Ruthless Vow (Ruthless #1)

Prologue

DANTE

The incense coats my throat like ash.

St. Louis Cathedral, crowded wall-to-wall. Standing room only. The stained glass throws colored light across the pews like judgment, and every time the doors open, the July heat rolls in, thick enough to choke on.

Half of them have come to pay respects to Salvatore Santoro. The underboss from the Ninth Ward who clawed his way to Don of the most powerful family in New Orleans. Who held it with iron fists for thirty years.

The other half have come to watch his son stumble.

I don’t stumble.

I sit in the front pew with my spine straight and my face carved from stone. I give them nothing. Let them look. Let them measure. Let them wonder if the Santoro empire crumbles now that Papa is in the ground.

It won’t. I’ll bury every last one of them before I let that happen.

My hands want to shake. I don’t fucking let them.

Renzo sits at my right. Silent. Dangerous. His eyes never stop moving, scanning the crowd, cataloging threats, doing what Renzo does. My brother has mastered violence to the point that I forget he’s capable of anything else.

Nico is to my left. No smile today. Even Nico knows better than to perform at a funeral. But his grief looks careful. Rehearsed. Like he’d practiced in the mirror until the angles were right.

Marco stands apart from the rest of us. Fists clenched. Jaw locked. He has the same look Papa used to get right before he hurt someone. That coiled, contained fury that charges the air, lifts the hair on every neck within ten feet.

Gia touches his arm. He leans into it, just a fraction, before catching himself and pulling back. She’s the only one he lets close.

When Gia walks to the pulpit in her black dress, surgeon’s fingers steady at her sides, I hold my breath. My youngest sibling, twenty-seven years old, saving lives in the OR while her brothers end them in warehouses.

Don’t crack, I think. Don’t give them anything they can use.

She doesn’t.

She talks about Papa before the grief hollowed him out. She tells them about him sitting in the front row at her medical school graduation, the only time Papa ever left New Orleans. About how he called her principessa until she told him she was too old for it.

“He called me that anyway,” she says, her voice clear over the silent cathedral. “Every time. Until the end.”

Her voice cracks. Once. She keeps going.

That’s my sister. Tougher than half the men in this room. And every one of these bastards is watching for the fracture.

The room is still. Every enemy, every ally, every shark circling our bleeding family. All of them hanging on every word she says.

She doesn’t mention the years after Mama died.

The study door always closed. The whiskey at three in the morning. The way Papa looked through us like we weren’t there, searching for someone else in our faces.

Some truths aren’t for funerals.

Gia knows exactly who’s listening and what they’ll do with a weakness if they find it.

After the service, they gather for me. The receiving line stretches across the cathedral steps, and I shake palms until mine aches. Sweat gathers at my collar. The gray sky presses down like a lid.

My jaw hurts from clenching. I can’t remember the last time I ate.

Three of these men are lying to my face. I know which ones. They don’t know I know. That’s the only advantage that matters right now.

The Benedettis send a representative. Not their Don. A consigliere with a slick smile and a soft handshake. The kind of grip that says he’s measuring my bones, wondering if they’ll snap.

The message is clear. We acknowledge your loss. We don’t respect your position. Not yet.

I file his face away. Men like this always think they have time.

Umberto Neri passes through the crowd. Our accountant. Three generations of Neris have kept our books clean. Quiet, respectful, forgettable. I watch him murmur condolences and slip away.

His daughter is supposed to be my bride. My pulse doesn’t move. My chest stays hollow. Good. That’s the point.

Then Luca Valentino appears, and the hollow space behind my ribs flickers with something I can’t name.

He comes alone. No soldiers. No entourage. No show of force. Just him in a dark suit, standing where Valentinos aren’t supposed to stand.

His father and mine bled each other across New Orleans for three decades. Rivals don’t attend funerals. And if they do, they bring muscle.

Luca brings nothing but himself.

“Santoro.” His voice carries just enough for the watchers to hear. “Your father was a worthy adversary. I hope we can change the dynamic between our families.”

I hold his gaze. Give him nothing.

“That remains to be seen, Valentino.”

He nods once. Turns to leave.

And then I see his eyes catch on someone across the garden.

Gia. Near Mama’s roses. She’s holding the arm of Nonna Rosa, who’s been with us since before any of us were born. Rosa is crying, clutching a rosary. Gia isn’t crying. She’s just there. Present. Holding space for someone else’s sorrow while her own pins her spine straight, locks her knees.

Luca Valentino watches my sister a second too long.

Then he looks away. Walks toward the gate. Doesn’t speak to her.

Interesting. If he’s smart, he’ll keep his eyes to himself. If he’s not. Well. That’s a problem I know how to solve.

Zio Pietro finds me before I can disappear. Not blood, but he walked Mama down the aisle, changed my diapers, taught me to throw a punch. Thirty years at Papa’s side. He’s earned the title.

He looks wrecked. Red-rimmed eyes, fingers that won’t stay still. The man who watched Papa build everything, who stayed even when it all started to crumble.

He grips my shoulder. Holds on too long.

“Your father was the best man I ever knew.” His voice cracks. “Before everything changed. You should know that. Who he was. Before.”

I don’t know what to say. Zio remembers a version of Papa I never met. The man who laughed. The man who loved without losing himself to it.

“I know,” I say.

I don’t. But Zio needs to hear it.

Romano appears. Smooth, professional, handling the next crisis. Thirty-two years of service have made him invaluable. He knows every captain, every shipment, every debt we’re owed.

“The cars are ready when you are, Don.” Steady. Measured. “Take all the time you need.”

“Thank you, Romano.”

He nods and walks away. Reliable. Solid. Always where he’s supposed to be.

The garden is quiet now.

The guests have gone. The cars have pulled away. The compound has emptied of everyone who came to mourn, or pretend to mourn, and I’m alone.

My shoulders drop. Just an inch. The mask slips when no one’s watching.

Mama’s roses are blooming. Red and white and pale pink, the same ones she planted when she was a new bride. Nonna Rosa tends them like they’re holy ground.

Maybe they are.

This is where Papa proposed. This is where they danced on their anniversary every year until she got too sick.

Papa’s grave is fresh earth beside Mama’s headstone.

Together. Done reaching.

Lucia.

Her name was the last thing he said. We were at Sunday dinner, all five of us at the table, the way Mama would have wanted.

Papa was passing the bread when his palm went to his chest. His eyes went wide.

He reached toward something none of us could see, and her name fell from his lips like a prayer.

He was gone before he hit the floor.

Gia tried. God, she tried. Working before her mind caught up, all that medical training pouring out of her in a desperate rush. But there was nothing to do. His heart had been broken for over a decade. It just stopped pretending otherwise.

Now he’s in the ground beside her.

I should be relieved. I should be grieving. I should be something other than this. Cristo.

I press my palm against my chest. My heart beats slow. Even. Like it doesn’t know everything has changed.

Bone-deep tired. I can’t afford sloppy. Not now. Not with every family in New Orleans smelling blood in the water.

Gia finds me when the sky goes dark.

She doesn’t say anything. Just appears at my shoulder and stands there, the way she’s done since we were kids.

The cicadas are loud. The jasmine is blooming, thick and sweet in the humid air. And I’m standing at my parents’ graves with my little sister, trying to remember how to breathe.

“He’s with her now,” Gia says, her voice low. “Together at last. That’s all he wanted. For so long.”

“I know.”

“Are you okay?”

The question hangs in the dark. Simple. Impossible.

I could tell her the truth. That I’m drowning. That I don’t know how to be the Don because I’ve already been doing it, and now it’s official, and that makes it worse somehow.

That I’m terrified I’ll fail them. That I’m terrified I won’t.

That I’m terrified I’ll end up just like him.

I could let her in. Let someone see. She’s asking.

I open my mouth.

I close it.

“I’m fine.”

Gia doesn’t push. But I see the flicker in her eyes. Disappointment, maybe. Or recognition. She’s watched me build these walls since we were kids. She knows she can’t get through them.

No one can. No one will.

She takes my arm.

“Come inside. You need to eat.”

I let her lead me. But I don’t let her in.

Later, the study is dark.

I pour whiskey. Enough to burn. Not enough to blur.

Papa’s desk. Papa’s chair. Papa’s empire, now mine.

The leather still smells like him. Cigars and ambition and something underneath that I could never name.

I sink into the chair. His chair. It still holds the shape of him.

My teeth grind. I force myself to breathe.

The chess set sits in the corner, pieces frozen mid-game. The last match he ever played was with me, when I was twenty-two. He never finished it. Just walked away one day and never returned to the board.

I should have hated him for that. For leaving us while he was still breathing. For thrusting me into his role when I was a boy barely past twenty. For every goddamn thing I had to become because he couldn’t be bothered to survive his own grief.

I didn’t hate him. I just stopped expecting him to come back. And I picked up every fucking thing he dropped.

My hand hovers over the board.

I could finish it. Move the pieces to their conclusion. End what he started.

Or I could leave it. Another thing he left undone. Another debt with no one left to collect.

I pick up the black king. His piece.

The cold marble presses into my palm, solid and small.

All those years he sat in this chair, lost in Mama’s memory. While his children waited for him to come back.

He never did.

My fingers close around the king. Tight. Tighter. Until my knuckles go white.

I set it down. Not on the board. On the shelf. Next to Mama’s photograph.

The game is over. Not finished. Just over.

I move to the window and look out at the garden. Fresh earth beside the roses. The place where my father loved so much that his children became ghosts in his own house.

I think about Gia’s question.

Are you okay?

I think about the answer I didn’t give her.

And I make a vow. Not to my father. Not to my mother. To myself.

I will not become him.

I will not love like that. Not so much that losing them destroys me. I will not die reaching for a ghost. I’ll run this family the way it should be run. The way he stopped running it the day Mama died.

I marry the Neri girl and keep her at arm’s length and never let her get close enough to matter. Controlled. Loveless. Safe.

Love is a luxury I can’t afford. A weakness I can’t survive.

I will not break.

I buried that possibility with him.