Page 85 of Ruthless Grace

The peak hits us like a second shockwave.

I shatter beneath him, a sharp, violent spasm of release that forces a ragged sob from my chest, while Luca follows me over the edge with a deep, guttural roar, burying his face in my neck as his entire body trembles violently against mine.

For a long, breathless minute, the only sound in the master suite is the heavy, ragged sync of our breathing and the distant rumble of thunder echoing over the river.

Luca doesn’t roll away. He lowers his full weight over me, his massive arm sliding safely beneath my uninjured right side while his palm splays wide across the warm expanse of my lower back, anchoring me securely against his chest. He buries his face in the hollow of my neck, his lips pressing soft, lingering kisses against my skin as his racing heart slows down against mine.

“Are you hurting?” he whispers against my collarbone, his voice thick with sudden, protective contrition. “Did I push too hard?”

I breathe out a soft, breathless laugh, my fingers lazily tracing the thick, carved muscles of his back, feeling the fading tremor in his skin. “Shut up, Valentino. I’m a surgeon. I know how to manage physical exertion.”

Luca lets out a low, gravelly chuckle that vibrates straight against my ribs. “Rest, cara,” he murmurs, his lips brushing my cheek.

I tilt my head back, looking up into his dark, heavy gaze. Since the night the fever pulled the truth out of me, he has buried my father’s pet name—retiring the arrogant taunt he used to throw across border tables.

“You stopped calling me principessa,” I whisper into the quiet dark between us.

Luca’s thumb pauses against my jaw, his thumb brushing my bottom lip with dark reverence. “You’re not a mobster’s traded daughter anymore, Gia. You’re my Donna.”

I press my face into the crook of his neck, my hand resting flat over his heart. I don’t tell him that a small, stubborn piece of me misses the sharp, dangerous edge of his taunt.

He presses one final, reverent kiss over my healed lumpectomy scar, before pulling the dark silk sheet up over our bare shoulders, enclosing us in the quiet, shadowed warmth of the master suite.

Outside the arched windows, the storm finally breaks, leaving New Orleans in deep, velvet silence—and inside our room, the war is truly over.

36

LUCA

The electronic hum of the secure communications terminal in my private study fills the quiet room with a sterile, high-frequency drone that seems to mock the raw, physical chaos of the night. Outside, the Gulf storm has finally bled itself dry, leaving behind a heavy, dripping silence over the limestone pathways of the Valentino estate.

On the monitor before me, the green status indicators flash with monotonous regularity across the regional map of New Orleans, confirming what my men already cleared on the ground: the Russo family is erased. Root, branch, and ledger.

Ettore Russo never faced the Commission. The old man died in his sickbed before my summons reached him, gout-rotted, alone, the last Russo name crossed off the ledger without costing me a single bullet.

Renzo stands on the left side of the desk, his heavy hands resting flat over a stack of printed asset transfer manifests, while Dante Santoro leans against the dark mahogany bookshelves behind him. His white dress shirt is open at the throat, dark with dried river mud and the faint, coppery ghost of powder residue, his knuckles scraped raw from where he cleared the warehouse corridor.

“The port berths are scrubbed,” Renzo reports, his voice low, steady, and utterly drained of the tension that has choked our river operations for years. “Berth 14 is fully under joint Valentino-Santoro security. The remaining Russo captains surrendered their shipping permits before dawn. There is nobody left to contest the line.”

“Good,” I reply. I don’t feel like a conqueror. I feel like a man standing over a pyre he built with his own hands, waiting to see if the ash will choke him too. “Make sure the port records reflect joint administration. No discrepancies. Every slip, every container crane, every import manifest must match the terms we drew up before the war.”

Dante shifts against the bookshelves, his dark eyes fixing on my face with an unreadable weight. For months, the Santoro Don looked at me through the distorted lens of suspicion and guilt, a rival captain building a wall. But tonight, after standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the blood and smoke of Berth 14, that barrier is gone.

“Cassia sent word through the secure line an hour ago,” Dante says quietly, his voice carrying an unexpected softness that sounds foreign in a war room.

I look up from the monitor, my jaw tightening. “Is the baby safe?”

“Lucia is sleeping,” Dante nods, a faint, tired ghost of a smile touching the corner of his mouth. “And Cassia... Cassia readmitted me to our bedroom. The guest-room sentence ended the night we bled together on those docks. She told me she’d rather have a husband with scars than a coward without a single one.” Dante pauses, lifting his gaze to mine with an unspoken understanding. “You tore a city down to the foundation to get her back, Luca. My brothers and I saw it. The Santoro ledger is clean with you. Forever.”

“The ledger was always balanced, Dante,” I reply evenly, pulling back my left cuff. “Go home to your wife and your daughter. The port is secure.”

When Dante and Renzo leave the study, the silence of the estate rushes in to fill the void, heavy and suffocating. I don’t go upstairs immediately. Instead, I push open the French doors leading out onto the private stone balcony of the master suite, stepping out into the cool, damp air of the late-night courtyard.

The air smells of crushed gardenias, wet paving stones, and the lingering, faint metallic ghost of cordite that seems permanently baked into my skin. Below, the estate guards move through the shadows with quiet, synchronized discipline, their boots clicking softly against the flagstones. The perimeter is secure. New Orleans belongs to us now.

I rest my palms against the cold stone balustrade, leaning my weight forward until the sharp edge digs deep into my flesh.

My thoughts drift back to the holding vault at Berth 14: to the blinding flash of the linear cutting strip, the acrid smoke of the breach, and the exact moment Gia turned her head through the chaos to look at me. She didn’t scream. She didn’t beg.