Page 6 of Ruthless Grace

“Give me one fucking reason,” Dante snarls, “why I shouldn’t blow your head off right here, Valentino. Cazzo, you’re standing in my mother’s garden in the middle of the night.”

I look at the dark eye of the barrel, then raise my eyes to his. My pulse doesn’t even spike.

Fear is a luxury I buried the day Matteo came home burned past recognition.

And he won’t fire. He took a hollow-point through the shoulder on the night our families ran that joint raid on the port, pulling my bleeding men off a loading dock that wasn’t even his to defend.

I hauled him out through the river water with his blood running hot and wet down my spine, and neither of us has ever said a word about it since. Men who drown in the same mud don’t blow each other’s brains out in rose gardens.

Which is the exact, agonizing part I can’t get past.

He did that for me. And then he signed the order that put my brother in a box.

“Because your guards at the south gate are useless coglioni,” I say smoothly. “And because if you pop off that gun, you’ll wake your wife, scare your newborn kid, and miss the reason I breached your perimeter.”

Dante’s grip on the frame tightens until his knuckles go white. “Stronzo. You have ten seconds to tell me why you’re on Santoro ground before I put you in the dirt beside my father.”

“Matteo died on this day,” I say softly.

The courtyard goes dead silent.

Dante’s jaw tightens, a flicker of dark, bloody history passing between us. My brother Matteo’s car was ambushed on a road he had no business being on. My father took one look at what came out of it, had a stroke, and dropped dead on the spot. Before the next sunrise, I buried two men and took a crown I never wanted. It took Salvatore Santoro’s own funeral, years later, to put me across a table from his son and sign the truce that kept New Orleans from turning into a graveyard.

“Vaffanculo,” Dante spits out, though his gun hand lowers just half an inch. “I know what fucking date it is.”

“Then you know I don’t walk into enemy territory just to breathe your air, Dante,” I say, stepping out of the oak’s shadow. “Russo is probing.”

“The port is locked down,” Dante snaps.

“The port is wide open and you know it,” I shoot back, my tone sharpening into cold steel. “Russo’s figli di puttana scouted berths four through seven twice this week. They aren’t looking at container manifests, Dante. They’re looking at you. Your father’s in the ground, your Underboss is distracted with his new fiancée, and you just brought a baby into this house. You look soft.”

Dante’s eyes flare with dark, dangerous heat. “Russo doesn’t have the fucking balls to test our joint line.”

“He doesn’t need balls if he uses Commission paper,” I reply.

I reach inside my suit jacket. Dante’s gun snaps right back to my nose, but I pull out a single, folded sheet of encrypted comms paper, stamped with a red wax seal, and flick it onto the wrought-iron bench between us. The bench where his father proposed to his mother.

“Read it, stronzo.”

Dante keeps the gun trained on my chest with his right hand while his left scoops up the paper. He snaps it open.

I watch his eyes track the forged Italian script. The fake intercept I spent months and forty grand constructing.

“Before you were born,” I say, my voice smooth as silk, “your father stole Lucia out from under that old senator’s ring. Russo provided the guns and the blood to clear the path for Salvatore to secure your mother.”

Dante’s eyes lock onto the paper, scanning the fabricated clause.

“Russo is claiming Salvatore never settled the tab for that favor,” I continue coldly. “And now he’s invoking an old Cosa Nostra debt clause—demanding Salvatore’s unwed daughter in marriage. To Ettore Russo himself. Settlement for the blood that saved your mother.”

I watch the exact second the trap springs.

The color drains from Dante’s face. His eyes go black with a feral rage. The paper crinkles violently in his fist as his grip crushes it into a ball.

“Madonna Santissima...” Dante breathes, his voice shaking with pure murder. “This is fucking garbage! My father paid every debt before he died! Russo can’t dig up a favor from before I could walk and put my sister against it⁠—”

“He can invoke whatever the fuck Chicago signs off on if you don’t have a legal block,” I cut in. “Salvatore left loose ends. Russo has three Don signatures backing the paper. If he files it this week, your sister gets summoned to the Gulf council by the end of the month.”

“I’ll kill the bastard,” Dante snarls, stepping into my space, the barrel of his gun shoving hard against the center of my charcoal vest. “I’ll take Renzo and Nico, march into his warehouse tonight, and tear his fucking heart out⁠—”