Chapter 6
LUCA
The iron gates of the Santoro compound open without a sound, yielding to the front bumper of the Maybach. I roll my shoulders inside my jacket, smelling the humid New Orleans air mixed with cedarwood, hot asphalt, and gun oil.
Behind me, Silvano Moretti and two guys from my detail keep their hands low near their holsters. I’ve crossed this gravel a hundred times for truce meetings: sitting across walnut tables to divide shipping lanes and tally up dead soldiers. But tonight isn’t a border negotiation.
I’m walking into enemy territory as an invited guest.
The house smells like chicory coffee, old wood, and the sharp, vinegar bite of Nonna Rosa’s kitchen. But the second I step into the formal dining room, the temperature drops off a cliff.
Dante sits at the head of the table, his spine stiff enough to snap.
Beside him, Cassia’s chair is pulled a full foot away, her napkin folded into a perfect square while she stares right past her husband.
Further down, Renzo looks up over a glass of dark red wine, his thumb brushing the pocket where he keeps his mother’s rosary.
He greets me with a nod that is so clean, so calm, it makes my teeth lock together.
I look at Renzo, and my blood runs hot. I have spent years planning to tear these men apart. Renzo pulled the trigger. Dante gave the order.
“Luca,” Dante says. He turns his signet ring on his finger. “You’re early.”
“Traffic on the expressway was light,” I say, taking my seat at the center of the table. “Though I see your house isn’t running on schedule.”
Enemy territory is quiet, but it’s loud as hell.
Nonna Rosa comes out of the kitchen with a platter of osso buco, serving every man at the table with soft Cajun-Creole murmurs, except Dante.
In front of the Don sits an empty plate.
Clean porcelain. One of the kitchen girls, Maria, walks right past him without looking down.
Nico sits across from me, his eyes cold as flint. He’s Gia’s twin, and he didn’t want this trade. He went nuclear in Dante’s study, and right now, he looks like he wants to jump the table and take a chunk out of my throat.
“The gravy smells fucking incredible, Rosa,” I say, keeping my tone smooth as glass.
Rosa stops behind my chair. The serving spoon in her hand freezes. The whole table goes dead silent. A Valentino complimenting a Santoro recipe in the middle of a family war.
“It’s marrow and burnt sugar, Don Valentino,” she says, her voice dry as dust. “It tastes better when nobody had to bargain for it.”
Moretti shifts his weight near the door. Nico’s jaw clenches so tight a knot pops in his cheek.
Then the heavy doors at the end of the hall swing open.
My lungs completely lock up. Cazzo.
I expected scrubs. I expected the boxy, oversized green cotton she uses to hide from every man in this city. I prepared myself for her to walk in wearing something dull, looking at me like an inconvenient line item.
Instead, she walks in wearing midnight-black velvet.
It’s cut low across her collarbones, structured with corset boning that forces her posture straight, hugging her waist and hips in a way that feels like a direct, deliberate attack.
It isn’t a dress meant to hide a woman. It’s built to make every man in the room lose his fucking mind.
The dark fabric swallows the light from the chandelier, and against her pale skin, it’s so lethal I forget how to breathe.
Principessa, I tell myself, slamming the wall down before the panic takes over. She’s a trade. A debt settlement. Don’t look at her like she just took your pulse.
Except she didn’t buy this off a rack. She chose it. She looked at this dress, knew what it would do, and put it on anyway.
The discipline shatters. The name slips in the dark, unmapped corners of my brain: Giada.
On her left hand, the black diamond ring I sent to her room catches the candlelight.
The two Texas capos sitting near the end of the table, here to witness the union for the Commission, stare at her like they’ve just seen a ghost. They aren’t looking at a traded sister.
They’re looking at a woman who looks like she owns the place.
“My bride,” I say out loud, the words coming out rough and quiet before I can catch them.
The introduction hits the table like an iron weight. The Texas capos raise their glasses, nodding. Renzo lifts his wine.
“To the union,” Renzo says smoothly. “May it keep the port quiet.”
“Quiet,” I repeat, my eyes locked on Renzo’s plate, wondering how easy it would be to snap his neck right here in front of his brothers.
“She’s a little high-strung for shipping berths, isn’t she, Valentino?
” a low-level capo sitting near the bottom of the table mutters.
He’s an outer-ring guy Dante brought in to fill seats, and he’s swirling his wine with a slick, greasy grin, his eyes trailing down the line of Gia’s hip.
“A surgeon across the table sounds like a headache. You want a girl who knows how to shut her mouth and look good on a boat.”
The dining room goes instantly, terrifyingly still.
Nico’s hand slams flat against the wood. Cassia stops mid-sip.
I don’t yell. I don’t raise my voice. I just set my knife down on the linen with a small, sharp clack, lean back in my chair, and look at him.
“Say that again,” I say, my voice dropping into that quiet, flat register that makes my own lieutenants sweat. “Out loud. In front of her family.”
The associate’s grin dies. He blinks, looking around the table, but nobody is helping him. Dante is staring straight ahead. Nico looks like he’s about to kill him if I don’t do it first.
“I—I was just making a joke, Don Valentino—”
“You have thirty seconds,” I tell him, my eyes locked on his. “Get up, walk out those gates, and get the fuck out of New Orleans. If I see your face in this parish after midnight, I’m going to personally cut your tongue out and feed it to the dogs on my dock. Move.”
The guy’s chair scrapes hard against the floor as he scrambles up, spilling his wine across the cloth, and bolts out the side doors without looking back.
Silence drops over the room: thick, heavy, and absolute.
Gia doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t thank me. She just reaches for her water, takes a slow sip, and rolls her left wrist, that small pre-scrub circle she makes when she’s processing a messy trauma case. She’s treating my threat like a variable in an operation.
Beside me, the no-touch rule holds. My hands stay on the table.
I don’t touch her waist, I don’t brush her arm, I don’t close the two inches of air between us.
The restraint is fucking brutal, a physical ache in my chest, but I won’t give her brothers the satisfaction of seeing me break my own word.
When the dinner finally breaks up, I find her outside at the edge of the garden, standing near the iron gate that leads to the family graves.
A warm summer rain is starting to fall, thick with the smell of wet dirt, jasmine, and river water. I step up behind her, stopping short of touching her. I can feel the heat coming off her skin right through the velvet.
“You made a scene in there,” she says, her back still to me, staring out at the headstones.
“I set a boundary,” I say. “Big difference.”
She turns around slowly, her dark eyes cutting into mine under the yellow garden light. The black diamond on her finger shines in the damp air. She looks completely unbothered, wrapped in a dress she picked out specifically to poke at my temper.
“You think tossing a low-level capo out the door proves something, Luca?” she asks, her voice sharp as a scalpel. “You think because Dante signed a piece of paper, I belong to your inventory?”
“You’re wearing my ring,” I remind her, my jaw clenching as I fight the urge to grab her by the hips and pull her against me until she forgets her own name.
“I’m wearing a contract,” she snaps, taking a step toward me until I can smell that clean, unscented soap on her skin. “And my contract says you don’t fucking touch me. So keep your hands in your pockets, Valentino. You’re going to need them when we’re actually stuck under the same roof.”
I look down at her: at the line of her throat, the stubborn tilt of her chin, the absolute refusal to bow. She thinks her clauses are a fortress. She thinks her clauses are going to keep her safe from me.
She doesn’t realize that every sharp word out of her mouth just makes me want to blockade every road and berth out of this city to keep her.
“Tomorrow,” I say, “you come home with me, Giada. You won’t be wearing the dress. And you won’t be hiding behind your paper.”
She holds my gaze, her chest rising and falling fast under the black velvet, refusing to back down.
“We’ll see who survives it, Luca,” she says, turns on her heel, and walks back into the house alone.