Chapter 13
GIA
Nonna Rosa’s silver serving spoon hits the heavy porcelain platter with a sharp, resonant clack that sounds like a gavel dropping in a courtroom.
“Eat, Don Valentino,” Nonna says, her raspy Creole voice laced with ice and old-world politeness. She sets a dish of braised beef ragù directly in front of my husband, carving off the leanest, most sparse portion of meat on the platter. “In this house, even enemies are fed before they are judged.”
Luca Valentino doesn’t flinch.
He sits in my late father’s dining room, surrounded by seven Santoros who would like nothing more than to carve his throat open over the linen tablecloth.
He wears a dark charcoal suit, his broad shoulders filling out the carved mahogany chair, his obsidian eyes calm and unarmored as he looks up at my grandmother.
“Thank you, Nonna,” Luca says. He doesn’t mock her. He doesn’t pull Don rank. He picks up his silver fork with the steady, effortless composure of a man who knew exactly what room he was stepping into when he agreed to our Sunday dinner rule.
I sit directly across from him, sipping a glass of heavy Tuscan red, watching him through the steam of Nonna’s roasted garlic and fresh pasta.
My husband took my freedom, but my contract dragged him out of his dark, fortified estate and forced him to sit at the table of the family he’s long hated. It’s home-court advantage, and the air in this room is thick enough to choke on.
To my left, my sister-in-law Cassia sits beside Dante.
On paper, they are the Don and Donna of the Santoro family.
In reality, the distance between their chairs feels like an ocean.
Cassia hasn’t looked at her husband once all evening.
Beside her plate, glowing faint blue against the white linen, sits the digital baby monitor.
Its soft, rhythmic static broadcasting baby Lucia’s quiet breathing in the upstairs nursery.
Dante’s right thumb turns his signet ring on his pinky finger over and over again: a nervous, agonizing tic. Every time the monitor crackles, Dante glances at it, his jaw tightening, and looks away.
Beside me, my twin brother Nico hasn’t touched his food.
His thick, calloused hands rest flat on either side of his plate, his knuckles white, his jaw dark with two days of shadow.
The aura radiating off Nico is pure, nuclear rage.
A silent promise that if Luca makes one wrong move, this dining room will turn into a slaughterhouse.
Beside Nico, Mila sits quietly, her pale gray-green eyes watchful, her hand resting gently over my twin’s knee beneath the table to keep him anchored.
Across from them, Renzo and Izzy sit side by side, Renzo’s dark gaze fixed on Luca’s throat like he’s measuring the exact distance for a knife strike, while my younger brother Marco chews his bread in tense, watchful silence.
The entire bloodline is assembled around the Santoro table. And the enemy is eating our bread.
“The reception was quiet on Friday,” Renzo says, his voice flat and low, breaking the silence like a blade scraping stone. “Davide Russo had a lot to say before he left the gates.”
Luca cuts a portion of beef with his knife, entirely unbothered. “Davide Russo speaks when he thinks he has an audience. He quieted down once my wife offered to demonstrate femoral artery anatomy on him.”
Izzy stifles a small, quick sip of her wine, her lips twitching with a sudden flash of amusement. Marco lets out a quiet snort before catching Renzo’s warning glare.
“My sister isn’t a threat to hide behind, Valentino,” Nico rumbles.
“I don’t hide behind her, Santoro,” Luca replies smoothly, setting his fork down. He looks Nico straight in the eyes. “I stand beside her. There’s a difference.”
“A difference none of us asked for,” Dante interjects, his voice tight, the Don register slipping as he looks at Luca. “You got what you wanted, Valentino. You have the shipping truce, and you have my sister in your house.”
“I have a wife who dictates her own terms,” Luca says, his gaze shifting across the table to lock onto mine.
I hold his look, raising my glass slightly in a mock toast.
I watch him like a surgeon reading a chart.
I look for the telltale signs of stress.
The flared nostrils, the micro-spasms in his jaw, the quick, defensive shift in weight.
I expect him to pull back his left suit cuff, check the silver watch on his wrist, and calculate how many minutes he has left in this room.
He doesn’t check his watch once.
He sits there in dark wool, enduring the cold fury of my twin, the silent judgment of the women, and the suffocating guilt of my eldest brother. He takes every drop of hostility this room can throw at him and absorbs it like iron.
He’s a ruthless, calculating Don who backed my family into a corner and bought my name. But he isn’t a coward. He doesn’t hide behind his sentries, and he doesn’t break when he’s surrounded by men who want him dead.
By eight o’clock, dinner is over, and the heavy silence in the foyer feels like an unexploded charge.
Dante stands near the archway of his private study, his hand resting heavy against the doorframe. He looks gray with exhaustion. “The port shipments cleared the lower berths this afternoon,” Dante says to Luca, his tone stiff and formal. “Your logistics team has full access to the river vaults.”
“Fausto Carbone verified the routes an hour ago,” Luca replies smoothly, pulling on his dark leather gloves.
Dante hesitates, his jaw working as his eyes shift to me. Then he looks away.
I step past my brothers, my dark silk heels clicking softly on the marble foyer, and stop beside Luca.
Nico steps up to my shoulder, his massive frame blocking Luca’s path to the front door.
My twin looks down at my husband, his dark eyes burning with unfiltered promise.
“Sunday is over, Valentino,” Nico whispers, his voice dropping an octave into pure, lethal threat.
“Take her back to your estate. But if she ever comes back here with a single mark on her skin, I won’t use a treaty to kill you. ”
Luca meets my twin’s gaze without an ounce of hesitation. He doesn’t reach for a weapon. He doesn’t issue a counter-threat. He looks Nico straight in the eyes:
“Your sister writes her own rules, Santoro. Ask her yourself.”
Nico’s eyes flicker to mine. I give my twin a single, calm nod. Nico closes his eyes for a fraction of a second, his chest heaving with unspent rage, then steps back and clears the doorway.
Luca opens the heavy mahogany front door, stepping out onto the veranda where his armored sedan waits beneath the live oaks.
I step past him onto the flagstone steps on my own power, my chin held high as the New Orleans night air washes over us, thick with sweet jasmine and river brackishness. Luca falls into step beside me, his broad shadow sweeping over the stone.
“You enjoyed that, didn’t you, principessa?” he murmurs, his deep voice vibrating against the humid night.
“Every single minute, Valentino,” I reply. “You looked very handsome eating cold ragù under my twin’s death glare.”
A faint, dark ghost of a smile touches the corner of his lips—gone as fast as it appeared.
“Tell your Nonna the food was excellent,” he says quietly, holding open the door of the sedan for me.
I step inside, settling onto the dark leather seat. As the heavy door shuts, locking us into the quiet, private intimacy of his world, I realize something unsettling:
He survived my family’s table without dropping his armor once. And breaking Luca Valentino is going to take a lot more than cold gravy.
Midnight.
The Valentino master suite is quiet, draped in deep shadows save for the single amber halo of the bedside lamp.
I sit propped against the velvet headboard in a plain silk slip, my dark hair loose over my shoulders, my black diamond ring glittering on my left hand. On the nightstand beside me lies the master copy of our contract—pages of heavy cream parchment outlining the terms of our marriage.
Across the room, the double doors leading to his private office are pulled shut. The one-inch gap from our first night is gone—he closed it fully tonight before stepping into his bedroom.
He hasn’t tried to force his way in.
Since the night I turned on my wand, flooded this room in light, and gave myself an explosive climax while he stood unbuckled and ruined at the foot of my bed, Luca hasn’t crossed that threshold. He has never taken anything I didn’t let him take. His hands stop the second mine tell them to.
I look at the contract resting on the nightstand, but I don’t reach for a pen.
I don’t need to write case notes on paper to track what’s happening in this house. I keep the ledger in my head.
He sat at my father’s table surrounded by seven people who hate his bloodline, and he never once looked at the door.
He took my brothers’ threats without issuing a single warning in return.
And when we came home, he walked me to my door, stepped back, and left me my space without demanding an invoice.
Every rule I wrote into that contract was designed to build a wall between us. But as I stare at the dark wood of his door, I realize the truth.
The black ink built the wall. But his quiet, unexpected respect for it is what’s starting to tear it down.
I reach over, click off the bedside lamp, and let the darkness take the room.