Page 74 of Ruthless Grace

Fausto sees the truth in my eyes. The performative panic drains from his face, replaced by a cold, desperate sneer. “You think you can survive a two-front war, Luca?” he whispers, his voice dropping the loyal elder facade entirely. “Davide Russo knows she’s your whole world now. The ‘debt collateral’ lie is dead. He’s going to use her to bleed your deep-water berths dry, and when he’s done, he’s going to⁠—”

I don’t let him finish the sentence.

I lower the pistol four inches, shifting the angle from his forehead down to his left kneecap, and pull the trigger.

BANG.

A deafening report shatters the rain-slick silence of the industrial corridor. Fausto lets out a blood-curdling shriek of pure agony as the 9mm hollow-point pulverizes his joint, collapsing him onto the wet asphalt in a heap of screaming, writhing meat.

Silvano doesn’t move. He stands in the downpour, his jaw set, his dark eyes wide as he looks at the traitor bleeding on the ground.

I step over Fausto’s writhing body, pressing my boot down onto his shattered knee with cold, unsparing pressure. Fausto’s shriek turns into a breathless, choking sob.

“You’re not dying today, Fausto,” I say, looking down at him with dark, unblinking eyes. “Dying is easy. You are going to sit in my interrogation vault until I bring my wife home. And then I am going to let her twin brother dissect you inch by inch.”

I lift my head and look at Silvano.

“Put him in the back of the van. Chain him to the floorboards.”

“Yes, Don Valentino,” Silvano says without a second’s hesitation.

Five minutes later, I stand beside the open door of my armored sedan, Gia’s leather surgical bag slung over my shoulder. The rain continues to hammer down against the roof of the car, washing Fausto’s blood off my leather boots.

Matteo’s watch ticks quietly against my wrist. But for years, I thought I was wearing a dead man’s crown to avenge a war caused by the Santoro family. Now I know the truth. The enemy wasn’t just across the river. The enemy was inside my walls.

I pull out my cell phone, speed-dialing a number I have never called in my life.

It rings twice before a rough baritone answers on the other end, tight, furious, and sharp as a razor blade.

“What the fuck do you want, Valentino?” Dante Santoro snaps, the background quiet of the Santoro study humming behind his voice. “If this is about Nico’s fist at the dinner table, I told you⁠—”

“Davide Russo ambushed Gia’s convoy on the Magazine approach twenty minutes ago,” I state, cutting him off with the freezing, absolute weight of a court order. “They executed Detail Three. They took her.”

A suffocating, deafening silence detonates on the line.

I can hear Dante’s breath catch, a sharp, violent inhalation of air, followed by the chaotic crash of a mahogany chair being thrown backward against the wall in the Santoro study.

“What did you fucking say?” Dante roars, his Don composure completely disintegrating into raw, bloodline terror.

“Russo has my wife,” I say. “He thinks she’s my single weakness. He thinks he bought himself leverage against the Valentino throne.”

“Madonna Santissima...” Dante breathes, his voice shaking with a terrifying, lethal rage. In the background, the roaring voices of Nico, Renzo, and Marco erupt, a pack of wolves realizing their sister has been touched. “Where are you?”

“I am standing in blood on the river approach,” I reply, my fingers tightening around the phone until the glass casing groans under the pressure. “And I am holding the man who sold her route.”

Dante pauses, his breath ragged. “What?”

“The route wasn’t intercepted from the outside, Dante,” I say, dropping the second nuclear revelation into the line. “Fausto Carbone sold Gia’s departure timestamp forty-five minutes ago. The same way he sold Matteo’s route years ago.”

Another violent beat of silence hangs over the line, heavy, monumental, and shifting the foundation of New Orleans forever.

For years, the blood feud between our families was fed by a ghost. I believed the Santoro line ordered the strike that killed my brother. Dante and Renzo carried the weight of an accusation that poisoned every truce. In one sentence, the poisoned ledger is wiped completely clean in blood. The Santoros are absolved. The true enemy stands exposed in the light.

“Fausto...” Dante whispers. “It was Carbone.”

“It was Carbone,” I confirm, my dark eyes staring out through the rain-slicked window of my sedan. “Your hands are clean, Dante. Your family didn’t kill my brother. But Russo executed both strikes—and now he has our heart.”

The shift over the line is instantaneous. The decades of rivalries, the border disputes, the cold transactional terms. It all evaporates into ashes. An attack on Giada Santoro-Valentino is no longer an underworld skirmish. It is a sacrilegious assault on both bloodlines simultaneously.