone at the scrub sink, my paper towel clutched in my hand, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.

2

LUCA

The damp heat of the East Courtyard wraps around my shoulders the second the glass doors seal behind me.

I step into the shadow of a live oak, my leather soles making no sound against the wet flagstones. I unbutton my charcoal suit jacket, pull back my left cuff, and check Matteo’s watch.

The stainless-steel face gleams under the moonlight, the second hand sweeping smoothly across the dial. Four minutes slow, as always.

The sky overhead is pitch-black, heavy with the dead hours after midnight. It has been only minutes since Dr. Giada Santoro delivered her niece. Minutes since I stood behind the glass, watching her roll her wrists, hiding that plush, ridiculous body of hers under oversized green scrubs.

The iron-reinforced door of the medical wing snaps open behind me.

Leather soles crunch violently on the gravel path. Fast. Heavy.

I don’t reach for the weapon beneath my armpit. I stand unhurried, hands tucked loosely into my suit trousers, watching Dante Santoro stride into the courtyard.

He’s sweating through his dark linen shirt, his sleeves rolled up, his jaw clenched so hard his molars look ready to snap. He smells of disinfectant, cigar smoke, and newborn baby powder. In his right hand, he’s holding a gun low against his thigh, his thumb flicking the safety off with a loud, metallic click.

Dante stops eight feet away. He doesn’t waste time. He raises the black barrel until it’s locked dead-center on my forehead.