Chapter 17
GIA
The underside of a luxury sedan smells like heated oil, road dust, and cold steel.
I’m kneeling on the polished concrete floor of the Valentino estate garage, the hem of my cream silk blouse tucked securely into the waistband of my trousers, my palms resting flat against the cool chassis.
Outside the open bay doors, the evening heat of New Orleans hangs thick and wet, heavy with the scent of river silt and bruised magnolia blossoms.
I don’t need a mechanic to tell me when something doesn’t belong on a machine. I am a trauma surgeon. My entire life is built on palpation: feeling through layers of tissue, muscle, and fascia to isolate the foreign body that shouldn’t be there.
When I reached into the rear wheel well of my dark gray sedan to check a loose tire lining, my fingers didn’t hit rubber or rust. They hit hard, industrial-grade plastic and an unforgiving neodymium magnet.
Clack.
I exert five pounds of leverage, twisting my wrist to break the magnetic seal. The housing comes free with a greasy snap.
I pull my arm out from under the bumper and sit back on my heels.
Resting in the palm of my right hand—the hand that held my father’s autopsy report, the hand that stitched a Valentino enforcer’s arm in the holding bay—is a military-grade satellite tracking unit.
A black, waterproof brick no larger than a deck of cards, smudged with lithium grease.
A tracker.
My pulse doesn’t spike with fear. It hardens into a cold, surgical line.
I refuse to be chauffeured around like a helpless Cosa Nostra trophy.
Driving my own car is the single non-negotiable line of my daily independence: the space between saving lives in my OR and returning to the iron gates of this estate.
Luca knew better than to force an armed soldier into my passenger seat, so he settled for an invisible tail SUV that lingers three car lengths behind me on St. Charles Avenue.
I knew about the tail team. I knew how to shake them whenever I needed twenty minutes of unmonitored air: a sharp turn through a hospital ambulance bay, a quick dive down a French Quarter alley. But this isn’t a tail car. This is geofencing.
This is my husband putting a leash on my wheel well because he knows I’m smart enough to slip his men.
I stand up, wiping a smear of dark grease from my thumb onto my palm, and grip the black housing so tight the plastic edges dig into my skin. I don’t go upstairs to change. I don’t wash my hands.
I turn on my heel and stride down the vaulted stone corridor toward the east wing.
The heavy oak doors of Luca’s study are closed, but a sliver of warm amber light spills across the dark herringbone floorboards. I don’t knock. Knocking is for guests, and I didn’t marry Luca to ask permission to enter my own house.
I push the door open with enough force that it hits the leather stop with a muted thud.
The study smells of cedarwood, old paper, vintage scotch, and the faint, unmistakable metallic tang of gun oil.
Luca is sitting behind his massive mahogany desk, stripped of his suit jacket.
His white dress shirt is unbuttoned at the throat, his dark tie loosened, and his sleeves are rolled back in those exact, clean two-inch folds on his forearms: the posture he takes when he’s auditing shipping manifests, reviewing dock security, or signing execution warrants.
Beside his elbow sits a glass of amber liquid.
He doesn’t flinch when the door slams. He doesn’t reach for the weapon I know is mounted beneath the knee-well of his desk. He simply raises his head, his dark, unreadable eyes locking onto mine with a slow, infuriating composure that makes my blood run hot.
“You’re home late, Dr. Santoro,” he says. “I was beginning to think your shift at the clinic ran over.”
“My shift ended an hour ago,” I say, stepping across the Persian rug until I’m standing directly across from him. “I was delayed by some routine vehicle maintenance.”
I lift my right hand and drop the grease-smudged GPS unit directly onto the center of his pristine leather blotter.
It hits the mahogany with a metallic clack, sliding two inches before coming to rest beside his scotch glass.
Luca doesn’t look down at the device. He stays focused entirely on my face, his masseter muscle flexing once in his jaw, the only microscopic sign that his tactical mind is recalculating the room.
“Find something under your bumper?” he asks mildly.
“I drive myself so I don’t have one of your men breathing down my neck while I work,” I say, my voice razor-thin, dropped into the flat, clinical register I use when an attending physician tries to override my OR authority.
“I am not a prisoner in your compound, Valentino, and I am certainly not an asset you get to tag like cargo.”
“I don’t treat you like cargo,” Luca corrects softly, leaning back in his leather chair and lacing his scar-seamed fingers over his stomach. “I treat you like my wife driving through territory where Russo’s men are currently testing our borders.”
“If you wanted to know where I was going, you could have asked,” I fire back, my eyes flashing. “I would have lied to your face with much less equipment.”
A faint, almost invisible curve touches the corner of his granite mouth. “I don’t care where you’ve been, Gia. I care where you are. And right now, you’re standing in my study, smelling like engine grease and fight.”
“Take it off my car.”
“No.”
“It’s already off my car,” I snap, pointing a grease-smudged finger at the black box between us. “And if I find another one under my frame tomorrow, husband, I’ll drain the brake fluid out of your car and leave the housing on your nightstand.”
Luca stares at me for three long seconds. The silence in the study stretches, taut as a suture line pulled to its breaking limit.
Then, slowly, deliberately, he pushes himself out of his chair.
He rises to his full height, his broad shoulders blocking out the amber halo of the desk lamp behind him.
He doesn’t yell. He doesn’t display the loud, performative rage my brother Dante uses when his authority is questioned.
Luca moves with the terrifying, unhurried grace of an apex predator that knows the room has no exits.
He rounds the edge of the mahogany desk.
I don’t step back. I stand my ground, my chin lifted, my left wrist executing a tight pre-scrub roll against my thigh.
He keeps coming until the toe of his leather oxford hits the front of my shoe. He invades my personal space until the heat radiating from his chest presses through my silk blouse, thick and suffocating. My back hits the edge of his mahogany desk, the hard wood digging into the small of my spine.
Luca plants his scar-seamed palms flat on the wood on either side of my hips, caging me between his arms.
The invisible line between us, the boundary we’ve been dancing around since our wedding night, holds like a wall of solid ice.
But his physical proximity is a weapon of its own.
He dips his head until his breath brushes the sensitive skin just below my ear, smelling of peat, bitter espresso, and dark heat.
“You think you’re untouchable, principessa?” he murmurs. “You think standing behind your boundaries makes you safe from me?”
“I think the only thing keeping your hands on that desk right now is your pride,” I say, my breath hitching despite my best efforts to keep my heart rate flat. “Cross the line. Touch me.”
Luca’s dark eyes darken to near-black. A muscle in his throat ripples as he swallows, his gaze dropping to the hard pulse hammering against the side of my neck, then tracing the curve of my lips.
“I don’t need to break my rules to win a war with you, Giada,” he whispers, the slip of my real name bleeding past his restraint before he catches it.
Slowly, without breaking eye contact, he reaches out. His hand doesn’t touch my skin. He hovers two millimeters above my hip, his fingers dipping into the shallow pocket of my trousers to slide out my encrypted phone.
I stiffen, but I refuse to reach for it. “What are you doing?”
Luca doesn’t answer. He holds my phone in one hand, his thumb moving across the glass with quick, practiced strikes.
He taps the screen, unlocks the device using the master key he undoubtedly had his tech team build into my network, and opens the satellite tracking application linked to the black unit on his desk.
In front of my eyes, he taps Unpair.
A red notification flashes across my screen: Device Serial #8841-V Disconnected.
“There,” Luca says softly, his tone dangerously calm. “The car tracker is dead. Your sedan is clean.”
I narrow my eyes, suspicious of how easily he yielded. “What’s the catch, Valentino?”
Luca doesn’t put my phone away. Instead, he opens his own personal location-sharing profile on the screen. He toggles the primary setting from Restricted to Always Share, authorizes the encrypted link with his fingerprint, and hands the phone back to me face-up.
Glaring back at me from the screen is a bright, pulsing blue dot anchored directly over the coordinates of the Valentino estate, accompanied by a live, unedited readout of his device’s real-time battery, signal, and movement telemetry.
“Now you know where I am every second of the day, principessa,” he murmurs, his voice dropping into a low, possessive rumble against my jawline. “Every meeting, every berth, every dock, every breath I take. You hold the key to my cage.”
My chest heaves under the silk. The chess move lands with the force of a physical blow.
By stripping the hidden tracker from my car and handing me his own 24/7 unedited location, he made himself completely transparent: a terrifying, unasked-for form of intimacy that unsettles me far more than a hidden bug ever could. He gave me his location to strip away my excuse to hide mine.
“You think this makes us even?” I ask, my voice tight.
“I think it means when you slip away from this estate, you’ll know exactly how close I am behind you,” he whispers.
He leans in a fraction of an inch closer, his chest almost brushing mine, the dark scent of him wrapping around my senses like a chokehold. “Keep the phone in your hand, Gia. Read the map whenever you feel like running.”
He steps back.
The sudden loss of his heat leaves the air cold against my skin. Luca doesn’t look bothered. He casually turns, reaches for his glass of scotch on the desk, and takes a slow, unhurried sip, watching me over the crystal rim with dark, unblinking eyes.
I grip my phone tight in my hand, my knuckles turning white around the casing. I look down at the blinking blue dot that represents my husband: a man who married me under Commission law, and just handed me his pulse on a digital screen.
He removed the physical car bug. He thinks he won the mental game.
What he doesn’t know—what his calculating, tactical mind hasn’t accounted for—is the encrypted calendar entry sitting two layers deep in my phone’s vault.
Tomorrow morning. 08:30 AM. Dr. Vance’s Private Clinic—Garden District VIP Annex. Procedure: Unmarked Breast Mass Diagnostic & Ultrasound Screening.
He thinks I’m picking fights over privacy because I hate his rules.
I slide the phone into my pocket, smooth the front of my cream silk blouse with hands that do not shake, and give him a sharp, cold smile, the kind of smile my father used to wear before signing a border truce.
“Enjoy your scotch, Valentino,” I say, my voice steady as steel. “I’ll see you at breakfast.”
I turn on my heel and walk out of his study, leaving him alone in the amber light.