Page 79 of Ruthless Grace

Four minutes slow.

I touch the glass face of the watch with my thumb, feeling the steady, mechanical pulse of my dead brother’s memory ticking against my skin. Four minutes slow, Matteo. But today, we close the ledger.

“Vehicles are ready in the yard,” Renzo says from the threshold, his voice low and steady.

Dante steps up beside me, resting his hand on the doorframe as he looks out into the pouring rain. He turns his head, meeting my eyes with the cool, unshakeable authority of a Don riding into battle with his brother.

“Let’s go get your wife, Luca,” Dante says.

“Let me show you how a Valentino burns a city,” I reply.

We step out of the armory together into the storm. Seconds later, the armored vehicles tear out through the iron gates in unison, cutting through the dark gray downpour toward Berth 14 on the river.

33

GIA

The shockwave hits before the sound does.

A sudden, concussive pressure wave ripples through the damp river air of the holding vault, vibrating through the concrete floorboards, racing up the legs of my wooden chair, and rattling the teeth in my jaw. A millisecond later, the outer perimeter wall of Berth 14 detonates with a deafening, metallic BOOM that tears through the storm outside.

Gray concrete dust and rust flaking off the corrugated steel ceiling rain down onto my hair and shoulders like a filthy winter storm.

I do not jump. I do not gasp. In an emergency trauma bay, when a multi-vehicle collision or a gunshot victim arrives amidst screaming paramedics, panic is a luxury reserved for civilians. A surgeon filters noise into diagnostic data.

I keep my spine flush against the oak backrest, my bound wrists held steady behind me, and run an immediate internal physical audit. The concussive blast rattles the steel rafters overhead, but my chest remains stable. I test the intercostal muscle groups around my ribcage.

The thin scar pulls tight across my left chest, but the tissue holds. On my left forearm, the dried, matted blood from the car’s shattered glass remains clotted beneath the coarse hemp rope binding my wrists. My body is whole.

Beside the yellow glare of the industrial floodlight, Davide Russo stumbles backward, his cheap leather soles skidding through a puddle on the concrete floor. His face, already pale from my anatomical lecture, drains of all remaining color.

“What the fuck was that?!” one of his armed enforcers screams, his unslung submachine gun swinging wildly toward the reinforced steel vault door.

“Position!” Davide shrieks, his voice cracking into a high, pathetic register. “Cover the main bay corridor!”

Before his guard can take two steps, the acoustic profile of the warehouse shifts from quiet captivity into an active war zone.

Through the heavy steel structure of Berth 14, the exchange of fire erupts. To an untrained ear, it is a wall of chaotic noise. To a surgeon who spent years stitching Santoro soldiers together in dark basements, it is an exact, readable score.

First comes the sharp, stuttering crackle of Russo’s outer perimeter guards opening fire with unsuppressed submachine guns, panicked, erratic bursts sprayed in wild, three-round clusters.

Then comes the response.

It is not panicked. It is a terrifying, rhythmic metronome of absolute tactical annihilation.

The suppressed thud-thud-thud of Santoro tactical rifles tears through the outer bay, sweeping from left to right in textbook military crossfire. And cutting straight through the center of the breach is a distinct sidearm cadence, the deep, boisterous BANG... BANG... BANG of heavy 9mm hollow-point rounds being cycled with lethal, unhurried precision.

My heart gives a single, violent thud against my ribs, not of fear, but of absolute, electric recognition.

Luca. His signature caliber. His exact firing rhythm. The man who spent weeks sitting silently in an armchair watching me breathe has just arrived at the river, and he is tearing Berth 14 apart brick by brick.

“That’s not a police breach, Davide,” I say, my voice dropping into a cool, razor-sharp register that cuts straight through the acoustic roar outside. “That’s my husband. You have about ninety seconds left to pray.”

The battle outside the holding vault moves with terrifying, supernatural speed.

Russo’s outer guard detail was supposed to hold a reinforced shipping yard against an invading force. Instead, they are being systematically dismantled in the dark.

The holding vault where I am bound sits at the rear elevation of the main warehouse bay, separated from the shipping floor by a wall of grimy, wire-reinforced frosted glass windows. Strobing red emergency lights from the breached outer perimeter flash through the dirty glass, casting long, liquid shadows across the damp concrete walls of my cage.