Chapter 15
GIA
My fingers refuse to unclamp from my leather medical satchel.
I stand in the doorway of the master suite, the heavy brass handle digging into my palm, but my right hand is frozen into a rigid, agonizing claw.
Sixteen hours over an open chest cavity at Tulane Trauma.
Sixteen hours of holding steel retractors, tying off severed vessels under blinding lights, and fighting for a teenager’s pulse while my muscles slowly burned out.
Surgeons don’t get to complain about fatigue. We don’t get to shake. But right now, the tendons in my forearms feel like overwound steel cables, a violent cramp seizing the muscle at the base of my thumb until my entire hand vibrates with a sharp, sickening ache.
I lean my forehead against the heavy mahogany door, taking a slow, ragged breath. Rain drums relentlessly against the high, arched windows of the estate, washing over the dark glass in heavy, steady sheets.
“You’re late, principessa.”
My eyes snap open.
Luca is sitting in the dark wingback velvet armchair near the hearth.
He hasn’t turned on the overhead lights.
Only the low, dying amber embers of the fireplace cast long, jagged shadows across his broad frame.
He still wears his black trousers and a white dress shirt, his sleeves rolled up to his forearms, his collar unbuttoned at his throat.
In the dim light, he looks massive and immovable: a shadow ruling a quiet kingdom.
I force my spine to lock straight, hiding the agony in my wrists as I step across the dark floorboards.
“Emergency bypass,” I say, my voice raspy and dry from hours under OR air vents.
“A drunk driver hit a pickup on Highway 90. I don’t check in with you when a kid is bleeding out on my table, Valentino. ”
Luca doesn’t argue. He doesn’t pull Don rank or interrogate me about the three-car security tail shadowing my transport.
He simply stands up from the armchair.
He crosses the room without making a sound. He stops two inches from me, his cedar-and-leather scent completely overwhelming the sharp, sterile smell of hospital soap clinging to my skin.
I brace myself. I pull my cramping hands behind my back, my jaw setting into a hard line as I wait for him to assert his authority.
Instead, Luca reaches out. His calloused palm closes gently around my left wrist.
“Don’t,” I whisper, trying to yank my arm back.
Luca doesn’t let go. His grip is firm, iron-solid, but entirely devoid of cruelty. He wraps his other hand around my right wrist, feeling the sharp, violent tremor shaking through my fingers.
“Give me your hands,” he says. His voice isn’t a lecture, and it isn’t an order. It’s a low, velvet rasp that vibrates against my collarbone, dark and absolute.
“I don’t need help, Luca,” I snap, my voice cracking slightly despite my best efforts. “I just need to shower and sleep.”
“You can barely open your fingers,” he replies smoothly.
Before I can draw another breath to fight him, Luca hooks his large hand around the back of my waist, lifts me straight off my feet, and sits down in the velvet armchair, pulling me right onto his lap.
A gasp rips from my throat. “Luca—”
“Sit still, principessa,” he murmurs, his dark voice heavy with a possessive command that makes my skin prickle with heat.
He doesn’t take more than I give him tonight. He shifts his heavy thighs beneath me, settling my weight firmly against his chest, holding me in place like a predator holding a captured songbird.
He reaches down with one hand, grabbing the cuff of my leather surgical boot.
With quick, practiced twitches of his fingers, he unlaces the leather, pulls the boot off my foot, and lets it drop to the mahogany floorboards with a dull thud.
He does the same to the other, tossing them aside, setting my bare feet against his knee.
I sit frozen on his lap, my heart hammering against my ribs.
I’ve spent a lifetime being the miracle of the Santoro family.
The daughter who stitches their soldiers at midnight, the sister who fixes their wounds, the caretaker who never gets to break down.
Nobody has ever pulled me onto their lap. Nobody has ever taken off my boots.
Luca reaches to the small marble side table beside the armchair.
His fingers wrap around a heavy, amber glass jar. He unscrews the lid with a quiet click.
The sharp, soothing scent fills the space between us immediately. A rich, herbal blend of arnica, magnesium, and deep botanical oils. It isn’t sweet or floral. It smells dark, rich, and therapeutic.
“What is that?” I ask, my voice barely a whisper.
“It’s for your hands,” he says simply.
He offers no explanation. He doesn’t tell me where he found a jar of custom-blended salve, or how he knew what overworked muscles need. He just acts like a man who has spent days watching my thumb joint shake while I read files at his table, and decided he couldn’t stand the sight of it anymore.
Luca scoops a liberal measure of the thick, cool salve onto his palm. He sets the jar down, then wraps his broad, scar-seamed hand around my right wrist.
“Luca, I can do it myself—”
“I said sit still,” he growls softly against my ear.
He presses his large thumb straight into the center of my palm.
A sharp, breathless cry escapes my lips. The pain is instantaneous. A deep, searing pressure hitting the knotted, locked muscle at the base of my thumb. My back arches against his chest, my head falling back against his broad shoulder as my eyes clamp shut.
“Breathe,” he commands quietly, his breath warm against my neck.
He doesn’t stop. He digs his thumb deeper, working in slow, heavy, circular grinds against the tight knot in my palm. The heat of his skin, combined with the cooling sting of the magnesium salve, sinks deep into my aching muscle, forcing the locked tendon to slowly yield under his palm.
He uses his fingers to trace the long, tight lines of my forearm, kneading from my wrist all the way up to my elbow. His hands are rough and covered in old scars from a decade of underworld war: hands that have pulled triggers, signed execution orders, and broken bones.
And now those same lethal hands are working through my muscle, finger by finger, with a reverent, suffocating tenderness that terrifies me a thousand times more than his gun ever could.
“Ah... God,” I gasp, my fingers twitching as the blinding ache in my forearm finally breaks, dissolving into a deep, melting warmth.
Luca shifts his focus to my fingers. He takes my index finger between his thumb and forefinger, pulling with firm, steady pressure, stretching the joint until a soft pop echoes in the quiet room.
He works his way down every single finger—thumb, index, middle, ring, pinky—kneading the thick muscle between my knuckles, working the salve deep into my skin until my right hand lies completely soft, warm, and pliable in his palm.
My body goes limp against his chest. Every drop of surgical armor I’ve built over years is melting away under the slow, steady rhythm of his hands.
He reaches for my left hand.
“You don’t have to do this,” I whisper, my voice thick, raw, and barely audible over the sound of the rain drumming against the glass. “You don’t owe me anything for Gianni. You don’t have to pay me back.”
Luca stops. His hands freeze over my wrist.
He tilts his head down, his dark, obsidian eyes locking onto mine in the dim amber glow of the fire. The cold, teasing Don mask is entirely gone. Beneath it lies a dark, feral intensity that makes my breath catch in my throat.
“I’m not paying you back, principessa,” he rasps, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly whisper that cuts straight through my soul. “And I don’t care about Gianni.”
He digs his thumb into the locked muscle of my left palm, making me gasp aloud as he begins kneading the second hand with the same brutal care.
“I care about these hands,” he growls, his thumb sliding over my pulse point. “The hands that saved my soldier. The hands that wrote black ink on my contract. The hands that belong to my wife.”
My heart does a terrifying, violent leap in my chest.
I look up at his sharp, marble jawline, at the dark shadow of stubble along his cheek, at the fierce, possessive focus in his dark eyes as he works through every knot in my left forearm.
I hate him.
I hate him because he and Dante traded my freedom like an asset on a ledger. I hate him because he’s an enemy Don who represents generations of blood against my family name.
But as I lie against his rigid chest, feeling the deep, intoxicating relief washing through my muscles, a single, devastating thought pierces through the darkness of my mind:
I hate him because he’s giving me the one thing no man in my family ever gave me: somewhere to put it down.
My brothers called me their miracle. They called me their grace. They expected me to stitch their men, deliver their heirs, and hold their world together without ever showing a crack. Luca Valentino saw the crack. And instead of using it to break me, he sat me on his lap and rubbed the pain away.
By the time he finishes my left pinky finger, my hands are completely relaxed, warm, and resting flat over the dark wool of his trousers. My eyelids feel impossibly heavy, the sixteen-hour surgery and the overwhelming sensory overload finally pulling me under into deep, suffocating exhaustion.
Luca doesn’t push me off his lap. He doesn’t tell me to go to my separate bed.
He sweeps his broad arm around my waist, pulling me tighter against his chest, letting my head rest comfortably in the crook of his neck.
“Sleep, principessa,” he whispers, his voice soft, rough, and strangely quiet in the dark.
I don’t argue. I don’t pull back. I shut my eyes, breathing in the scent of cedar, old wine, and unscented arnica salve, and let myself fall into the deepest, most dreamless sleep I’ve known since walking into his house.
The war is still outside the gates. My contract is still on the nightstand.
But tonight, the enemy’s hands are the only thing keeping me whole.