Page 49 of Ruthless Grace

I don’t give him a second glance.

I turn toward the carpeted corridor, my weapon held low at my side, my leather boots making zero sound against the thick Persian runner. The air in the hallway feels heavy, claustrophobic, charged with a lethal energy that makes my blood sing for violence.

Suite 102.

Every instinct I possess as a Don, every lesson in tactical restraint, is gone. If she is in there with another man... if some arrogant fool thinks he can lay his hands on the Donna who sits at my table... I will tear his chest open before he can scream her name.

I reach the heavy oak door at the end of the hall. The brass numbers 102 gleam under the dim sconce light.

I stop. The world shrinks down to the sound of my own ragged breathing, the cold steel frame of the weapon in my right hand, and the slow, steady tick-tick-tick of the watch on my wrist.

I don’t knock. I don’t call out her name.

I raise the gun to eye level, lock my front sight on the center mass of the door frame, plant my left boot beside the latch, and kick the door open with pure, explosive force.

BOOM!

The lock shreds from the wood. The door slams back against the interior wall.

“Get your fucking hands off my wife!” I roar, stepping across the threshold with my weapon drawn, eyes blazing, heart roaring for blood, ready to execute whoever is inside⁠—

19

GIA

The cold on my chest isn’t just the ultrasound gel. It’s an arctic chill that starts under my ribs and settles deep into my bones.

I’m lying back on the examination table in the private rear nook of the Prytania Street brownstone, the white paper sheet crinkling beneath my spine with every shallow breath I draw. My blouse and bra sit folded over the back of a velvet armchair across the room, leaving me covered only by a thin, pale blue paper gown draped open over my left breast.

Beside my shoulder, Dr. Vance glides the plastic transducer probe over my skin with steady, latex-gloved fingers. The high-frequency swish-and-hum of the machine fills the quiet room, the monitor’s grayscale light reflecting off Dr. Vance’s wire-rimmed glasses.

“Adjusting gain, Dr. Santoro,” Dr. Vance says softly, his voice low and clinical. “Measuring acoustic transmission now.”

I am a chief trauma surgeon. I have read a thousand ultrasounds, stitched a hundred torn arteries, and dictated pathology reports in my sleep. I know how to read density, tissue borders, and posterior shadowing.

And when I tilt my head three inches to the left and look at the screen, my throat locks tight.

There, embedded in the pale, fibrous ribbon of my chest tissue, is a dark, irregular nodule anchored near the pectoral wall. A jet-black shadow with jagged, unyielding margins.

“Eighteen millimeters,” Dr. Vance murmurs, clicking his trackball to set the digital calipers across the screen. “Irregular borders. Posterior acoustic attenuation.”

The air leaves my lungs. The room tilts.

Eighteen millimeters. Big enough to feel if I’d been looking. Small enough to hide under the daily adrenaline of OR shifts and mafia politics.

Suddenly I’m not in a private Garden District clinic. I’m a girl again, standing at the foot of the carved mahogany four-poster bed in my mother’s bedroom at the Santoro compound.

I’m watching Mama wither away under white lace sheets in our own home: the clicking of Nonna Rosa’s rosary beads by the window, the faint scent of dark chicory coffee mixing with sickroom lavender. I remember watching her voice fade to a whisper, her cheeks sinking into hollow pits, her wrists shrinking to brittle twigs while my weeping brothers held her hands. I stood uselessly at the edge of the Persian rug, holding an OR bag full of useless stethoscopes and IV tubing that couldn’t stop the cells from devouring her from the inside out.

That was the day I became the Santoro family’s miracle. The day I swore I would never let another person I loved bleed out without a fight.

It’s back, my mind screams, the sound deafening inside my own skull. It’s in my blood. It took her, and now it’s here.

My fingers grip the metal edge of the exam table so hard my knuckles turn translucent. My left wrist twitches, an involuntary pre-scrub roll against the paper sheet, trying to find a scalpel, a clamp, a retractor, anything to cut the terror out of my own chest.

Then the front of the suite shatters.

BOOM!