Page 38 of Ruthless Grace

I don’t wait for my driver to open the door. I throw it open myself, my heavy leather boots hitting the flagstone driveway, my suit jacket unbuttoned as I stride through the grand foyer.

I head straight for the ground-floor holding bay near the security office. A rugged room with concrete walls, heavy leather cots, and basic first-aid supplies where guards debrief after shifts.

I step past the doorway and stop dead in my tracks.

The harsh glare of the overhead fluorescent tube reflects off the linoleum floor. In the center of the room, sitting on the edge of a leather cot, is my guard Gianni: a two-hundred-pound Valentino enforcer. Gianni is pale, his shirt torn open at the shoulder, his bare, muscled arm resting over a towel.

Standing over him, completely in command of the room, is my wife.

Giada Santoro wears an emerald silk blouse with her sleeves rolled tightly past her elbows, revealing the smooth, pale skin of her forearms. Her heavy black leather surgical satchel sits open on the adjacent steel table, her personal tools laid out on a sterile cloth. Her dark hair is pinned back with a slim steel clamp, her amber-flecked eyes locked onto the wound with terrifying focus.

She doesn’t have a single tremor in her hands.

My enforcer Gianni—a man who normally flinches for no Don—is staring up at her with wide-eyed reverence. And my wife’s soft, skilled hands are resting directly on his bare skin, her thumbs pressing hard into his torn muscle.

A dark, blinding wave of feral alpha possessiveness explodes in my chest.

My blood turns to pure acid. I stand in my own house, locked behind a no-touch clause, sleeping in an adjoining room while my wife gives her gentle, healing touch to a fucking grunt soldier. I want to grab Gianni by his throat, drag him off that cot, and throw him through the reinforced glass just for having her fingers on his skin.

“Dr. Santoro,” I say, my voice booming off the concrete walls like thunder.

Gia doesn’t look up. She doesn’t flinch at the violent edge in my voice. She picks up a curved steel tool from her satchel with her right hand, her thumb and ring finger fitting into the loops with practiced, second-nature grace.

“Quiet, Valentino,” she says, her voice flat, cool, and sharp as a scalpel. “Your soldier has a two-inch laceration along the brachial sheath from a bullet graze—a centimeter off the median nerve. He’s lost a pint of blood. If I drop my focus, he loses the use of his left thumb.”

I take two slow, stalking steps closer to the cot, looming directly behind her left shoulder. My cedar-and-gunpowder scent mixes with the sharp, copper tang of fresh blood and antiseptic wipes.

I stare at her hands.

The same hands that wrote a black-ink contract on my nightstand. The same hands that gave herself a screaming, explosive orgasm in my bed while I stood unbuckled and ruined in the dark. Now those hands are buried in another man’s open flesh, working with a steady, breathtaking precision that makes my jaw grind until my teeth ache.

She doesn’t look like a hostage. She doesn’t look like a trade.

She looks like a queen ruling an empire of blood and steel. And every cell in my body is screaming that she belongs to me.

“Did you give him lidocaine, Dr. Santoro?” I ask, my voice dropping into a low, gravelly rasp that vibrates against her ear.

“Two percent from my bag,” Gia replies, her steel clamp flashing under the lights as she drives the curved point through the torn muscle wall. She pulls the thread through with a smooth, continuous flick of her wrist, tying off a knot. “He didn’t scream once. Which is more than I can say for the Don who owns this house.”

Gianni lets out a faint, painful wheeze that might be a laugh, before catching the dark, murderous glare in my eyes and freezing on the cot.

“You’re done, Gianni,” Gia tells the guard, her tone softening slightly into her doctor register as she clips the suture end. “Keep the dressing dry for forty-eight hours. Signora Matilde has antibiotic tablets in the kitchen. Take two with water.”

Gianni sits up slowly, holding his wrapped arm against his ribs. He looks at Gia, bowing his head in absolute respect. “Thank you, Donna,” he mutters in raspy Italian. “Thank you.”

“Get the fuck out, Gianni,” I bark, my voice laced with enough ice to cut a man in half. “Before I decide to break your other arm.”

Gianni doesn’t ask questions. He slides off the cot and hurries out the door, shutting it behind him, leaving my wife and me alone in the holding bay.

The silence in the room turns thick and charged with static electricity.

Gia steps up to the small stainless steel sink in the corner, turning on the tap. She plunges her bare hands under the rushing warm water, scrubbing the drying blood off her palms and wrists with unscented soap from her bag.

I don’t stay at the door. I step up right behind her, my massive frame trapping her against the edge of the counter, my shadow completely swallowing her in the small wall mirror.

“You look very comfortable patching up my men, principessa,” I murmur against her ear, using the weaponized pet name with a possessive rasp.

Gia turns off the tap, grabbing a paper towel to dry her fingers. She turns around in the narrow space between the sink and my chest, her spine locking straight, her head tilting up to meet my dark gaze.