Page 82 of Ruthless Grace

Davide doesn’t let go. His fingers dig deeper into Gia’s silk blouse, pulling her body flush against his frame, using her torso to cover his heart and lungs.

“You think I’m stupid?!” Davide screams, tears of pure, desperate panic leaking from the corners of his eyes. “You bring her brothers! You bring an entire army to my berths! Give me a car and clear the river bridge, or I’ll blow her fucking brains across this concrete!”

I hold my sidearm steady, but my mind is racing through the cold, brutal physics of the room.

He is tucked tight behind her left shoulder. The angle is horrific. The silver barrel of his 9mm is pressed under her jaw. A fraction of an inch of error, a single flinch from Gia, or a millisecond of over-penetration could kill her before I can take a second shot.

Adrenaline surges through my chest, my pulse hammering against my ribs like a trapped beast. My left arm twitches with the desperate, territorial urge to lunge across the concrete and tear his fucking throat out with my bare hands.

Beside me, Nico’s rifle remains leveled at Davide’s exposed forehead, but the twin brother is hyperventilating. His barrel trembling by a millimeter as he stares at the gun pressed against his sister’s jaw.

“Luca...” Nico whispers through his teeth, his voice laced with a terrifying, helpless panic. “The angle...”

“Quiet,” I command softly.

Under the yellow glare of the floodlight, Gia doesn’t scream. She doesn’t pull away from the silver barrel biting into her skin. She keeps her spine rigid against the oak backrest, her chin lifted, her bound wrists held steady behind her.

Slowly, deliberately, Gia turns her head by two millimeters. Her dark, unblinking eyes move through the swirling gunpowder smoke, bypassing the silver gun, bypassing the blood on my shirt, and lock dead-center onto mine.

In the middle of an active war zone, surrounded by dead men and burning cordite, my wife looks at me with an absolute, terrifying calm.

Her lips part slightly. She doesn’t offer a tactical warning. She doesn’t scream for help. She speaks a single word. Soft, clear, and laced with a quiet, devastating warmth that cuts straight through the noise in my head:

“Luca.”

The way my name rolls off her tongue hits my chest like a physical impact.

The frantic thud of my pulse silences. The adrenaline tremor in my forearms instantly dissolves. The world shrinks until there is nothing left in existence except the geometry between my front sight post and the two-inch target exposed above Gia’s left shoulder.

She isn’t panicking. She isn’t doubting. She is giving me her complete, unqualified green light, placing her life, her body, and her heart into my hands without a single shadow of hesitation.

Davide sees the shift in her eyes and loses his mind completely. “SHUT UP!” he roars, his finger tightening on the trigger in a frantic, involuntary spasm. “DON’T LOOK AT HIM!”

He never gets the chance to pull the trigger.

I don’t hesitate. I don’t bargain. I align the front sight post with the bridge of Davide Russo’s nose, exhale half a breath, and pull the trigger.

BANG.

The heavy 9mm hollow-point round tears through the smoke, clearing Gia’s ear by less than an inch, and buries itself dead-center between Davide Russo’s eyes.

The impact is instantaneous and absolute. Davide’s eyes roll back into his head as his body shuts down. His grip on Gia’s blouse snaps like dry paper. His silver pistol clatters uselessly against the wet floorboards, and his body drops backward like a sack of lead, slamming onto the concrete with a heavy, final thud.

The heavy sidearm slips from my fingers, hitting the concrete floor with a loud metallic clatter.

I don’t give a damn about tactical clearance. I don’t give a damn about the remaining warehouse corners. The title, the territory war, the family business. It all vanishes into ashes.

I stride across the four yards of concrete separating us, pulling my tactical blade from my vest sheath in one fluid motion.

I reach her chair, slide the steel blade beneath the coarse hemp ropes behind her back, and sever her wrist bindings with a single, aggressive slice. The thick rope falls away in frayed pieces, dropping to the floor. I bend down, slashing through the ankle bindings, freeing her completely from the oak frame.

The second the ropes fall, I drop heavily to my knees on the damp concrete before her chair.

My scar-seamed hands reach for her with a violent, uncontrollable tremor.

“Gia,” I rasp, my voice a broken, shattered thread of sound stripped of all authority.

I cup her face in my palms, my thumbs pressing against her cheekbones, tilting her head toward the floodlight as I run an immediate, desperate physical check over her skin.