Page 22 of Ruthless Grace

The chill settles over the room, thick and suffocating. The gallows humor evaporates, leaving behind the hard, terrifying reality of what I am walking into this afternoon.

I turn back to the mirror and look down at my hands.

This is my real armor. Luca Valentino can put his ring on my finger, he can put his name on my marriage certificate, and he can lock me behind his iron gates across the river. But he cannot take away the fact that when a human body opens on a table, I am the one who decides who lives and who dies.

“Everyone out,” Nonna says suddenly from the doorway, her voice turning thick, gravelly. “Out. Give me two minutes with her.”

Cassia, Izzy, and Mila exchange a brief glance, nod, and step quietly out into the hallway, closing the heavy oak doors behind them.

The quiet in the room snaps shut like a lock.

Nonna Rosa walks slowly toward me, her apron rustling against her skirts. She isn’t holding a wooden spoon now. In her hands, she carries a small, faded black velvet box, worn smooth at the corners by decades of touch.

My chest tightens. A sudden, instinctual panic flares behind my ribs: the same feeling I get when a monitor starts flatlining before I’ve even made the first incision.

“Nonna,” I say, my voice tightening. “Don’t.”

“Shut your mouth, Giada,” Nonna says, her Creole cadence rough. She sets the tray down on the vanity and opens the box.

Inside, resting against discolored white satin, sits a single strand of heavy, cream-white saltwater pearls. They aren’t flawless. They are old, organic, each one shaped by time and ocean salt, fastened with an antique gold clasp carved into the shape of a rose.

Mama’s pearls.

Nonna Rosa told me the story a hundred times growing up: Lucia Santoro wore them once, on the day my father brought her through the front gates of this compound, a terrified young bride from the Delta stepping into a house full of armed men. I haven’t seen them since the day we buried her behind the garden.

“Your mama gave me these before she took to her bed for the last time,” Nonna says, her fingers trembling slightly as she lifts the heavy strand from the satin. Her dry, weathered hands, hands that have fed three generations of my family, are shaking so hard the pearls click together like teeth. “She knew she wasn’t getting back up, Giada. She knew she wouldn’t be standing in this room today.”

“Nonna, please,” I whisper, my throat closing up. “I can’t do this right now. I have to walk down those steps in minutes. If I break⁠—”

“You won’t break,” Nonna Rosa snaps, stepping behind me, her dry fingers brushing the nape of my neck as she lifts the cold pearls around my collarbone. “You are Lucia’s daughter. You’re made of iron and salt water.”

She tries to line up the small gold pin with the carved rose clasp. Her fingers fumble. She misses the latch once. Twice.

The Cajun matriarch who can skin a rabbit in thirty seconds and command a kitchen of twenty people is failing at a simple clasp.

“Ah, foutre,” Nonna mutters under her breath, a tear spilling over her weathered cheek and slipping into the deep lines around her mouth. She swipes at it angrily with the back of her wrist. “Look at me. Old fool making a mess.”

“Nonna,” I say softly, reaching up to touch her cold hand.

“She gave me an instruction, Giada,” Nonna whispers, her voice breaking, the tears coming faster now as she finally forces the gold pin into the latch with a sharp click. “She said to me, ‘Rosa, when my Giada gets put into her dress, you put these around her neck. You tell her a woman in this house keeps her mind in her own head, her heart behind her ribs, and she never...’”

Nonna stops.

The sentence hangs in the air, broken in half, bleeding into the quiet room.

Nonna Rosa’s breath hitches. She stares at my reflection in the mirror, her hands resting heavily on my silk shoulders, but the rest of the words refuse to come out. “She should be the one dressing you today, cher,” she whispers instead, her voice thick. “Not me.”

I don’t cry.

I don’t scream. I don’t let out a single sob. Tears are a luxury for people who have time to recover. Instead, I go completely, terrifyingly still. I stare at my reflection in the antique glass: at the structured ivory silk, the sharp crown of dark hair held by a hemostat, and the cold, heavy weight of my mother’s pearls resting against my bare collarbone.

The pearls are ice against my skin. Unfamiliar. Heavy. A physical anchor binding me to a vow my eldest brother just broke.

Nonna wipes her face with her apron, takes a ragged breath, and steps back. She doesn’t try to finish the sentence. She doesn’t offer a hug or a platitude. She just smoothes the silk over my shoulders with one final, hard pat.

“You look like a Don’s daughter,” Nonna Rosa says, her voice flat, cleared of tears. “Go down there and make them pay for every yard of that silk.”

She turns and walks out of the room, leaving the door standing open.