Page 67 of Ruthless Grace

“A honeymoon,” I murmur softly, looking out the tinted window as we cross the Mississippi River bridge. “They think you were keeping me in your bed.”

“Let them think it,” Luca rasps, his knuckles brushing against my knee through my skirt, sending a jolt of static heat straight through my bloodstream. “It keeps them focused on our bed instead of our armor. But tonight is Sunday, cara. And the contract requires us to break bread.”

The Santoro estate smells of crushed basil, roasted garlic, and Nonna Rosa’s Sunday marinara: a scent that has anchored my entire life since childhood. But tonight, as Luca and I step through the cypress doors into the main dining room, the atmosphere is thick enough to cut with a scalpel.

Sunday dinner with my family until the day one of us dies. It was my ultimate weapon, a legal chain forcing the Don of the Valentino family to sit at his enemy’s table every seven days.

The long mahogany table is fully set. Dante sits at the head, his expression strained, carrying the crushing weight of the guilt he has borne since trading me. Beside him, Cassia keeps her arm brushed against his, her sharp eyes tracking Luca and me the second we enter.

Renzo sits across from Izzy, his scarred hands quiet over his lap, while Marco leans against the sideboard. And at the far end, my twin brother Nico sits with Mila at his side, his fists jammed deep into his pockets, his dark eyes burning with an unholy, volatile rage that has been brewing for weeks.

“Sit,” Nonna Rosa commands from the doorway, carrying a steaming bowl of handmade rigatoni. “Before the food gets cold.”

Luca pulls out my chair at the center of the table, his hand resting possessively against the back of my seat before he takes his place beside me. The silence in the room is suffocating.

Dante sets his wine glass down with a heavy, deliberate clack. “You vanished, Gia,” Dante begins, his voice tight, rough, and laced with suppressed anger. “Radio silence. Cassia told your department at Casa Lucia you were on a private retreat with your husband. You haven’t taken a single surgical rotation. Care to explain why my sister was locked away across the river?”

“She wasn’t locked away, Dante,” Luca replies smoothly, unfolding his linen napkin. “She was under my protection.”

“She belongs in an OR, not hidden in your master suite like a fucking trophy!” Nico snaps, his chair scraping violently against the floor as he leans forward, his twin eyes locked onto mine. “You’ve been dodging my calls, Gia. Every time I ask Renzo where you are, he gives me two-word answers. What the hell is going on?”

I look around the table. At Cassia, whose sharp gaze is fixed on my collarbone. At Nonna Rosa, who has stopped stirring the sauce. At Renzo, who remains dead silent. And at my brothers, who sold me to stop a war.

“I wasn’t on a honeymoon,” I say, my voice cutting through the heavy dining room like a cold blade.

Nico freezes. Dante’s jaw tightens.

I reach up, my fingers slowly unbuttoning the top three buttons of my black silk blouse. With calm, surgical composure, I pull the fabric back just far enough, exposing my left chest to the warm glow of the chandelier.

There, sitting cleanly against my skin, is the silver-pink line of my healed lumpectomy scar.

“Weeks ago, Arthur Vance found a mass during a routine screening,” I state, my tone clinical, detached, and unyielding. “Then I underwent a lumpectomy in Luca’s private procedure room at the estate. They took the tumor out. Before we left, Arthur gave me my final clearance. It was benign—but I spent weeks not knowing that. The threat is gone.”

A deafening, suffocating silence detonates in the room.

Nonna Rosa lets out a ragged, trembling gasp, her hand flying to her rosary. Cassia’s eyes widen in sheer shock, her hand dropping from Dante’s arm. Izzy covers her mouth, and Mila freezes beside Nico.

Dante looks as if he has been shot through the heart. “A tumor...” he whispers, his face draining of all color, the guilt on his features morphing into a terrifying, gut-wrenching horror. “You had surgery... and you didn’t tell us? You know what that disease did to Mama, Gia. How could you shut us out?”

“You had cancer,” Nico breathes, his voice shaking with a terrifying, volatile tremor. “Like Mama.” He looks at my scar, then turns his dark, twin eyes onto Luca. “You kept her there. You kept our sister under a scalpel, and you didn’t call her family? You let her go through a tumor alone?!”

“She wasn’t alone,” Luca says evenly, his voice cool, flat, and immovable as granite. “And I honored my wife’s command. She requested privacy.”

“PRIVACY?!” Nico roars.

Nico springs up from the table, knocking his heavy oak chair backward onto the floor. In one violent surge, my twin lunges across the corner of the table, his bare fist cocked back with pure, protective Santoro rage.

BANG.

Nico’s bare fist crashes straight into Luca’s jaw with a sickening, heavy crack before anyone in the room can draw breath. The sheer force of the strike snaps Luca’s head violently to the side, driving him back a step against his chair. Blood instantly spurts from a deep split in Luca’s lower lip, dripping down his chin and staining the crisp white collar of his dress shirt crimson.

Luca doesn’t raise a guard. He doesn’t dodge, and he doesn’t throw a counter-punch. He stands there like a monument carved from granite, taking the full, brutal impact of my twin’s strike.

Seeing his Don struck and bleeding, Silvano Moretti instantly reacts. Standing guard by the dining room archway, Silvano draws his sidearm, the steel slide clearing the holster with a sharp, deadly clack.

Luca wipes the ribbon of blood from his split lip with the back of his hand. Without taking his dark, lethal gaze off Nico, Luca turns his head slightly and barks a razor-sharp order at his Consigliere:

“STAND DOWN, SILVANO! Don’t you fucking touch him!”