Page 73 of Ruthless Grace

I look inside the dark, leather-lined cabin.

The back seat is empty.

“GIA!” The name tears from my chest, not the command of a Don, but the unhinged, feral roar of a man whose heart has just been ripped out of his ribcage with a dull knife.

There is no answer. Only the quiet, mocking hiss of steam escaping the car’s crushed engine.

I step up onto the running board and lean into the cabin. Sitting on the center of the dark leather floorboard is Gia’s black surgical bag. It is unzipped, knocked on its side. Her sterile stainless-steel scalpels, her boxes of nitrile gloves, and her surgical shears are scattered across the floor mat.

I drop to one knee on the wet asphalt, my large, trembling hand reaching into the wrecked car to pick up her bag. I pull the leather strap against my chest, burying my face in the dark material.

The scent hits me like a physical blow: clean unscented soap, crisp cotton, and the faint, sweet trace of her lavender perfume.

My Don persona—the cold architecture, the horrifying stillness, the decades of calculated patience—shatters into a million jagged, unholy pieces. The fear of my father’s house, the ghost of my mother dying in blood, the years I spent grieving Matteo. It all condenses into a single, radioactive wave of absolute madness.

They took my Queen.

A second convoy of Valentino security sedans screeches to a halt along the perimeter, blue emergency lights flashing through the gray downpour.

Fausto Carbone steps out of the lead vehicle, pulling his raincoat around his broad shoulders as he hurries toward the crash site. Silvano stands beside him, his sidearm drawn, sweeping the surrounding warehouse roofs.

“Don Luca!” Fausto calls out, his voice thick with performative alarm as he approaches the car. He stops three feet away, taking in the executed guards and the empty rear seat. “Christ... they hit the convoy at the narrowest point of the access lane.”

I don’t stand up immediately. I remain on one knee beside the open door, Gia’s surgical bag clutched in my fist, my head bowed against the rain.

“How did they get past Detail Three?” Fausto mutters, reaching into his pocket for his radio terminal. “It had to be an opportunistic strike, Don Luca. Ettore Russo’s scouts were probing Magazine Street yesterday. They must have picked up her departure on the river port cameras when she left the estate gates⁠—”

“Shut your mouth, Fausto,” I say.

My voice isn’t loud. It is a flat, dead whisper, so devoid of human emotion that Fausto instantly freezes, his thumb hovering over his radio buttons.

Slowly, I stand up. The rain pours down my face, running down my jaw, plastering my dark hair to my forehead. My charcoal suit jacket is drenched, but I don’t feel the cold. I don’t feel the rain. I feel only the white-hot, apocalyptic fire consuming my veins.

I turn around and face Fausto.

“A port camera doesn’t give you the exact clearance timestamp of an estate gate,” I say, stepping closer to him until my chest eclipses his line of sight. “A river scout doesn’t know which vehicle in a three-car decoy convoy holds the Chief Surgeon. A lucky hit squad doesn’t bring a military frequency jammer that deploys thirty seconds before the lead car reaches the bridge.”

Fausto’s eyes flicker, a microscopic, two-millimeter shift of his pupils that lasts less than a tenth of a second. “Don Luca... you think⁠—”

“I know, you fucking traitor,” I growl, stepping directly into his personal space, my gun raised until the cold steel of the barrel presses flush against the center of Fausto’s forehead.

Silvano gasps, his hand flying to his holster. “Don Luca!”

Fausto goes completely rigid, his hands lifting slowly into the air, the rain dripping off his graying mustache. “Luca... what are you doing? I’ve served the Valentino throne for twenty years! I stood beside your father!”

“And you stood beside Matteo,” I whisper, my thumb pulling back the hammer of the pistol with a sharp click. “The departure route Gia took this morning was generated forty-five minutes ago on my private terminal. Only four people had access to that route log: me, Silvano, Gia... and the route specialist who cleared the port escorts.”

Fausto’s throat works in a hard, frantic swallow. “I cleared the escorts to protect her! Russo’s men must have intercepted the digital terminal⁠—”

Cleared the escorts. Gianni’s tail never failed her. My own Level-One clearance waved her shadow off the route before she ever reached the car, the same protocol that put my brother on the river road alone.

“The terminal is hardwired with 256-bit quantum encryption, Fausto,” I interrupt. “It can’t be intercepted from the outside. It can only be read by someone sitting at the desk.”

I look at the tactical precision of the ramming maneuver on the car, then down at the spent 9mm hollow-point casings cluttering the asphalt. They are the same rounds Russo’s men fired on the river road.

The realization settles into my soul with ice-cold, devastating clarity.

The old leak never closed. The internal rat who sold my brother’s route to the Russos years ago was never a Santoro soldier. It was the man standing right inside my house. The insider who traded Matteo’s life for Russo gold was still breathing my air, still eating at my table, and he just handed my wife to the same bloodthirsty famiglia.