Page 46 of Ruthless Grace

I stiffen, but I refuse to reach for it. “What are you doing?”

Luca doesn’t answer. He holds my phone in one hand, his thumb moving across the glass with quick, practiced strikes.

He taps the screen, unlocks the device using the master key he undoubtedly had his tech team build into my network, and opens the satellite tracking application linked to the black unit on his desk.

In front of my eyes, he taps Unpair.

A red notification flashes across my screen: Device Serial #8841-V Disconnected.

“There,” Luca says softly, his tone dangerously calm. “The car tracker is dead. Your sedan is clean.”

I narrow my eyes, suspicious of how easily he yielded. “What’s the catch, Valentino?”

Luca doesn’t put my phone away. Instead, he opens his own personal location-sharing profile on the screen. He toggles the primary setting from Restricted to Always Share, authorizes the encrypted link with his fingerprint, and hands the phone back to me face-up.

Glaring back at me from the screen is a bright, pulsing blue dot anchored directly over the coordinates of the Valentino estate, accompanied by a live, unedited readout of his device’s real-time battery, signal, and movement telemetry.

“Now you know where I am every second of the day, principessa,” he murmurs, his voice dropping into a low, possessive rumble against my jawline. “Every meeting, every berth, every dock, every breath I take. You hold the key to my cage.”

My chest heaves under the silk. The chess move lands with the force of a physical blow.

By stripping the hidden tracker from my car and handing me his own 24/7 unedited location, he made himself completely transparent: a terrifying, unasked-for form of intimacy that unsettles me far more than a hidden bug ever could. He gave me his location to strip away my excuse to hide mine.

“You think this makes us even?” I ask, my voice tight.

“I think it means when you slip away from this estate, you’ll know exactly how close I am behind you,” he whispers.

He leans in a fraction of an inch closer, his chest almost brushing mine, the dark scent of him wrapping around my senses like a chokehold. “Keep the phone in your hand, Gia. Read the map whenever you feel like running.”

He steps back.

The sudden loss of his heat leaves the air cold against my skin. Luca doesn’t look bothered. He casually turns, reaches for his glass of scotch on the desk, and takes a slow, unhurried sip, watching me over the crystal rim with dark, unblinking eyes.

I grip my phone tight in my hand, my knuckles turning white around the casing. I look down at the blinking blue dot that represents my husband: a man who married me under Commission law, and just handed me his pulse on a digital screen.

He removed the physical car bug. He thinks he won the mental game.

What he doesn’t know—what his calculating, tactical mind hasn’t accounted for—is the encrypted calendar entry sitting two layers deep in my phone’s vault.

Tomorrow morning. 08:30 AM. Dr. Vance’s Private Clinic—Garden District VIP Annex. Procedure: Unmarked Breast Mass Diagnostic & Ultrasound Screening.

He thinks I’m picking fights over privacy because I hate his rules.

I slide the phone into my pocket, smooth the front of my cream silk blouse with hands that do not shake, and give him a sharp, cold smile, the kind of smile my father used to wear before signing a border truce.

“Enjoy your scotch, Valentino,” I say, my voice steady as steel. “I’ll see you at breakfast.”

I turn on my heel and walk out of his study, leaving him alone in the amber light.

18

LUCA

The brackish water of the Mississippi River laps against the concrete piers beneath my port office, a low, rhythmic grinding that usually settles my mind.

It isn’t settling it today.

I sit at my dark wood desk, stripped of my jacket, my sleeves rolled to my elbows, scanning container manifests for the southern deep-water berths. Ever since Russo’s men tested our perimeter at the docks, every shipment carries the foul stench of an internal leak. But beneath the numbers, beneath the logistics of a family at war, my mind is anchored fifty blocks away, on the woman who stood in my study last night and dropped a grease-smudged satellite tracker onto my blotter.