Page 8 of Ruthless Grace

3

GIA

The air inside my father’s study smells of old leather, stale cigar smoke, and suffocating guilt.

It’s mid-morning. I’ve had ninety minutes of sleep on the vinyl couch in the medical wing call room, two shots of Nonna’s dark chicory espresso, and zero time to process the fact that my mother’s name is living in our house again.

I step past the heavy mahogany door, my rubber-soled clog shoes quiet against the Persian rug. My thumbs are tucked deep into my coat pockets, my right thumb turning my mother’s emerald ring against my knuckle. One. Two. Three.

I stop dead three feet inside the threshold.

The room is packed like a war council, the atmosphere thick enough to slice with a scalpel. All four of my brothers are inside.

Dante sits behind Papa’s mahogany desk, his six-foot-two frame hunched over, his dark linen sleeves rolled to his elbows. The composure he wore last night while holding baby Lucia is completely gone, replaced by an ash-gray, haunted pallor. His scar-seamed hand endlessly turns Papa’s signet ring against the wood.

Renzo stands against the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf on the left, his heavy arms crossed over his chest, his jaw set so tight the silver scars along his neck look like wire. He smells of gun oil and sandalwood, his eyes fixed on the floorboards like he’s waiting for an explosion.

Marco leans against the stone fireplace mantel, his tablet tucked under his arm, his ink-stained knuckles white where his hands are shoved into his trousers pockets. He looks twenty-four going on forty, his mouth pressed into a flat, grim line.

And then there is Nico.

My twin is pacing the narrow strip of rug between the desk and the leather armchairs like a caged, rabid wolf. His jacket is off, his tie loosened, his dark hair a violent mess where his fingers have dragged through it. He isn’t performing. The smooth, charming Consigliere who can talk a judge out of a warrant is entirely gone. His chest heaves, his eyes bloodshot and terrifyingly wild.

Sitting in the high-backed wingback chair directly across from Dante’s desk is the fifth man in the room.

Luca Valentino.

He sits with an unhurried, arrogant stillness that makes my pulse spike into my throat. He wears a dark three-piece charcoal suit, immaculate and seamless, his broad shoulders filling the leather frame. His hands rest loosely on the carved armrests. On his left wrist, the stainless-steel face of his heavy watch catches the morning light. On his exposed forearm, my silver suture seam gleams against his skin.

He doesn’t look at Dante. He doesn’t look at Renzo or Marco.

The second the door seals behind me, Luca raises his head, and his dark, unreadable eyes lock dead-center onto mine.

“Gia,” Dante says. “Sit down.”

“I have rounds at Casa Lucia in twenty minutes, Dante,” I say, my voice flat and clinical. I don’t look at Luca. I look at the man sitting behind Papa’s desk. “Say what you brought me up here to say.”

Dante swallows hard. His eyes flicker with agonizing hesitation before he forces the words out.

“Russo has three Commission Don signatures,” Dante begins, the words forced out of his throat like crushed glass. “He’s invoking a favor clause from before any of us were born—claiming Papa never settled the debt for the financial backing and leverage Russo provided so Papa could outbid that old senator for Mama without starting a war. Russo is filing paper in Chicago to claim you in marriage. To Ettore Russo himself. A seventy-year-old man collecting a bride young enough to be his granddaughter off Papa’s tab.”

He gestures toward the draped corner by the window. “Before you ask—Izzy ran the verification herself.”

Izzy steps out from the shadow of the drapery. Her phone screen wakes in her palm, casting a cool blue light over her face before she darkens it again.

“I ran it myself, Gia. Twice.” Her voice isn’t flat the way I need it to be. “Sourcing, seals, provenance. It’s clean.” She crosses the rug and takes my hand, her cold fingers wrapping around mine. “I’m sorry. I wanted it to be fake. I looked for a way to make it fake.”

Her thumb taps the phone screen again, waking it: no notifications, no message. Her jaw tightens, her focus fracturing toward whatever is happening across town with Sofia. She squeezes my hand once, hard, and slips out the mahogany door.

I watch it click shut behind her. Sofia. I don’t call her back. I let it go.

I turn back to my brother. Dante drops the hammer.

“You’re marrying Luca Valentino in a few days,” Dante rasps, his hand crushing the dark wood of the desk. “It’s the only legal block under Cosa Nostra law. The second you take a Don’s name, Russo’s paper becomes scrap.”

The moment the full scope of Dante’s words settles, the study around me dissolves.

The sound of the room cuts out, replaced by the ghost of my mother’s bedroom.