Page 60 of Ruthless Grace

23

GIA

The hum of the laminar flow hood in the estate’s private procedure room sounds too much like a morgue table.

I stand before the stainless-steel scrub sink on the ground floor of the west wing, my hands held waist-high, watching sterile water cascade over my knuckles. Behind me, Dr. Arthur Vance is tightening his surgical mask, the crisp rustle of his sterile gown echoing off the white-tiled walls.

This room shouldn’t exist in a nineteenth-century New Orleans mafia estate. When Luca first showed it to me weeks ago, I mocked him for turning a home into a makeshift field hospital. Now, with an eighteen-millimeter mass anchored in my breast tissue and an inconclusive core biopsy hanging over my head like a guillotine, I am terrifyingly grateful for its surgical precision.

I turn off the faucet with my elbow, letting the sensor air-dry my skin before sliding my hands into sterile gloves.

By the reinforced mahogany doorway stands Luca Valentino.

He isn’t wearing his suit jacket. His white dress shirt is unbuttoned at the collar, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, revealing the heavy silver scars crisscrossing his forearms. He hasn’t spoken a word since we walked down the hall.

He stands motionless against the jamb, dark tailoring and lethal reputation, playing the part of a sterile guardian. He locked down the entire west wing hours ago, ensuring no servant, no guard, and no ghost from across the river could penetrate this corridor while I am on the table.

“Ready, Dr. Santoro?” Arthur asks quietly, picking up a skin marker from the tray.

I take a slow, deep breath, letting the familiar scent of iodine and isopropyl alcohol steady the manic racing of my pulse. I have opened hundreds of chests, clamped hundreds of bleeding arteries, and stared death in the face while holding a beating heart in my palm.

Today, my own chest is the table.

“Let’s go,” I say, my voice steady as steel.

I walk over to the operating table, climb up, and lie back on the padded vinyl. The overhead surgical lights snap on, casting a brilliant, blinding white glare directly down over my left side. I position my arms on the armboards, my left wrist executing that small, tight pre-scrub roll against the sheet, an unconscious prayer for steady hands that aren’t mine.

Arthur steps up to my left side, prepping the skin with a wide, cold sweep of brown betadine.

Across the table, entering my peripheral vision, Luca moves silently forward. He doesn’t cross the sterile boundary. He doesn’t touch my face. Instead, he reaches out with his scar-seamed hand and wraps his fingers around my right hand, the one not strapped to the board.

His grip is absolute. Unyielding. A physical anchor keeping me tethered to the room as Arthur administers the local anesthetic, followed swiftly by the cool, heavy fog of intravenous sedation.

Count backward, Gia, my mind tells me as the ceiling lights begin to blur. Ten... nine... eight...

When I surface, the white glare of the operating lights is gone.

The room has shifted into the deep, amber shadows of the master suite upstairs. The heavy velvet curtains are drawn against the night, and the rhythmic, steady tick-tick-tick of Luca’s watch echoes softly through the dark.

My eyes flutter open. My chest feels tight, bound in a thick, rigid web of surgical tape and compressive gauze over a fresh, throbbing incision. A clear, cold gel ice wrap rests directly over the dressings, deadening the raw ache radiating toward my pectoral wall.

I am lying in my own bed, propped against a stack of velvet pillows.

Sitting in the dark velvet armchair two feet away is my husband.

Luca hasn’t changed his shirt. He sits hunched forward, his forearms resting on his knees, his dark eyes fixed entirely on my face. The moment he sees my eyelids flicker, his massive frame straightens, tension breaking across the hard planes of his jaw.

“You’re awake,” he says, his voice a low, gravelly rasp that vibrates through the quiet room.

“The specimen?” I whisper, my throat dry as dust. My tongue feels like sandpaper.

“Arthur checked the tissue in the procedure room,” Luca answers, standing up and pouring a glass of water from the bedside pitcher. He slides his arm gently beneath my shoulders, lifting me just enough to press the rim against my lips without putting an ounce of pressure on my left chest. “It’s all out, Gia. Every trace.”

I drink greedily, the cool water soothing my parched throat. “And the permanent section? The final pathology?”

“It’s being couriered to the lab tonight,” Luca says, lowering me back onto the pillows with infinite care. “Two days for the definitive panel, Giada. Then we know.”

Limbo. The surgery is over, but the ghost is still breathing. The tissue is sitting in a formalin jar across the river, and until Arthur calls with the final verdict, I am suspended between the woman I was before the ultrasound and the patient I am right now.