Chapter 5
GIA
The cold bite of steel against skin is something I understand. A scalpel in a wet glove, a hemostat slipping past a carotid sheath. Those have logic. They have parameters.
A stranger’s copper-tipped tape measure pulling tight across my ribs does not.
“You’ve lost weight, chère,” Marguerite Beaumont says, her French accent clipped and dry as old parchment, dropping into the back of my neck before I can even unbutton my collar.
“Or perhaps you simply never had any meat on you to begin with. Stand straight. Do not slouch like a student who has spent thirty-six hours over a cadaver.”
I don’t slouch. I don’t breathe in, either. I keep my spine locked into the rigid posture I learned the day I stood at the St. Louis Cathedral pulpit in black wool, holding my family together while my father went cold in the ground.
Out in the front showroom of Marguerite’s Boutique on Magazine Street, the air smells of old cedar, machine oil, and the sweet rot of Magazine Street heat rolling in every time the front door shifts. Izzy is sitting on a velvet settee near the window, her phone face-up on her knee.
Every forty seconds, the screen lights up blue, she looks down, and the micro-tension in her jaw resets. Nothing from Sofia.
The rehabilitation facility across town, the quiet apartment downtown where her sister is trying to live with a mother who survived a bottle only to drown in silence: it’s all running on a razor’s edge in Izzy’s head.
She split herself in two to sit here with me today, because that is what you do when your soon-to-be sister-in-law is being fitted for a marriage she didn’t ask for.
Nobody asks how I’m holding up. Not Dante, who is currently enduring Nonna Rosa’s glacial silence across an empty kitchen table. Not Nico, who went nuclear in the study and hasn’t slept since.
And certainly not Marguerite, who is currently pinning three yards of charcoal silk foulard across my left shoulder with the terrifying efficiency of a woman who has buried half of New Orleans and dressed the other half for leverage.
“I want something plain,” I say, my voice flat, operating at the exact pitch I use when calling out instrument trays to a scrub nurse during an arterial bleed. “Dark. Forgettable. A high neck, long sleeves, no embellishment. Something that disappears the second I walk into a room.”
Marguerite stops. The brass-headed pin between her teeth clicks against her molar. She smells perpetually of beeswax and pressed linen, and possesses the only pair of eyes in the Catholic parish that do not soften when they look at a Santoro name.
“You are asking me for a shroud,” she says, her fingers pausing against my collarbone.
“I am asking for clothing.”
“You are asking to hide,” Marguerite corrects, stepping back with a sharp rustle of wool skirts.
She crosses her arms, her gaze sweeping down my frame with clinical, pitiless assessment.
“And you have come to the wrong shop. I dressed your mother for the Broussard. I dressed her again when she went into the ground behind the compound. And I dressed you in black wool to bury your father. I know what this house does to its women.”
My thumb moves automatically, turning the emerald-and-gold ring on my right hand one slow quarter-turn against my knuckle. I don’t touch the four-carat black diamond sitting on my left ring finger. I leave it cold, unacknowledged, an enemy anchor I refuse to soothe.
“My mother’s wardrobe is irrelevant to this conversation, Marguerite.”
“Your mother wore charcoal because she thought if she made herself gray enough, the men around her would forget she had a pulse,” Marguerite snaps. “It did not save her. And it will not save you. Take the blouse off.”
She saw my mother’s wardrobe, not my mother.
She saw yards of muted silk hanging on cedar forms, not a woman who stopped wearing color because when your life is traded across a table, bright dye feels like an insult to the spirit inside you.
Marguerite thinks she’s diagnosing a survival strategy. She’s only counting swatches.
I don’t waste clinical breath correcting a woman who mistakes clothing for character. My fingers move to my collar, unbuttoning the starch-stiff cotton, and I take the blouse off anyway.
The fitting room is lined with three-way antique mirrors framed in tarnished brass.
When I step before them in my slip, the reflection multiplies me by three: three ghosts with dark, pulled-back hair pinned with two tortoiseshell pins, three sets of sharp collarbones, three pairs of eyes refusing to blink.
I hate mirrors. In a hospital, mirrors are for checking PPE seals or verifying suture lines. Here, they are an inventory of what is being traded.
Strip away the cotton, and what’s left is the body Dante bartered.
Marguerite doesn’t offer sympathy. She offers work.
“Turn,” she commands.
I turn. Her warm, dry hands land flat between my shoulder blades, holding me still with the exact, unyielding pressure I use to keep a terrified patient from bolting off an exam table. There is no sentimentality in her touch. She is a mechanic evaluating a cracked engine block.
“There is no time to weave new silk,” Marguerite murmurs, running a strip of chalk down my ribs, her thumb pressing hard enough to leave a white line against my skin.
“The dinner is tonight. The wedding is tomorrow. Your brother’s arrangement moves like a wildfire.
The gown I will build overnight—ivory, not white, since you have already killed white in my shop and I agree with the murder.
For tonight, black velvet from my private couture archive.
Never worn, never promised, and I will cut it to your body by six. ”
“Couture by six,” I echo, staring at my own collarbone in the glass. “That sounds expensive.”
“It will be,” Marguerite says dryly. “Your brother is paying. Lift your arms.”
I raise my arms. She drops a garment over my head: heavy, midnight-black velvet structured with corset boning so rigid it forces my lungs to expand against my will.
It is sleeveless, cut low enough across the chest to make my breath hitch, and fitted through the waist and hips with a predatory precision that leaves nothing to the imagination. It hugs every curve of my hips, every line of my waist, tracing the exact anatomy my scrubs were built to erase.
When I open my eyes and look in the three-way mirror, the reflection doesn’t look like a trauma surgeon. It looks like a weapon.
“There,” Marguerite whispers, stepping back to admire her handiwork in the glass.
She reaches out, pulling a loose strand of dark hair from my neck, letting it fall across my shoulder.
“You want to disappear, chère? Put that on and walk into a room full of Valentino soldiers. See how many of them look at your hands.”
The silence in the fitting room stretches, thick with the smell of warm iron and my own racing pulse. My wrist rolls through the pre-scrub circle, an old reflex trying to find a sterile field that isn’t here.
“They won’t be looking at my hands,” I say, my voice dangerously low. “They’ll be looking at a debt settlement. That’s all this is.”
Marguerite tilts her head, her eyes glittering in the antique glass. “A debt settlement does not wear velvet like a second skin, Giada. A man does not look at a woman dressed like this and see an invoice. He looks at her and wonders how long it would take to ruin her.”
The words hang between us like a dropped scalpel.
Outside in the showroom, a floorboard creaks.
Izzy’s phone chimes, a soft, double-tone notification.
Through the gap in the fitting room velvet curtain, I see Izzy snatch the phone up so fast her knuckles go white.
A second passes. The light on her face dies.
She sets the phone back down, face-up, and stares at the dead glass.
No message from Sofia. The silence in her world matches the silence in mine.
I look back at my reflection.
I can take the dress off. I can demand Marguerite put me back in the charcoal wool, wrap myself in gray modesty, walk into Luca Valentino’s world looking like an apology, and let every man at that table think they bought something small, manageable, and broken.
Or I can keep the velvet on.
I can take the trade, strip away the pretense of a victim, and hand them a queen who chose her own armor.
My hand reaches behind my back, my fingers finding the edge of the corset zipper.
“Leave it,” I say.
Marguerite raises an eyebrow. “The black?”
“The black,” I tell her, my chin lifting until the line of my jaw is as hard as the steel frames around the mirrors. “If they want a Valentino possession, I’ll make sure they can’t look away from what they bought.”
Marguerite doesn’t smile. She simply reaches for her shears, snips a stray basting thread from the hem, and nods once: a sharp, economical dip of the head that is higher praise than anything a Santoro has given me since this started.
“Come out, then,” she says, sweeping the curtain back. “Let your friend see what you’ve done to yourself.”
I step out of the dim, beeswax-scented quiet of the fitting room and into the bright, sun-bleached light of the front showroom.
Izzy looks up from her phone.
The words she was about to say, probably something sharp about the time or a reminder of the car waiting outside, die in her throat.
Her eyes sweep from the edge of the midnight-black hem up the impossible line of the velvet waist to my face.
The hacker’s gaze freezes, calculating an equation that doesn’t balance.
For three seconds, the front of Marguerite’s Boutique is completely silent. Even the Magazine Street traffic outside seems to hold its breath.
“Gia,” Izzy whispers, the color draining slightly from her cheeks. “My god.”
“Is the car outside?” I ask, my voice level, steady, and entirely untouched by the sudden, suffocating realization of what I have just handed the man I marry tomorrow.
Izzy slowly stands, her fingers clutching her phone like a shield. “The car is outside. Dante’s men are on the door.”
“Good,” I say, smoothing the heavy black velvet over my hips with hands that do not shake. “Let’s go meet my husband.”