Page 54 of Ruthless Grace

My jaw tightens until my molars ache. The Old Guard is screaming. Cosa Nostra is on fire. Russo is testing my gates.

I don’t call Moretti back. I don’t order an immediate strike. I type a single, ice-cold response onto the server: Lock down Berth 9. Contain the perimeter. I am offline for the next forty-eight hours.

I leave her door open and go down to my study.

Sitting on the corner of my mahogany desk is a thick leather binder containing municipal permit applications, border land deeds, and architectural schematics for the trauma hospital I bought in secret months ago. Casa Lucia Hospital.

I pick up the permits, swing the harbor painting back from the concealed wall vault, and enter the code: 04–12–88.

The heavy titanium bolts retract with a soft, mechanical click. I place the Casa Lucia permits deep inside the private vault, shutting the steel door and locking my grand calculation behind steel and stone. It is the hospital I am building in secret to give her everything she dreamed of, but right now, my only duty is standing guard over her breath.

I climb back up to her bedroom, grab the massive, dark velvet armchair sitting in the corner, and drag it across the dark herringbone floorboards with a heavy, muted scrape. I place the armchair directly beside her mattress, two inches from her nightstand, blocking the path between her bed and the rest of the room.

I strip off my wet tie, unbutton the top three buttons of my dress shirt, roll my white sleeves up to my elbows in two clean folds, and sit down in the chair.

I lean back, plant my forearms on the velvet armrests, and lock my dark gaze onto her face.

Gia stares at me, her breath hitching. “What are you doing?”

“I am sitting here,” I say.

“For how long?”

“For forty-eight hours,” I tell her, my dark eyes unblinking, unarmored, and burning with a possessive, unyielding devotion that no contract on earth can erase. “Until Arthur Vance calls with that lab report, I don’t leave this chair. I don’t step out of this room. You don’t get to walk through your mother’s ghost alone anymore, principessa. Not under my roof.”

Gia stares at me for a long, agonizing second. Her jaw twitches, her lower lip trembling for a microscopic fraction of a heartbeat before she bites it back. She looks at the Don sitting in a velvet chair beside her bed, a man who engineered her family’s debt, signed her rules blind, and is now taking up an iron guard over her pain.

She doesn’t tell me to leave.

She slowly reaches her right hand out from under the cashmere throw, sliding her icy fingers across the dark nightstand until her knuckles rest against the arm of my chair.

I reach out and cover her hand with mine, my scar-seamed palm wrapping around her fingers.

The forty-eight-hour clock begins now. And I am not moving an inch.

21

GIA

The bedroom is shrouded in deep, amber shadows, quiet except for the relentless drumming of rain against the tall leaded windows. I’m lying propped against a stack of velvet pillows, the cashmere throw pulled up to my waist, my right hand holding a gel ice wrap firmly over the thick pressure bandage on my left chest.

Beneath the sterile tape, my chest aches with a dull, throbbing burn, the somatic reminder of a steel needle harvesting three tissue cores from an eighteen-millimeter mass.

Sitting two feet from my mattress, unmoving in the dark velvet armchair, is my husband.

Luca has been sitting there for hours, his suit jacket discarded, his white shirt unbuttoned at the throat, his dark eyes fixed on my face with a protective intensity. He hasn’t slept. He has left the room only twice, once to shower and once to bring me food. He has simply kept vigil over my pain, giving me the one thing no one in my family ever offered: a place to set the weight down.

Then, the silence shatters.

The encrypted tactical radio resting on the arm of his chair buzzes, breaking the quiet with a harsh burst of static.

“Don Luca,” Fausto Carbone’s voice comes through, fast and strained over the frequency. “We have an ambush on the St. Charles corridor. Donna Giada’s dark gray sedan was just rammed by two heavily armed vehicles—a six-man Russo hit squad. They boxed the sedan in a kill-zone and opened fire with automatic weapons.”

My pulse spikes into my throat. The ice pack in my hand suddenly feels like lead.

To keep Russo’s informants from realizing I was bedridden at the estate following my biopsy, I had sent my driver out in my sedan along my routine route to Casa Lucia to drop off my surgical charts and OR schedule. Russo’s spotters saw my car running its usual night route, assumed I was inside taking an emergency trauma call, and took the shot.

Luca doesn’t yell. He doesn’t curse.