Page 10 of Ruthless Grace

I look at Dante. My eldest brother looks like he wants to vomit. The guilt in his dark eyes is a physical, rotting thing: a weight he will carry on his ledger for the rest of his life.

“If I take this trade,” I say to Dante, “I do it on my terms. Not yours. Not his.”

I turn my body toward the wingback chair.

Luca sits perfectly still. His dark charcoal suit is unwrinkled, his dark hair immaculate. His lethal hands rest on his thighs, exposing the pale suture seam on his forearm.

“You saw an opening,” I say to him, my voice ringing with an ice-cold clarity. “Russo puts my family in a corner, and you step in to claim our deep-water berths and my name as your price.”

Luca doesn’t flinch. “I provided the only shield that keeps you out of Chicago, Dr. Santoro.”

“I am not my mother,” I say, stepping closer to his chair until I am standing directly over him. The heat radiating off his broad frame presses against my boxy scrubs, thick and suffocating. “I do not sign my life away for a man’s protection. If I walk into your house, I walk in as a surgeon, not a captive.”

A faint, almost microscopic lift touches the corner of Luca’s clean, granite jaw. “Draft your terms, doctor.”

I reach into my doctor’s coat, pull out a yellow legal pad and a black fine-point pen I use for surgical charts, and slap the pad down onto the edge of Dante’s mahogany desk.

Nico steps up beside me, his jaw clenched, his hand resting on the edge of the desk like a guard dog. Renzo and Marco watch from the shadows, silent witnesses to the execution of our family’s oldest rule.

I don’t sit. I stand over the desk, my left wrist rolling once before the nib hits the yellow paper.

“First,” I dictate aloud, the pen scratching violently across the page. “Separate bedrooms. You do not enter my bedroom without my explicit verbal permission.”

Luca’s eyes track the movement of my mouth. He doesn’t blink. “Granted.”

“Second,” I continue, my pen digging into the paper until the ink bleeds through the yellow stock. “No physical contact without my explicit consent. No marital expectations, no performance of a real marriage behind closed doors. This is a truce with rings on it, nothing more.”

Luca’s heavy gaze drops to my throat, tracking the hard pulse beating against my skin, then raises back to my eyes. “Granted.”

“Third,” I say. “Complete surgical and professional independence. I retain my position as Lead Trauma Surgeon at Tulane and Chief Medical Officer at Casa Lucia. My hours are mine. My schedule is mine. Your guards do not enter my operating rooms.”

“Granted.”

“Fourth,” I say, leaning over the desk, pressing both palms flat against the wood, staring straight into the eyes of the man who thinks he bought my life. “An unconditional, self-executing walkout clause. If you breach a single line of this contract—if you touch me without consent, if you restrict my medical practice, or if you bring violence to my work—this marriage is instantly nullified under Cosa Nostra law, and I walk away with full legal immunity.”

Dante stares at the yellow legal pad in shock. Renzo lets out a low, silent breath.

A walkout clause in a Cosa Nostra marriage contract is unheard of. It is an insult to the Don, a public declaration that the bride does not belong to him.

“Fifth,” I add, my pen scratching three heavy lines beneath the text. “The Sunday Dinner Clause. Sundays will always be held at this compound so we can keep my mother’s tradition alive. Both spouses will attend Santoro Sunday dinner every single week. No exceptions, no absences.”

For half a second, the black fine-point nib hovers over the yellow stock.

Absolute transparency.

The thought flares behind my ribs: a clause demanding full truth, zero secrets, a complete accounting of every move and motive he keeps locked behind those eyes.

I kill the impulse before the ink can touch the page. To demand honesty from Luca Valentino is to admit I care about what he hides. It is to concede that this marriage is something real: a relationship that could be betrayed, rather than a cold legal transaction. I don’t want his truth. I want boundaries. Asking for honesty would give him leverage I refuse to hand over.

I lift the pen from the page.

I look up into Luca’s dark eyes.

I know what I have just written. He can put me behind his gates, but one day out of every seven, I go home. My mother’s table. My grandmother’s food. My brothers in every chair. He has sat at that table when it suited him and left when it didn’t. Now it’s on paper, and he doesn’t get to make me disappear into his house quietly.

Luca’s dark gaze holds mine. His face doesn’t show a flicker of hesitation.

He slowly pushes himself out of the leather chair, rising to his full height, his massive shoulders blocking out the morning sun streaming through the window. He steps up to the desk, standing directly across from me, separated only by the yellow sheet of paper.