Chapter 14
LUCA
The river smells of brackish Mississippi silt, heavy diesel exhaust, and spent gunpowder.
The gunsmoke is still settling. Eight Russo enforcers rolled up on the lower berth perimeter in two unmarked black SUVs, opening fire on our wine import transport before my night shift could latch the container doors.
They didn’t come to steal the cargo. They came to mark their territory: a pathetic, desperate probe from Davide Russo to test whether my Santoro marriage made my borders soft.
On my left wrist, Matteo’s watch sits heavy, its worn silver casing catching the light. I do the math in my head, calculating the exact price of every bullet fired on my docks.
Silvano Moretti pulled that heavy steel watch off Matteo’s blistered wrist and pressed it into my palm before the sun went down on the same day. Steel that still smelled of scorched metal and melted rubber, the only piece of my golden brother the fire couldn’t entirely consume.
“Don Luca,” a voice speaks from the shadow of the container stack.
Fausto Carbone steps into the yellow sodium light.
My logistics and route specialist holds a bloody rag against his grazed cheekbone, his tailored jacket torn at the shoulder, his iPad tucked beneath his arm.
Fausto has managed the manifest schedules for the Valentino shipping lines since before the truce.
He knows every berth number, every customs clerk, and every deep-water tide in the Gulf.
“Report, Fausto,” I say.
“Three Russo shooters dead on the dock, two in the river,” Fausto says, his tone trembling slightly beneath his usual professional composure. “Our men returned fire immediately. But the manifest for Berth 11 was locked in our encrypted server. Only internal logistics had the route.”
My dark eyes narrow as I look at the shattered container lock. Internal logistics. A leak in my own house.
“Find the line, Fausto,” I say, stepping closer to him, my shadow swallowing his frame. “I don’t care if you have to audit every terminal in New Orleans. If someone sold Russo the berth numbers for tonight’s delivery, I want their name before sunrise.”
“Understood, Don Luca,” Fausto says quickly, nodding. “What about the retaliation?”
“Send twelve men to the Russo warehouse on upper Tchoupitoulas,” I command. “Burn the entire container yard. Leave nobody standing. Let Davide Russo learn what happens when he touches a Valentino shipment.”
“And Donna Giada?” Fausto asks carefully. “She’s at the estate tonight.”
A possessive knot tightens in my chest at the mention of her.
Ever since Sunday’s dinner at her family’s table, my mind has been a pressure cooker of unspent rage and suffocating frustration.
I can’t touch her in our bedroom. I can’t break her rules without becoming the liar she accused me of being.
So I channel every drop of that dark energy into the war on my docks.
“Double her tailing detail,” I order, turning my back on the docks and walking toward my waiting car.
“Starting tonight, I want three armored chase cars shadowing her transport wherever she goes. If she steps foot out of Tulane Trauma or my estate, I want a full perimeter locked onto her. Nobody approaches her. Nobody speaks to her.”
“Understood, Don Luca.”
I climb into the dark leather cabin of the car, slamming the heavy armored door shut. “Take us back across the river,” I tell the driver. “Fast.”
As the engine purrs to life and the car rockets away from the riverfront, my phone vibrates against my hip. I pull it out, seeing Signora Matilde’s private line flashing on the screen.
I swipe the screen. “Luca.”
“Don Luca,” Matilde’s voice comes through, sharp and hurried. “The motorcade from the docks just pulled through the rear gates. One of your guards—Gianni—was shot in the arm during the berth skirmish. He’s bleeding heavily.”
My jaw clenches. “Did you call the house physician?”
“I tried,” Matilde says, taking a ragged breath. “Dr. Moreau is twenty minutes away across town. But... your wife heard the tires on the driveway. She came downstairs with her medical bag.”
I go rigidly still in the dark leather seat. “What did she do, Matilde?”
“She didn’t wait for Moreau,” Matilde whispers, a mixture of awe and terror in her voice. “She ordered my staff to carry Gianni into the ground-floor holding bay beside the security office. She opened her black leather satchel and took control of the room.”
The Valentino estate is ablaze with floodlights when the car sweeps beneath the portico.
I don’t wait for my driver to open the door. I throw it open myself, my heavy leather boots hitting the flagstone driveway, my suit jacket unbuttoned as I stride through the grand foyer.
I head straight for the ground-floor holding bay near the security office. A rugged room with concrete walls, heavy leather cots, and basic first-aid supplies where guards debrief after shifts.
I step past the doorway and stop dead in my tracks.
The harsh glare of the overhead fluorescent tube reflects off the linoleum floor.
In the center of the room, sitting on the edge of a leather cot, is my guard Gianni: a two-hundred-pound Valentino enforcer.
Gianni is pale, his shirt torn open at the shoulder, his bare, muscled arm resting over a towel.
Standing over him, completely in command of the room, is my wife.
Giada Santoro wears an emerald silk blouse with her sleeves rolled tightly past her elbows, revealing the smooth, pale skin of her forearms. Her heavy black leather surgical satchel sits open on the adjacent steel table, her personal tools laid out on a sterile cloth.
Her dark hair is pinned back with a slim steel clamp, her amber-flecked eyes locked onto the wound with terrifying focus.
She doesn’t have a single tremor in her hands.
My enforcer Gianni—a man who normally flinches for no Don—is staring up at her with wide-eyed reverence. And my wife’s soft, skilled hands are resting directly on his bare skin, her thumbs pressing hard into his torn muscle.
A dark, blinding wave of feral alpha possessiveness explodes in my chest.
My blood turns to pure acid. I stand in my own house, locked behind a no-touch clause, sleeping in an adjoining room while my wife gives her gentle, healing touch to a fucking grunt soldier.
I want to grab Gianni by his throat, drag him off that cot, and throw him through the reinforced glass just for having her fingers on his skin.
“Dr. Santoro,” I say, my voice booming off the concrete walls like thunder.
Gia doesn’t look up. She doesn’t flinch at the violent edge in my voice. She picks up a curved steel tool from her satchel with her right hand, her thumb and ring finger fitting into the loops with practiced, second-nature grace.
“Quiet, Valentino,” she says, her voice flat, cool, and sharp as a scalpel. “Your soldier has a two-inch laceration along the brachial sheath from a bullet graze—a centimeter off the median nerve. He’s lost a pint of blood. If I drop my focus, he loses the use of his left thumb.”
I take two slow, stalking steps closer to the cot, looming directly behind her left shoulder. My cedar-and-gunpowder scent mixes with the sharp, copper tang of fresh blood and antiseptic wipes.
I stare at her hands.
The same hands that wrote a black-ink contract on my nightstand.
The same hands that gave herself a screaming, explosive orgasm in my bed while I stood unbuckled and ruined in the dark.
Now those hands are buried in another man’s open flesh, working with a steady, breathtaking precision that makes my jaw grind until my teeth ache.
She doesn’t look like a hostage. She doesn’t look like a trade.
She looks like a queen ruling an empire of blood and steel. And every cell in my body is screaming that she belongs to me.
“Did you give him lidocaine, Dr. Santoro?” I ask, my voice dropping into a low, gravelly rasp that vibrates against her ear.
“Two percent from my bag,” Gia replies, her steel clamp flashing under the lights as she drives the curved point through the torn muscle wall.
She pulls the thread through with a smooth, continuous flick of her wrist, tying off a knot.
“He didn’t scream once. Which is more than I can say for the Don who owns this house. ”
Gianni lets out a faint, painful wheeze that might be a laugh, before catching the dark, murderous glare in my eyes and freezing on the cot.
“You’re done, Gianni,” Gia tells the guard, her tone softening slightly into her doctor register as she clips the suture end. “Keep the dressing dry for forty-eight hours. Signora Matilde has antibiotic tablets in the kitchen. Take two with water.”
Gianni sits up slowly, holding his wrapped arm against his ribs. He looks at Gia, bowing his head in absolute respect. “Thank you, Donna,” he mutters in raspy Italian. “Thank you.”
“Get the fuck out, Gianni,” I bark, my voice laced with enough ice to cut a man in half. “Before I decide to break your other arm.”
Gianni doesn’t ask questions. He slides off the cot and hurries out the door, shutting it behind him, leaving my wife and me alone in the holding bay.
The silence in the room turns thick and charged with static electricity.
Gia steps up to the small stainless steel sink in the corner, turning on the tap. She plunges her bare hands under the rushing warm water, scrubbing the drying blood off her palms and wrists with unscented soap from her bag.
I don’t stay at the door. I step up right behind her, my massive frame trapping her against the edge of the counter, my shadow completely swallowing her in the small wall mirror.
“You look very comfortable patching up my men, principessa,” I murmur against her ear, using the weaponized pet name with a possessive rasp.
Gia turns off the tap, grabbing a paper towel to dry her fingers. She turns around in the narrow space between the sink and my chest, her spine locking straight, her head tilting up to meet my dark gaze.
“I built my career on blood, Valentino,” she says, her voice smooth, cool, and unbothered. “Your holding bay is cramped and dusty, but my bag has clean steel. If you think stitching your soldier means I owe you an invoice, you’re mistaken.”
A dark, dangerous flare of amusement flickers in my chest.
“I don’t want an invoice, Dr. Santoro,” I whisper, leaning down until my mouth is an inch from hers, my eyes locking onto a tiny, dried spot of Gianni’s blood near her jawline.
I reach out. My large, calloused thumb comes up, pressing against her soft skin, roughly wiping the dried crimson stain from her cheek. My thumb lingers against her pulse point, feeling the fast, steady rhythm of her heart hammering beneath her skin.
Gia doesn’t pull back. Her breath hitches sharply, her dark eyes going black as she holds my gaze, her lips parting slightly in the heat between us.
“You’re covered in my soldier’s blood,” I growl, my thumb digging slightly into the line of her jaw, my possessiveness burning through every layer of my restraint. “And you stand in my house like you own every stone in the foundation.”
“I don’t own the foundation, Luca,” she whispers back. “I just know how to operate on it.”
We stand there for three long, agonizing seconds, inches apart, the air between us burning with unspent adrenaline, violence, and a dark, suffocating desire that threatens to shatter every rule she wrote into her contract.
My hand wants to slide up into her dark hair. My mouth wants to crush hers against the stainless steel sink until she forgets every clause in her contract.
Instead, I force my hand to drop to my side, keeping myself locked tight.
“Get upstairs, principessa,” I say, my voice turning back to cool, level stone. “Your three-car security tail is locked in for Monday morning. You won’t step out of this estate without my men watching every block.”
Gia looks at my hand, then up at my cold face. A small, razor-thin smile touches her lips, knowing that my security grid isn’t just about Russo.
It’s about a Don who is losing his mind trying to keep his hands off his wife.
“Goodnight, Valentino,” she says smoothly.
She packs her needles back into her satchel, zips the leather shut, and sweeps past my shoulder into the dark corridor, leaving me alone in the holding bay.
I stand alone under the buzzing fluorescent light, looking at her wet sink, and feeling the steady, uneven tick of the watch against my wrist, lagging behind a world that’s slipping out of my hands.
Down the west corridor, behind a heavy deadbolt she has never seen, my secret Procedure Suite sits locked, sterile, and waiting for her.
You can double the car detail, Luca. You can lock down every berth in New Orleans.
But the real threat isn’t outside your gates.
She’s sleeping upstairs in your bed.