Chapter 9
GIA
By late afternoon, the sweltering New Orleans heat has begun to give way to a heavy, humid stillness.
Mama’s Garden behind the main compound is packed in absolute silence.
The garden path is lined with white iron chairs.
On the left side sit forty men in dark suits representing the Santoro famiglia: Renzo, Marco, and the capos standing rigid, their expressions dark and unreadable.
On the right side sit thirty soldiers from the Valentino faction, led by Luca’s top lieutenants, their hands folded neatly over their buttoned suit jackets, watchful as hawks.
Between the two sides runs a narrow aisle of crushed white stone, stretching from the iron garden gate all the way to the back wall of the estate, where the live oaks cast long, jagged shadows over the Santoro family plots.
Salvatore and Lucia Santoro lie there, side by side under twin markers of gray slate, covered in blooming white jasmine and Lucia’s ancient rose vines. Today is their wedding anniversary.
I stand behind the tall iron doors of the garden arbor, the heavy lace of my train resting on the grass.
Through the scrollwork of the iron gate, I can see him.
Luca Valentino stands at the foot of my parents’ graves, waiting beside Father Angelo.
Father Angelo looks small and ancient in his ceremonial white vestments, his gnarled hands holding his worn leather breviary.
He is the priest who baptized every single Santoro child born in this compound, the man who stood on this very ground years ago and said the commendation of the soul over my father’s coffin.
Today, his eyes are heavy with a quiet, tragic sorrow as he waits to bless the trade.
Beside him, Luca wears a bespoke black suit, tailored so perfectly to his broad shoulders that he looks carved out of obsidian.
His dark hair is styled back, his jaw cut from marble, his expression terrifyingly calm.
But his dark, obsidian eyes are locked on the garden gate, cold and possessive, waiting for the asset he bought to be delivered to his feet.
The string quartet begins the slow, solemn measures of the processional.
The iron gate swings open.
Dante is waiting for me on the stone landing. He looks impeccably sharp in his Don’s suit, but his face is gray with exhaustion, his right hand nervously turning Papa’s signet ring on his pinky finger over and over again.
He steps forward as I reach the landing, his expression raw, offering me his arm with a look that begs for absolution, begs for us to pretend, for fifty feet of stone pathway, that he is a proud elder brother giving his beloved sister away to an ally.
I stop two inches from his extended elbow. I don’t take it.
Dante’s arm stiffens in the air. “Giada,” he whispers, his voice cracking beneath the quiet hum of the garden. “Please. Let me walk you.”
I look up into the eyes of the Don who traded me in his study while my newborn niece slept upstairs. My voice is clean, quiet, and razor-sharp, cutting through the humid air so only he can hear:
“You already gave me away, Dante. You don’t get to do it twice.”
Dante flinches as if I’ve struck him across the face with an iron rod.
The color drains completely from his lips.
His arm drops to his side, heavy as dead weight.
He stands frozen on the lawn, stripped of his right, as the entire underworld watches the Don of the Santoro family get dismissed by his own blood.
Nico steps out from behind the arbor hedges.
He doesn’t offer me a formal arm. He simply steps up beside my left shoulder, his tall frame blocking Dante from my view, and aligns his stride with mine.
Together, Nico and I walk down the brick steps onto the crushed-stone path.
The crunch of white gravel under my silk heels echoes through the silent garden. I keep my head held high, my posture straight as a surgical steel rod, looking neither left nor right at the rows of armed men watching the trade take place.
We reach the iron archway that marks the edge of the formal lawn, ten yards from where the aisle cuts between my parents’ graves.
I halt. I turn to my twin and gently lay my hand over his forearm.
Nico looks down at me, his jaw clenching so hard a muscle twitches near his ear. “Gia,” he says softly, his voice thick with unspent violence. “I can take you out through the rear gate right now. Fuck the treaty. Fuck Valentino.”
“No,” I say softly, meeting his dark eyes with absolute calm. “We play the hand on the table, Nico.”
I pull my hand back from his arm.
“The last steps are mine.”
Nico closes his eyes, swallowing hard, then nods once. He steps back to the edge of the lawn, leaving the stone path completely open.
I turn back toward the altar.
I am walking myself down the aisle.
No father to guide me. No Don brother to give me away. No man standing beside me to claim ownership of the steps I take.
I step onto the stone path, my ivory lace train dragging over the white gravel, passing directly between the slate markers of Salvatore and Lucia Santoro.
As I pass my mother’s grave, her voice echoes from the dark vault of my memory, the words she spoke from her sickbed years ago, holding my small hands in hers: No Santoro daughter, traded, ever.
I’m sorry, Mama, I think, my chest tightening with a sharp, searing ache that I refuse to let show on my face. He traded me. But he didn’t break me.
I reach the end of the path and step up onto the stone dais before my parents’ headstones.
Luca Valentino doesn’t blink.
He stands inches from me, his massive frame towering over mine, his cedar-and-leather scent washing over me in a suffocating wave. His dark eyes scan my face, taking in the cold iron in my posture, the pale pearls at my throat, and the absolute lack of fear in my eyes.
A dark, dangerous flare of admiration flashes deep within his gaze: something raw and feral.
He realizes in this exact second that he hasn’t engineered the surrender of a timid mafia princess.
He has handed a throne to a queen who intends to burn his kingdom down from the inside if he steps out of line.
Father Angelo opens his breviary, clearing his raspy throat as he begins the Latin rites, his old voice droning on about duty, honor, and holy matrimony under the eyes of God and Cosa Nostra.
I don’t hear a word of it. I keep my eyes locked on Luca’s.
When Father Angelo asks for the vows, Luca speaks first. His voice is a deep, velvet rasp, cool, absolute, and resonant as a funeral toll:
“I, Luca Valentino, take you, Giada Santoro, to be my wedded wife. To have and to hold, from this day forward, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, until death parts us.”
He reaches out, taking my left hand in his scar-seamed palm. His skin is warm, calloused, and heavy with lethal authority. He slides the heavy platinum band onto my ring finger, his thumb pressing once against my knuckle with possessive, deliberate force.
It is my turn.
I feel the eyes of forty Santoros and thirty Valentinos burning into my back. I feel Dante’s suffocating guilt hovering near the rear gate. I feel Nico’s watchful rage.
I look Luca Valentino directly in his dark, merciless eyes. I don’t flinch. I don’t hesitate. My voice carries across the quiet garden, clean, steady, and sharp as a scalpel, without breaking once:
“I, Giada Santoro, take you, Luca Valentino, to be my wedded husband. To have and to hold, from this day forward, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, until death parts us.”
I slide the matching platinum ring onto his long, scarred finger.
“I pronounce you husband and wife,” Father Angelo says softly, making the sign of the cross over our joined hands. “What God has joined, let no man put asunder.”
Luca steps forward. His broad frame blocks out the sweltering New Orleans sun, casting a long shadow over me. His hand comes up, cupping the back of my neck: his fingers warm, heavy, and startlingly steady against my bare skin. He tilts my chin upward, forcing my gaze up to meet his.
He lowers his mouth to mine.
I expected a cold transaction. I expected a public display of dominance meant to humiliate my brothers.
Instead, the moment his lips press against mine, time stops.
The ambient hum of the cicadas in the live oaks cuts out. The rustle of white gravel, the heavy breathing of forty armed men, the ticking of the watch on his wrist: all of it vanishes into absolute, deafening silence.
His mouth is hot, firm, and devastatingly slow. He doesn’t rush the claim. He takes my bottom lip between his own with a deep, intoxicating pressure that sends an electric current straight down my spine, shattering every drop of surgical composure I’ve spent a lifetime building.
My breath hitches in the back of my throat. I gasp against his mouth, and Luca takes the sound, his grip on the back of my neck tightening just enough to pull me flush against his rigid chest.
Through the heavy lace of my dress and the dark wool of his suit, I feel the violent, hammer-like thud of his heartbeat. It isn’t the steady, calculating pulse of a Don carrying out a trade. It is fast. Wild. Feral.
My hands, usually so steady with a blade, twitch against his lapels. I mean to push him back. I mean to remind him where we stand. But my fingers sink into the heavy silk of his suit jacket instead, clinging to him as the ground beneath my heels feels like it’s tilting into an abyss.
When he finally pulls back an inch, his thumb lingers against the angle of my jaw, his pad tracing the frantic pulse point leaping beneath my skin.
Luca’s dark eyes are wide, black pupils blown so dilated that the dark iris has completely swallowed the light.
For a fraction of a second, the cold, impenetrable mask of Luca Valentino slips—and I see the terrifying, unhinged truth beneath it.
He isn’t triumphant. He looks staggered.
He looks like a man who just reached into a fire expecting ash and caught a living, burning lightning bolt.