Page 95 of Ruthless Grace

From the second I saw her standing at her father’s pulpit with her eyes dry and her voice steady, to the Sunday dinners where I starved for her gaze across her family’s table, to the night she wrote her brutal contract rules to watch me break—she held the leash the entire time.

I stake my heart, my crown, and my soul on her freedom.

If Giada Santoro decides that the monster who trapped her is unforgivable, she will execute her walkout clause, call her brothers, and leave me in this cold port office for the rest of my days. And I will let her go without raising a single finger to stop her.

But if she walks through those dock gates, if she crosses the river on her own two feet and steps onto my piers holding the keys I gave her, it won’t be because she was sold, traded, or trapped.

It will be because she chose me.

I take a deep breath of the cold river air, lean against the iron railing, and wait for my Queen.

41

GIA

I sit behind Luca’s heavy mahogany desk in the master study, my palms resting flat against the dark, polished mahogany.

Deep inside my coat pocket, my fingers touch the cool plastic cap of my surgical pen and the cold brass master keys to Casa Lucia Hospital. The unrolled blue-line blueprints for the border facility cover the center of the desk, weighed down at the edges by brass paperweights, the state health permit cover page lying beside them with its bright red municipal seals exposed to the afternoon sun.

On the desk console, the internal intercom chimes twice. I press the button.

“Donna Giada,” the gate commander’s voice rasps through the speaker. “Don Dante Santoro has reached the outer perimeter. He is traveling in a single vehicle, unescorted. Per your orders, we checked his car. He is alone.”

“Open the gates,” I command quietly. “Let him drive up to the courtyard.”

A Don stepping across another Don’s threshold while the host is absent is an absolute breach of protocol, an act that would normally invite a barrage of gunfire. But Luca’s final order before he went to the port office left no room for interpretation: My wife commands the estate. Obey her. And Dante, entering enemy territory alone without his usual tactical detail of enforcers, is surrendering his own armor to respect my summons.

Three minutes later, heavy leather soles echo against the marble hallway outside the study doors.

The double doors swing open, and my eldest brother steps across the threshold.

Dante looks unnerved stepping into the quiet, vaulted stronghold of the Valentino regime, his dark eyes sweeping the empty study before landing on me sitting in Luca’s leather chair. But beneath his tailored charcoal suit jacket, the human toll of the last few months is carved deep into his face: dark, bruised circles beneath his eyes, a tight line to his jaw, and his right thumb restlessly turning Papa’s signet ring around his knuckle.

“Giada,” Dante says, his voice carrying that rough register he uses when the Don in him begins to slip back into the big brother who used to carry me on his shoulders. “There are rumors on the port that Valentino hasn’t been at the estate for days.”

“Sit down, Dante,” I say softly, indicating the leather armchair across from the desk.

Dante hesitates for a single beat, then steps forward and sinks into the chair. He rests his forearms on his knees, his hands clasping together, the dark onyx ring catching the light.

“I need to know why,” I say. “Not the mafia speech you gave the Capos, and not the legal justification you gave Nico. I want the truth, Dante. You took an oath at Mama’s deathbed that no Santoro daughter would ever be traded to settle a debt. Why did you stand in my room and sell me to Luca Valentino?”

Dante closes his eyes, a deep, ragged breath expanding his chest. When he opens them, the cold, impenetrable armor of the Don of New Orleans is completely gone. There is only a tired, terrified man.

“Ever since Papa withered away in grief and died at that table calling Mama’s name, I have been the shield for this family,” Dante whispers, his voice cracking slightly. “I was barely out of my teens when I took that crown. I locked my own grief in a vault, gave up my youth, and spent every waking hour making sure you, Renzo, Nico, and Marco kept breathing.”

He looks up, meeting my eyes with a raw, agonizing sincerity.

“And then I held Lucia in that delivery room, Gia... and something rewired inside my brain,” Dante continues, his thumbs digging into his palms. “I looked at my newborn baby against Cassia’s chest, and then I looked at you. Parental terror shoves logic to the dark end of the spectrum. I felt like the walls were closing in on us, and I knew I could not protect my daughter and my sister at the same time. Not alone.”

He reaches out, his hand hovering over the desk. “And then Valentino brought those comms and debt files to my desk. The debt logs showed Ettore Russo claiming an ancient territorial marker—demanding a Santoro daughter to settle the ledger. I saw a seventy-year-old monster coming for my sister. I panicked. Luca was my ally, a brother-in-arms I trusted. When he offered to absorb the debt and take you under his name, I believed I was putting you behind the strongest wall in New Orleans. I broke the letter of Mama’s vow so I could keep the spirit of it—so you would stay alive.”

I listen to my brother, my chest aching with a complex weight.

I see the broad-shouldered young man who took the Don’s crown while still grieving our parents, who locked his own soul in a cage so he could manage our family’s survival, and who looked at his newborn daughter and saw only the terrifying fragility of the people he loved. Dante didn’t trade me out of cruelty or disinterest. He traded me out of a suffocating, overwhelming fear that wore the mask of protection.

He thought he was saving my life.

I look down at the pre-dated permits sitting on the desk, tracing the raised red state seals with the tip of my finger.