Page 21 of Ruthless Grace

Not Cassia, who knows exactly what it costs to stand in a room while men divide your life. Not Nonna, who has watched two generations of Santoro women get fitted for political graves. Not even Nico, whose dark eyes meet mine across the room with a raw, silent understanding that needs no language.

The absence of the question is a mercy. In my world, if someone asks you if you’re okay, it means you look broken. It means your vitals are crashing and you need an IV line. To be treated like a victim today is to admit that I am cargo being shipped across the river, rather than a trauma surgeon conducting a high-stakes procedure on her own life.

Cassia walks over, setting a cool, dry hand against the side of my arm. “We aren’t doing this to give you an easy out, Giada,” she says, her voice dropping into a quiet, fierce register that cuts through the kitchen hum. “We’re doing it because five years from now, when the men in this city start rewriting history and telling everyone you went willingly into the Valentino house to secure a truce, there will be women sitting in that front row who remember every single drop of blood it cost you.”

She looks at me, her gaze steady, unarmored. “We are your witnesses.”

I hold her gaze, the breath locking in my throat for half a second before I force my ribs to expand. “Then make sure you have good seats.”

Upstairs in my East Wing suite, the air smells of pressed silk, lavender steam, and the sharp, industrial tang of Marguerite Beaumont’s iron.

The bedroom has been turned into a field hospital for couture. Marguerite stands in the center of the Persian rug, three brass pins held between her teeth, her tape measure draped over her sharp shoulders like a stethoscope. On the dress form behind her hangs the gown Marguerite built overnight for a rush fee that could fund a small clinic: the long line of silk-covered buttons gleaming down the spine of structured ivory.

It isn’t white. White was murdered the moment Marguerite refused my request for charcoal wool.

“Stand still, chère,” Marguerite mutters, working the silk-covered buttons closed up the back of the structured bodice. The boning clicks into place, binding my ribs with a cold, terrifying structure that forces my posture straight. “If you breathe out too hard, you’ll pop a seam, and I do not do re-stitches in the garden.”

Izzy and Mila sit on the edge of my unmade bed. Izzy is holding a vintage silver compact, her phone tucked under her thigh, still dark, still silent, still carrying no word from Sofia. But right now, her hands are steady as she reaches up, tilting my chin toward the afternoon light streaming through the balcony doors.

“Hold still,” Izzy says, brushing a feather-light layer of dark lip stain across my mouth. “Valentino threw a capo out of your announcement dinner last night for looking at your hip. If I don’t get this arch right, he might execute the florist.”

Mila sits beside her, her pale gray-green eyes quiet, her long fingers untangling a dark strand of my hair. Mila is Nico’s partner, a Russian violinist who survived the cold, lethal architecture of the Zakharov Bratva before she ever stepped foot in New Orleans. She doesn’t talk much, but her hands are impossibly gentle as she pins my dark hair up into a high, intricate crown, securing it with a single, antique silver hemostat I keep on my dresser.

Nobody in Cosa Nostra touches me gently. In my life, hands on my body mean physical exams, wound care, or men trying to hold me back while someone bleeds out on an operating table.

But for an hour, in the quiet heat of my bedroom, Izzy and Mila touch my hair, my face, my skin, with a tender, sisterly care that feels more dangerous than a knife. It threatens to soften the callus I’ve spent a lifetime building over my heart.

“Here,” Cassia says, walking into the room and tossing a sleek, silver-embossed box onto the bedspread. “A wedding gift from the tribunal.”

I raise an eyebrow, watching Izzy snatch the box up and tear off the ribbon. She flips the lid open, reaches inside, and pulls out a sheer, whispering cloud of dark crimson silk and lace.

It is a nightgown, if you can call three inches of gossamer thread and strategic cutouts a gown. It belongs in a high-end French Quarter bordello, designed for explicit, uncompromising destruction.

“Mon Dieu,” Nonna Rosa grunts from the doorway, holding a tray of scalded milk and chicory. She takes one look at the lace hanging from Izzy’s fingers and crosses herself. “That’s not a nightgown. That’s an invitation to a funeral.”

Izzy bursts out laughing: a bright, wicked sound that shatters the heavy atmosphere of the room. “It’s a strategic counter-strike, Rosa. Gia’s contract says separate bedrooms. If she wears this to walk to the bathroom, Valentino’s brain will short-circuit through his tailored suit.”

“He’ll sign over the deep-water berths just to get the zipper down,” Cassia adds dryly, leaning against the bedpost.

I look at the crimson silk, my mouth twitching with a sharp, dry humor I didn’t know I had left in me today. “I don’t use silk to short-circuit men. I use arterial pressure.”

“Tuck it in your bag anyway,” Izzy insists, shoving the box into my leather satchel beside my suture kits. “Call it a tactical variable.”

The laughter lingers in the air for a second, warm and buoyant, before it dies against the cold reality waiting downstairs.

Mila steps back, her gray-green eyes fixed on my reflection in the long vanity mirror. She wipes a smudge of dark powder from her thumb, her expression turning somber, unreadable.

“I watched Valentino at the dinner last night,” Mila says softly, her accent carrying that cool, flat Russian cadence that hears everything under the surface.

The room goes dead quiet. Izzy stops smiling. Cassia turns her head.

“He was setting a perimeter,” I say, smoothing the heavy ivory silk over my waist. “He’s an alpha Don performing dominance for his capos.”

“No,” Mila corrects, her pale eyes meeting mine in the glass. “A man who wants an asset looks at her paper. A man who wants a trophy looks at the room to see who’s watching. Valentino didn’t look at the paper, Giada. He looked at you like you were the only oxygen left in a burning room, and he was deciding whether to breathe you in or let the house burn down around you.”

She steps closer, her hand resting lightly on the back of my silk shoulder.

“That isn’t protection,” Mila whispers. “That is obsession. I’ve seen men like him in Moscow. They don’t take territory, Giada. They conquer it.”