Page 75 of Ruthless Grace

We are no longer two rival Dons negotiating a truce. We are family. Connected by marriage, bound by blood, and united by the single woman who holds both our empires together.

“My brothers are already in the armory, Luca,” Dante says, using my first name. The word carries no malice, no distance. It is the recognition of a cognato, a brother-in-law standing in the same fire. “Tell me what you need.”

“I am shutting down the Valentino berths. I am locking every cargo ship in the Gulf channel,” I say, my hand gripping Gia’s leather surgical bag on my lap as Silvano guns the engine toward the river. “And I am marching directly into your compound.”

“The gates are wide open for you, Luca,” Dante growls, the sound of four heavy magazine slides racking back in unison vibrating through the receiver as Nico, Renzo, and Marco step behind their Don. “Where is Carbone? Did you kill him?”

“He’s kneecapped and locked in my basement,” I say. “He’ll bleed until I get my wife back. Then he’s yours.”

“Good,” Dante rumbles. “Bring every gun you have.”

“Tell your brothers to load every weapon in the house, Dante,” I say, stepping into the back seat of my armored vehicle and closing the heavy door against the storm. “I am standing in blood that was spilled taking my wife—and tonight, as brothers, we leave the Russo famiglia in ashes.”

31

GIA

The disorienting taste of flashbang copper and stale smoke lingers on the back of my tongue when my consciousness returns.

I do not open my eyes immediately. In a trauma bay, when a severely compromised patient wakes up in a chaotic environment, the first rule of triage is silent, systematic self-assessment before engaging the room. I keep my breathing shallow, slow, and completely rhythmic, letting my sensory receptors gather baseline diagnostic data.

My head throbs with a dull, localized ache at the base of my skull, a mild Grade 1 concussion, likely from the side-curtain airbag deploying when the ramming vehicle forced my car off the Magazine Street approach. No motor deficit in my facial nerves. My vision behind my eyelids remains clear of dark spots.

A sharp, stinging ache burns along the lateral edge of my left forearm. I feel the stiff, crusted tackiness of dried blood matted against my skin and soaking the torn cuff of my silk blouse.

When Russo’s enforcer shattered the car’s side window and yanked me through the frame, a jagged tooth of tempered glass sliced three inches across my forearm. I run a quick test on my fingers: flexion, extension. The cut is skin-deep.

It bled profusely across the car’s leather seat—head and forearm cuts always look like a slaughterhouse—but the vein is intact. No tendon damage. It clotted under the pressure of my sleeve.

My wrists are pulled tight behind my back, bound securely against the vertical slats of a heavy wooden chair. Coarse hemp rope. It bites into the soft skin directly over my glass cut, but the pressure actually serves as a makeshift tourniquet against further oozing. My ankles are lashed to the front chair legs at the Achilles tendons.

I shift my weight by millimeters, testing the muscles across my torso. The clean, silver-pink line of my healed lumpectomy scar stretches taut across my left chest. I feel the familiar, deep-tissue pull, but there is no sharp, tearing heat, no swelling, and no deep bruising. The tissue held. Arthur Vance’s margins remain unbroken.

I open my eyes.

The setting is an isolated, damp port shipping vault. Dust motes dance in the yellow glare of a single industrial floodlight hanging overhead. The air is thick with the acrid stench of diesel exhaust, damp river silt from the nearby Mississippi, rusting iron, and the cheap tobacco smoke clinging to corrugated steel walls. Heavy Gulf rain hammers relentlessly against the sheet-metal roof above, a deafening, rhythmic roar that drowns out the noise of the city.

My bound fingers begin to cramp from the awkward angle behind my lower spine. Adrenaline threatens to send a fine motor tremor through my hands, a physiological response that I refuse to permit.

I close my eyes for three seconds, pulling up a grounding somatic memory from two nights ago in our master suite: Luca sitting on the leather ottoman between my knees, his scar-seamed hands splaying wide over mine, his thumbs pressing with restorative pressure into my tendon joints during his salve ritual. “Breathe, vita mia,” his low, gravelly rasp echoes in the dark vault of my mind. “I’ve got you.”

The memory anchors me instantly. The tremor dissolves before it can take root. My pulse settles into a steady sixty-four beats per minute.

I lift my chin into the harsh glare of the floodlight, completely composed, dried blood on my cuff, waiting for my captor to step into the frame.

The heavy steel door at the far end of the warehouse screeches open against rusted hinges. Unhurried footsteps echo off the wet concrete floor, accompanied by the wet slap of leather dress shoes stepping through shallow puddles.

Davide Russo steps out of the shadows.

The heir to the Russo famiglia wears a tailored charcoal suit that attempts to match Luca’s bespoke Italian cut, but on Davide, the wool looks cheap, lacking the broad, lethal structure of a true Don. He carries an unlit cigar between his fingers, his slicked-back dark hair damp from the rain outside. Two heavy enforcers flank him, their hands resting on the grips of tactical submachine guns slung across their chests.

“Look at that,” Davide sneers, his voice echoing off the corrugated iron walls with a wet, arrogant raspiness. “The saint of the Santoro line. Don Luca Valentino’s traded bride, sitting in my warehouse like unsorted cargo.”

I don’t blink. I don’t shift in my chair. I watch him approach the way a surgeon watches an incompetent resident contaminate a sterile field.

“You’re standing downwind, Davide,” I say, my voice level, smooth, and entirely unbothered. “And your cologne smells like an oil leak.”

Davide’s smirk falters for a fraction of a second, his jaw tightening as he stops five feet from my chair. He taps the unlit cigar against his palm, trying to establish dominance in the room.