Page 23 of Ruthless Grace

A second later, a shadow falls across the doorway.

Nico stands there.

He is dressed in his black wedding suit, his tie pulled tight, his gaze fixed on mine. He doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t offer a joke about Dante’s empty plate or a warning about Luca Valentino. He steps into the room, walks right up to me, and stops two inches away.

Slowly, deliberately, Nico raises his right hand. He places his thumb flat against the exact center of my forehead, pressing hard, the sharp, familiar pressure of our childhood twin code.

Hold the line.

I close my eyes for one second, feeling the heat of his thumb against my skin, absorbing the raw, silent promise of the only man in this city who would burn the world down to keep me safe.

Nico pulls his hand back, turns on his heel, and walks out toward the staircase without speaking to a single person in the hall.

I look in the mirror one last time.

I am dressed. I am witnessed by the women who refused to let me go quietly. And around my neck, I carry the cold, unbroken weight of my dead mother.

I turn my back on my empty bedroom and walk down to the garden to meet my husband.

9

GIA

By late afternoon, the sweltering New Orleans heat has begun to give way to a heavy, humid stillness.

Mama’s Garden behind the main compound is packed in absolute silence.

The garden path is lined with white iron chairs. On the left side sit forty men in dark suits representing the Santoro famiglia: Renzo, Marco, and the capos standing rigid, their expressions dark and unreadable. On the right side sit thirty soldiers from the Valentino faction, led by Luca’s top lieutenants, their hands folded neatly over their buttoned suit jackets, watchful as hawks.

Between the two sides runs a narrow aisle of crushed white stone, stretching from the iron garden gate all the way to the back wall of the estate, where the live oaks cast long, jagged shadows over the Santoro family plots.

Salvatore and Lucia Santoro lie there, side by side under twin markers of gray slate, covered in blooming white jasmine and Lucia’s ancient rose vines. Today is their wedding anniversary.

I stand behind the tall iron doors of the garden arbor, the heavy lace of my train resting on the grass.

Through the scrollwork of the iron gate, I can see him.

Luca Valentino stands at the foot of my parents’ graves, waiting beside Father Angelo.

Father Angelo looks small and ancient in his ceremonial white vestments, his gnarled hands holding his worn leather breviary. He is the priest who baptized every single Santoro child born in this compound, the man who stood on this very ground years ago and said the commendation of the soul over my father’s coffin. Today, his eyes are heavy with a quiet, tragic sorrow as he waits to bless the trade.

Beside him, Luca wears a bespoke black suit, tailored so perfectly to his broad shoulders that he looks carved out of obsidian. His dark hair is styled back, his jaw cut from marble, his expression terrifyingly calm. But his dark, obsidian eyes are locked on the garden gate, cold and possessive, waiting for the asset he bought to be delivered to his feet.

The string quartet begins the slow, solemn measures of the processional.

The iron gate swings open.

Dante is waiting for me on the stone landing. He looks impeccably sharp in his Don’s suit, but his face is gray with exhaustion, his right hand nervously turning Papa’s signet ring on his pinky finger over and over again.

He steps forward as I reach the landing, his expression raw, offering me his arm with a look that begs for absolution, begs for us to pretend, for fifty feet of stone pathway, that he is a proud elder brother giving his beloved sister away to an ally.

I stop two inches from his extended elbow. I don’t take it.

Dante’s arm stiffens in the air. “Giada,” he whispers, his voice cracking beneath the quiet hum of the garden. “Please. Let me walk you.”

I look up into the eyes of the Don who traded me in his study while my newborn niece slept upstairs. My voice is clean, quiet, and razor-sharp, cutting through the humid air so only he can hear:

“You already gave me away, Dante. You don’t get to do it twice.”