Chapter 3
GIA
The air inside my father’s study smells of old leather, stale cigar smoke, and suffocating guilt.
It’s mid-morning. I’ve had ninety minutes of sleep on the vinyl couch in the medical wing call room, two shots of Nonna’s dark chicory espresso, and zero time to process the fact that my mother’s name is living in our house again.
I step past the heavy mahogany door, my rubber-soled clog shoes quiet against the Persian rug. My thumbs are tucked deep into my coat pockets, my right thumb turning my mother’s emerald ring against my knuckle. One. Two. Three.
I stop dead three feet inside the threshold.
The room is packed like a war council, the atmosphere thick enough to slice with a scalpel. All four of my brothers are inside.
Dante sits behind Papa’s mahogany desk, his six-foot-two frame hunched over, his dark linen sleeves rolled to his elbows.
The composure he wore last night while holding baby Lucia is completely gone, replaced by an ash-gray, haunted pallor.
His scar-seamed hand endlessly turns Papa’s signet ring against the wood.
Renzo stands against the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf on the left, his heavy arms crossed over his chest, his jaw set so tight the silver scars along his neck look like wire. He smells of gun oil and sandalwood, his eyes fixed on the floorboards like he’s waiting for an explosion.
Marco leans against the stone fireplace mantel, his tablet tucked under his arm, his ink-stained knuckles white where his hands are shoved into his trousers pockets. He looks twenty-four going on forty, his mouth pressed into a flat, grim line.
And then there is Nico.
My twin is pacing the narrow strip of rug between the desk and the leather armchairs like a caged, rabid wolf.
His jacket is off, his tie loosened, his dark hair a violent mess where his fingers have dragged through it.
He isn’t performing. The smooth, charming Consigliere who can talk a judge out of a warrant is entirely gone.
His chest heaves, his eyes bloodshot and terrifyingly wild.
Sitting in the high-backed wingback chair directly across from Dante’s desk is the fifth man in the room.
Luca Valentino.
He sits with an unhurried, arrogant stillness that makes my pulse spike into my throat.
He wears a dark three-piece charcoal suit, immaculate and seamless, his broad shoulders filling the leather frame.
His hands rest loosely on the carved armrests.
On his left wrist, the stainless-steel face of his heavy watch catches the morning light.
On his exposed forearm, my silver suture seam gleams against his skin.
He doesn’t look at Dante. He doesn’t look at Renzo or Marco.
The second the door seals behind me, Luca raises his head, and his dark, unreadable eyes lock dead-center onto mine.
“Gia,” Dante says. “Sit down.”
“I have rounds at Casa Lucia in twenty minutes, Dante,” I say, my voice flat and clinical. I don’t look at Luca. I look at the man sitting behind Papa’s desk. “Say what you brought me up here to say.”
Dante swallows hard. His eyes flicker with agonizing hesitation before he forces the words out.
“Russo has three Commission Don signatures,” Dante begins, the words forced out of his throat like crushed glass.
“He’s invoking a favor clause from before any of us were born—claiming Papa never settled the debt for the financial backing and leverage Russo provided so Papa could outbid that old senator for Mama without starting a war.
Russo is filing paper in Chicago to claim you in marriage.
To Ettore Russo himself. A seventy-year-old man collecting a bride young enough to be his granddaughter off Papa’s tab. ”
He gestures toward the draped corner by the window. “Before you ask—Izzy ran the verification herself.”
Izzy steps out from the shadow of the drapery. Her phone screen wakes in her palm, casting a cool blue light over her face before she darkens it again.
“I ran it myself, Gia. Twice.” Her voice isn’t flat the way I need it to be. “Sourcing, seals, provenance. It’s clean.” She crosses the rug and takes my hand, her cold fingers wrapping around mine. “I’m sorry. I wanted it to be fake. I looked for a way to make it fake.”
Her thumb taps the phone screen again, waking it: no notifications, no message. Her jaw tightens, her focus fracturing toward whatever is happening across town with Sofia. She squeezes my hand once, hard, and slips out the mahogany door.
I watch it click shut behind her. Sofia. I don’t call her back. I let it go.
I turn back to my brother. Dante drops the hammer.
“You’re marrying Luca Valentino in a few days,” Dante rasps, his hand crushing the dark wood of the desk. “It’s the only legal block under Cosa Nostra law. The second you take a Don’s name, Russo’s paper becomes scrap.”
The moment the full scope of Dante’s words settles, the study around me dissolves.
The sound of the room cuts out, replaced by the ghost of my mother’s bedroom.
I am standing in the doorway with her chart in my hand, still young enough that nobody has thought to send me out.
The air smells of withered jasmine, rubbing alcohol, and the sharp, metallic tang of late-stage cancer.
Mama lies in the center of the four-poster bed, her skin translucent, weighed down to eighty pounds.
Dante, already broad through the shoulders, already being fitted for what was coming, and terrified, is on his knees beside her mattress, sobbing silently into her quilt.
Mama’s frail, paper-thin hand, bruised black from IV lines, reaches out and grips Dante’s wrist with a terrifying, dying strength. Her eyes, hollowed by pain, bore into her eldest son.
“I was taken like property, Dante,” Mama whispers, her voice a dry, rattling rasp.
“Your father took me at gunpoint. I was brought into this house without a choice, no matter what it became after. Swear to me, Dante... swear on your soul... no Santoro daughter gets sold for peace. Not Gia. Not ever. Not the way I was.”
Dante buries his face in her blanket, weeping violently, his voice cracking against her skin. “I swear, Mama. I swear on my life. I’ll never sell her.”
The memory snaps back like a severed rubber band.
I stand in the center of Papa’s study, looking at the same boy who knelt by my mother’s bed.
Dante sits behind the desk, unable to hold my gaze. He swore to our dying mother that I would never be traded. And now I am watching him break it.
That realization doesn’t make me cry. It doesn’t make me scream. It settles behind my ribs as a cold, terrifying, absolute calm: the eerie, unshakeable stillness of a trauma surgeon who has realized the room is already lost and the only thing left to do is operate.
Before I can take a breath, Nico snaps.
“Cazzo!” Nico roars, the sound tearing from his throat like a wounded beast. He lunges forward, his palm slamming down on Dante’s desk with a thunderous crack that rattles the whiskey glasses.
“Don’t you fucking phrase it like a strategy, Dante!
Tell her what you did! Tell her you broke your fucking word to Mama! ”
“Nico, sit the fuck down,” Renzo grunts from the bookshelf, his body tensing, ready to throw himself between my brothers if the room detonates.
“No! Fuck you, Renzo! Fuck all of you!” Nico screams, his face flushed red, turning his murderous rage on Dante. “He sold her! Our brother—our Don—just traded my twin to a Valentino to buy a fucking port truce!”
The study erupts into chaos.
Marco steps off the fireplace mantel, his hands coming out of his pockets. “Nico, calm down—”
“I will burn New Orleans to the fucking ground!” Nico shrieks, reaching under his suit jacket, his hand locking onto the grip of his concealed weapon.
“I will march into Russo’s territory, I will tear Chicago apart, and I will put a bullet through Luca Valentino’s skull right where he sits before I let any of you use my sister as debt collateral! ”
“Nico, draw that gun in this room and I will put you through the wall,” Renzo growls, stepping forward, his massive frame blocking the desk.
Luca doesn’t move an inch. He doesn’t reach for his gun. He doesn’t even tilt his head. He sits in his leather chair like a king watching peasants riot, his eyes never leaving my face.
“Nico.”
My voice isn’t loud. It isn’t a scream. It is the razor-thin, ice-cold command I use when an artery spurts across an OR ceiling and an attending nurse loses her head.
Nico freezes. His chest heaves, his hand still locked on his gun, his bloodshot eyes snapping to mine.
I step into the center of the room, directly between my explosive twin and the enemy Don sitting in our chair.
I roll my wrists once: the pre-scrub circle, the physical anchor that brings us both back to reality.
Nico’s shoulders shudder. The wild, blind fury in his eyes cracks, exposing the raw, bleeding horror beneath.
“Gi,” Nico whispers, his voice breaking, sounding like the boy who held my hand when Mama died. “Don’t let them do this. Per favore, sorellina. I’ll get you out of the city. I’ll take you to Europe. I’ll—”
“Tishe, fratellino,” I say softly, using the Russian word Mila taught me, stepping close enough to press my bare palm against his chest. I feel his heart hammering like a trapped bird beneath his linen shirt. “Quiet. Look at me.”
Nico looks at me.
“I am not a victim,” I say, holding his gaze until his grip loosens on his weapon. “And you are not going to ruin your life or burn this family down over a paper. You have a good thing going with Mila, Nico. I won’t be the one to destroy that after you brought her back from the dead.”
Nico swallows hard, his jaw working as tears shine in his eyes.
I turn around. Slowly. Deliberately.
I look at Dante. My eldest brother looks like he wants to vomit. The guilt in his dark eyes is a physical, rotting thing: a weight he will carry on his ledger for the rest of his life.
“If I take this trade,” I say to Dante, “I do it on my terms. Not yours. Not his.”
I turn my body toward the wingback chair.