Chapter 8
GIA
The smell of scorched garlic and scalded milk hits me before I even reach the bottom step of the main staircase.
Underneath it is the heavy, hissed steam of Maria’s iron pressing black linen in the utility room: a rhythmic, aggressive thwack-hiss that sounds suspiciously like a hammer hitting an anvil.
The house is at war, and the women are currently executing the casualties.
I step into Nonna Rosa’s kitchen, my leather surgical satchel slung over my shoulder. The room is hot, bright, and suffocating with the scent of dark chicory coffee and cold-blooded female retribution.
Dante sits at the head of the long oak prep table. The Don of the Santoro famiglia, dark wool and lethal authority who commands two hundred armed soldiers across four parishes, is currently staring down at his breakfast plate.
It is completely empty.
Not a slice of pancetta. Not a crust of bread. Not even a drop of oil. Just a dry piece of glazed ceramic and a cup of black coffee that looks like it was brewed out of river silt and spite.
Beside the stove, Nonna Rosa stands with a wooden spoon in her hand, her apron tied tight over her hips, stirring a pot of polenta with the methodical, pitiless precision of a surgeon performing an amputation.
She is Cajun-Creole to her bones, raised in the bayous before she ever set foot in this compound, and she speaks with a dry, sharp cadence that doesn’t bow to titles.
“You want butter on that plate, Don Dante?” Nonna asks without turning around, her voice dripping with sweet, Louisiana poison. “Or maybe you prefer to eat the paper you signed on your sister’s life?”
Dante doesn’t answer. His jaw is locked so tight the muscle in his cheek looks like a knot of rope. His right hand rests flat on the table, his thumb endlessly turning our father’s signet ring around his knuckle. He looks up as I enter, his dark eyes hollow, bruised with sleep deprivation.
He opens his mouth to say something: maybe my name, maybe an apology I have no intention of accepting.
“Don’t,” I say, my voice level, cool, and flat as a stainless-steel tray. “Save your breath, Dante. You’re going to need it for the altar.”
Maria sweeps past him, slamming a freshly ironed stack of white linen napkins onto the sideboard so hard the silver salt cellars jump. She doesn’t look at Dante. She doesn’t look at his empty plate. She treats the head of this family like a draft coming through a broken window.
Cassia steps through the pantry doors, holding baby Lucia against her shoulder. My sister-in-law is wearing tailored cream silk, her dark hair pinned back, her posture impossibly straight. She looks like the woman who tracks every dollar this family moves: cool and calculating.
“The tribunal has concluded, Giada,” Cassia announces, setting a small bottle of formula on the counter without looking at her husband.
She speaks to the room, but the verdict is aimed directly at Dante’s throat.
“Dante has been officially evicted from the East Wing master suite. His bags are in the second-floor guest room facing the driveway.”
Dante’s head snaps up. “Cassia—”
“The nursery door stays locked from the inside,” Cassia continues, her voice smooth as marble. “Lucia wakes up every three hours. You will take the 3:00 AM feeding, the 5:00 AM burping, and the 6:00 AM diaper change. Alone. While I sleep.”
Nico, sitting near the far window in his tailored black wedding suit, lets out a low, dark snort into his espresso cup.
Cassia’s gaze pivots to him. “Renzo and Marco have been sentenced to two weeks of complete domestic exile for standing in that study and letting Dante negotiate the trade. They will be served cold soup until the reception is over.”
“And Nico?” I ask, leaning against the doorframe, my thumb tracing the strap of my medical bag.
“Nico is cleared unanimously,” Cassia says, her sharp eyes flicking to my twin. “He gets hot polenta.”
Nonna Rosa immediately sets a bowl of rich, yellow polenta topped with braised short rib in front of Nico. Nico gives Dante a slow, deliberate smirk, picking up his fork.
Dante looks at his empty plate, then up at his wife. “This is ridiculous, Cassia. We have forty capos arriving before the ceremony. The house needs to show a united front.”
“The house is united,” Cassia replies, pouring herself a cup of black coffee. “Against you. Eat your air, Dante.”
It’s gallows humor, sharp and vicious, the only weapon these women have in a world built by men who trade blood for territory.
None of them can stop the cars from pulling through the compound gates.
None of them can tear up the contract Luca Valentino signed in my father’s study.
So they punish the Don at his own breakfast table, using the only currency he can’t command: their warmth.
Nobody asks me how I’m holding up.
Not Cassia, who knows exactly what it costs to stand in a room while men divide your life. Not Nonna, who has watched two generations of Santoro women get fitted for political graves. Not even Nico, whose dark eyes meet mine across the room with a raw, silent understanding that needs no language.
The absence of the question is a mercy. In my world, if someone asks you if you’re okay, it means you look broken.
It means your vitals are crashing and you need an IV line.
To be treated like a victim today is to admit that I am cargo being shipped across the river, rather than a trauma surgeon conducting a high-stakes procedure on her own life.
Cassia walks over, setting a cool, dry hand against the side of my arm.
“We aren’t doing this to give you an easy out, Giada,” she says, her voice dropping into a quiet, fierce register that cuts through the kitchen hum.
“We’re doing it because five years from now, when the men in this city start rewriting history and telling everyone you went willingly into the Valentino house to secure a truce, there will be women sitting in that front row who remember every single drop of blood it cost you. ”
She looks at me, her gaze steady, unarmored. “We are your witnesses.”
I hold her gaze, the breath locking in my throat for half a second before I force my ribs to expand. “Then make sure you have good seats.”
Upstairs in my East Wing suite, the air smells of pressed silk, lavender steam, and the sharp, industrial tang of Marguerite Beaumont’s iron.
The bedroom has been turned into a field hospital for couture.
Marguerite stands in the center of the Persian rug, three brass pins held between her teeth, her tape measure draped over her sharp shoulders like a stethoscope.
On the dress form behind her hangs the gown Marguerite built overnight for a rush fee that could fund a small clinic: the long line of silk-covered buttons gleaming down the spine of structured ivory.
It isn’t white. White was murdered the moment Marguerite refused my request for charcoal wool.
“Stand still, chère,” Marguerite mutters, working the silk-covered buttons closed up the back of the structured bodice.
The boning clicks into place, binding my ribs with a cold, terrifying structure that forces my posture straight.
“If you breathe out too hard, you’ll pop a seam, and I do not do re-stitches in the garden. ”
Izzy and Mila sit on the edge of my unmade bed.
Izzy is holding a vintage silver compact, her phone tucked under her thigh, still dark, still silent, still carrying no word from Sofia.
But right now, her hands are steady as she reaches up, tilting my chin toward the afternoon light streaming through the balcony doors.
“Hold still,” Izzy says, brushing a feather-light layer of dark lip stain across my mouth. “Valentino threw a capo out of your announcement dinner last night for looking at your hip. If I don’t get this arch right, he might execute the florist.”
Mila sits beside her, her pale gray-green eyes quiet, her long fingers untangling a dark strand of my hair.
Mila is Nico’s partner, a Russian violinist who survived the cold, lethal architecture of the Zakharov Bratva before she ever stepped foot in New Orleans.
She doesn’t talk much, but her hands are impossibly gentle as she pins my dark hair up into a high, intricate crown, securing it with a single, antique silver hemostat I keep on my dresser.
Nobody in Cosa Nostra touches me gently. In my life, hands on my body mean physical exams, wound care, or men trying to hold me back while someone bleeds out on an operating table.
But for an hour, in the quiet heat of my bedroom, Izzy and Mila touch my hair, my face, my skin, with a tender, sisterly care that feels more dangerous than a knife. It threatens to soften the callus I’ve spent a lifetime building over my heart.
“Here,” Cassia says, walking into the room and tossing a sleek, silver-embossed box onto the bedspread. “A wedding gift from the tribunal.”
I raise an eyebrow, watching Izzy snatch the box up and tear off the ribbon. She flips the lid open, reaches inside, and pulls out a sheer, whispering cloud of dark crimson silk and lace.
It is a nightgown, if you can call three inches of gossamer thread and strategic cutouts a gown. It belongs in a high-end French Quarter bordello, designed for explicit, uncompromising destruction.
“Mon Dieu,” Nonna Rosa grunts from the doorway, holding a tray of scalded milk and chicory. She takes one look at the lace hanging from Izzy’s fingers and crosses herself. “That’s not a nightgown. That’s an invitation to a funeral.”
Izzy bursts out laughing: a bright, wicked sound that shatters the heavy atmosphere of the room. “It’s a strategic counter-strike, Rosa. Gia’s contract says separate bedrooms. If she wears this to walk to the bathroom, Valentino’s brain will short-circuit through his tailored suit.”
“He’ll sign over the deep-water berths just to get the zipper down,” Cassia adds dryly, leaning against the bedpost.