Chapter 21
GIA
The bedroom is shrouded in deep, amber shadows, quiet except for the relentless drumming of rain against the tall leaded windows.
I’m lying propped against a stack of velvet pillows, the cashmere throw pulled up to my waist, my right hand holding a gel ice wrap firmly over the thick pressure bandage on my left chest.
Beneath the sterile tape, my chest aches with a dull, throbbing burn, the somatic reminder of a steel needle harvesting three tissue cores from an eighteen-millimeter mass.
Sitting two feet from my mattress, unmoving in the dark velvet armchair, is my husband.
Luca has been sitting there for hours, his suit jacket discarded, his white shirt unbuttoned at the throat, his dark eyes fixed on my face with a protective intensity.
He hasn’t slept. He has left the room only twice, once to shower and once to bring me food.
He has simply kept vigil over my pain, giving me the one thing no one in my family ever offered: a place to set the weight down.
Then, the silence shatters.
The encrypted tactical radio resting on the arm of his chair buzzes, breaking the quiet with a harsh burst of static.
“Don Luca,” Fausto Carbone’s voice comes through, fast and strained over the frequency.
“We have an ambush on the St. Charles corridor. Donna Giada’s dark gray sedan was just rammed by two heavily armed vehicles—a six-man Russo hit squad.
They boxed the sedan in a kill-zone and opened fire with automatic weapons. ”
My pulse spikes into my throat. The ice pack in my hand suddenly feels like lead.
To keep Russo’s informants from realizing I was bedridden at the estate following my biopsy, I had sent my driver out in my sedan along my routine route to Casa Lucia to drop off my surgical charts and OR schedule.
Russo’s spotters saw my car running its usual night route, assumed I was inside taking an emergency trauma call, and took the shot.
Luca doesn’t yell. He doesn’t curse.
He stands up from the armchair in a single, terrifyingly smooth motion. The warm, unarmored man who held my hand through the biopsy needle vanishes, replaced instantly by the Don who commands an empire. His face turns to pure, carved granite, his dark eyes darkening to near-black.
He pulls his gun from his shoulder holster, checking the chamber with a sharp, mechanical clack.
“Lock the bedroom door behind me, Gia,” he says, his voice dropping into an icy, absolute register that makes the hair on my arms stand up. “Do not open it for anyone except me.”
“Luca—”
“Lock the door,” he repeats, stepping toward the threshold without looking back. “I’ll be back shortly.”
He slips out into the dark corridor. I hear the heavy oak door click shut, followed by the sound of his quick, silent footsteps vanishing down the hall.
The storm rages outside the leaded glass while I wait.
I sit on the edge of the mattress, my right hand covering my sore left chest, listening to the rain drum against the roof and the deafening silence of the estate.
A key scrapes. Then, the heavy brass latch turns.
The bedroom door swings open.
I freeze. The breath locks tight in my throat.
Luca steps across the threshold, and for three seconds, my surgeon’s mind forgets how to process what I’m looking at.
He looks like a demon that just crawled out of the mouth of hell.
His white dress shirt is torn open at the left shoulder, plastered to his chest with rainwater, grease, and thick, wet crimson blood.
Dark, drying gore is spattered across his neck, smudged over his jawline, and coating his forearms all the way down to his knuckles.
The sharp, acrid smell of burnt gunpowder, copper, and wet wool floods the bedroom, instantly overpowering the scent of cedarwood.
He stands in the doorway, his broad chest heaving in ragged, shallow gulps, his hands trembling with residual, high-octane adrenaline. His dark eyes are wild, burning with a feral, lethal light that screams he just executed absolute, unholy slaughter.
He didn’t just repulse an ambush. He hunted down every single man who dared lay a hand on my car and tore them apart.
He takes one heavy step into the room, his wet leather boots leaving dark, pink-tinted tracks on the Persian rug. Then he stops, his gaze landing on me where I stand by the bed.
“Gia,” he rasps. His voice is a broken, ruined gravel, his vocal cords shredded from shouting over gunfire. He looks down at his blood-soaked hands, then steps back toward the door frame, his jaw clenching. “Don’t come near me. Don’t touch me. I’m covered in them.”
The fear in his voice isn’t for himself. It’s the terrifying, possessive terror that his violence will contaminate the woman he spent all evening protecting.
My heart hammers against my ribs. My pride, my caution, the ink of my contract, every single defense mechanism I built to keep this Don at bay dissolves into dust.
“I’ve spent my career elbow-deep in human blood, Valentino,” I say, my voice steady as steel as I step across the hardwood floor toward him, ignoring the dull ache in my left chest. “ You held my hand while a needle went into my chest tonight. Stand still and let me clean you.”
“Gia—”
I don’t let him finish. I reach out and grab his right wrist.
His skin is burning hot, vibrating with the violent pulse hammering beneath his calluses. He flinches, trying to pull back so he doesn’t smear Russo gore onto my plum silk blouse, but I tighten my grip, my fingers sinking into his muscle, and drag him across the bedroom toward my master ensuite.
I push open the heavy glass-paneled door of the bathroom. I reach into the walk-in glass shower, turn the heavy brass fixtures, and open the scalding water taps to full capacity.
A heavy, roaring cascade of water hits the dark slate tiles. Within seconds, billows of thick, white steam rise from the floor, filling the marble bathroom with a warm, suffocating mist that condensation-coats the mirrors and dampens the air.
I turn back to Luca. He stands in the middle of the room like a statue, rain and blood dripping from his hair onto the tile, his eyes locked on no one else with a raw, desperate hunger.
“Holster off,” I command softly.
I reach up, unbuckling the leather straps of his shoulder holster. I pull the heavy Sig Sauer from the hide, set it safely on the marble vanity, and drop the leather harness to the floor.
Then I peel off my bulky outer pressure tape and ice wrap, leaving only the clear, waterproof Tegaderm patch Dr. Vance sealed over the tiny two-millimeter puncture nick on my left breast. A minor entry compared to the surgical wounds I fix every day.
I reach for the front of Luca’s torn shirt. My fingers work their way down the ruined white cotton, unbuttoning the blood-soaked fabric button by button. Luca stays completely still, his hands hovering at his sides, his breath hitching every time my knuckles brush the burning skin of his stomach.
I push the wet shirt off his shoulders. The heavy, crimson-stained cotton falls to the slate with a wet, heavy thump.
He stands before me stripped to the waist: a wall of scarred, muscle-bound oak.
Pale silver bullet wounds mark his ribs.
The surgical seam on his left forearm where I stitched him years ago gleams under the sconce light.
But almost every inch of his chest, shoulders, and neck is covered in dark, drying blood.
I grab a soft linen washcloth from the heated rack, hold it under the streaming warm faucet, and lather it with unscented soap.
“Step in,” I whisper, looking up into his dark eyes.
Luca steps across the threshold into the glass enclosure. I step in right behind him, the scalding water spray hitting my back, soaking through my dark trousers and silk blouse, sticking the wet fabric to my skin.
The steam wraps around us, hot and claustrophobic. Immediately, Luca shifts his weight, angling my left side away from the heavy water spray and taking the brunt of the scalding cascade against his own broad back.
I lift the soapy linen cloth and bring it to his jawline.
Gently, with the slow, reverent precision of a surgeon cleansing a wound field, I wipe the dark crimson smudges from his face.
The soap lathers against his rough stubble, turning pink as the hot water washes the gore away.
I slide the cloth down the column of his throat, over his masseter muscle, and down onto the broad, muscular expanse of his chest.
Luca lets out a long, ragged exhale. His eyes close, his head tilting back against the wet slate wall as my hands move over his body.
“They thought you were in that car, cara,” he whispers, his rough voice vibrating against my palms as I wipe the blood from his collarbone. “They boxed the sedan in... they put round after round through the passenger door. They thought they were taking my wife.”
“I know,” I murmur, rinsing the cloth under the spray and working it down his bicep, washing the dark streaks off his skin until the water swirling down the dark slate drain turns clear. “I know, Luca.”
“I made sure none of them lived long enough to regret the mistake,” he growls, opening his dark eyes. The violent, feral light is still there, but it’s mixed with something far more dangerous, a raw, possessive devotion that consumes every inch of the air between us.
He doesn’t wait anymore. The restraint that held him in that armchair for hours cracks down the middle.
His scar-seamed hands reach out, unfastening the buttons of my wet silk blouse in seconds. He peels the soaked cloth off my shoulders, letting it pool around my feet, before his large hands find the button of my trousers, sliding them down my thighs alongside my damp lace.
I stand before him bare under the cascade of scalding water, shielded by his broad shadow.