Page 94 of Ruthless Grace

Moretti swallows hard, his chest rising on a slow breath before he gives a single, stiff bow of his head. “We have an understanding, Don Luca.”

“Good. Get back to the berths.”

After Moretti exits, the heavy steel door clicks shut, leaving me alone with the quiet hum of the river.

I walk over to the worn leather sofa, pull off my shoulder holster, and toss it onto the low coffee table alongside the watch. I lie back against the cracked leather, resting my arm over my eyes, staring into the dark.

The physical hunger for her hits me like a freight train, dark, primitive, and suffocating.

My mind doesn’t just remember her. It drags me back under her skin. I remember the slick, feverish heat of her mouth wrapped around my shaft in the dark of our suite, the desperate, whimpery gasps she gave me when I bound her wrists to the velvet headboard with her surgical silk ties. I remember the exact taste of her slick on my tongue, the way her inner walls clamped around me like a vise when she came, and the velvet friction of her bare thighs gripping my hips while I poured myself into her.

Beneath my dark trousers, my cock reacts instantly, swelling heavy and stone-hard against the seam of my trousers.

A sharp, agonizing throb pulses through my groin, straining against my zipper until my molars ache. My hand moves instinctively down my stomach, my fingers locking around my belt buckle. Every instinct in my body commands me to unbutton my pants, grip my shaft, and pump myself until I spill her memory onto this leather couch.

My knuckles turn white against the leather belt. I don’t unzip. I force my hand to stay clamped to my waist, gritting my teeth against the brutal, unfulfilled throb in my blood.

I won’t give myself easy relief. Touching myself to a memory feels like a cheap consolation, and I refuse to take a substitute for the woman who owns my soul. If my body burns for her, I will let it burn. The aching stone between my legs is my self-inflicted penance, a constant, pulsing reminder that until Giada Santoro walks through my door of her own free choice, I stay in the desert.

I swallow past the dry fire in my throat, forcing my breathing to slow, but the ache doesn’t die. It deepens into my chest.

I lie in the quiet of this industrial warehouse and realize what I actually lost when I walked out those doors.

I don’t just miss my wife in my bed. I miss her family.

I grew up in a house carved from grief and ice. My mother Alessandra died delivering me into this world, and my father Don Alberto spent thirty years looking at my face and remembering the woman I killed by being born.

He drilled a single, unyielding law into my blood from the time I could walk: Never trust a Santoro. He taught me that Salvatore Santoro was a snake, that his sons were murderers, and that nothing good is ever given to a Valentino.

When Matteo died on that river road and my father collapsed over his body, I became Don of a house filled with ghosts.

And then came the truce. I used business and strategy as an excuse to attend Sunday dinner at the Santoro table. I sat the length of the table away from Gia, surrounded by the loud, chaotic, aggressive warmth of four brothers who would bleed for each other without a second thought. I listened to Nonna Rosa pass the pasta, watched Cassia and Izzy banter with their men, and watched Gia command her family with a quiet, fierce grace that held the entire room together.

I told myself I was sitting at that table to measure my enemies. I told myself it was reconnaissance.

The truth is uglier and far more tragic. I sat at that table because I was starving. I was a ghost watching a living family love each other. The enemies my father taught me to hate gave me the only real taste of a home I had ever known in my life.

And in my unhinged, terrifying obsession to claim the woman at the center of that table, I built a trap that destroyed the very sanctuary I craved.

Dawn breaks over the lower berths not with sun, but with a pale, silver illumination that cuts through the river fog.

I stand on the narrow steel balcony of my port office, my hands resting on the cold iron railing, watching the massive container ships cut slow, dark wakes through the muddy water. The morning wind is sharp and wet, whipping my unbuttoned linen shirt against my chest.

I look down at my left hand. No piece. No weapon. No fake comms network running in the background. No leverage over Dante, and no trap set for Gia.

For the first time since I took my father’s signet ring off his dead finger and stepped into the crown of the Valentino family, I am standing completely unarmored.

My father spent his life building fortresses, enforcing debts, and warning me that loving a woman was a death sentence for a Don. He believed that control was the only way to survive in Cosa Nostra. But his control left him dying alone on a marble floor over his son’s corpse, bitter, broken, and surrounded by blood.

I won’t die like him.

I built an empire around Gia’s mother’s name to give her a dream. I leaked fake comms to steal her from her family. I signed her contract blind because I believed a prisoner didn’t get to choose her cage, and I told myself that once she was behind my gates, she was mine forever.

I thought I was the master architect building a cage.

I look out over the river, the mechanical second hand of Matteo’s watch ticking in the quiet, and I smile a dark, bitter, ruined smile into the rising fog.

The truth is uglier, sweeter, and absolute: she was never my captive. I was hers.