The Don's Daughter He Left to Bleed novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Man in the Kitchen

Giacomo carries Nina through the catering kitchen to her father and brother; Franco holds up the bullet and says someone put her at the one pillar with no cover.

Giacomo reached me in under a minute.

He came through the service door behind the stage in a waiter's white jacket, with a gun held low against his thigh.

I had not seen his face in seven years.

There was a scar through his left eyebrow that had not been there when I left, and his eyes went straight to my side.

"Don't talk," he said, and dropped to one knee.

He tore the sash off my dress and pressed it hard against the wound.

I made a sound I had never made before.

"I know," he said. "I know. Look at me."

I looked at him.

"You came yourself," I said.

"I was never going to send anyone else."

He slid one arm under my knees and one under my back, and he stood up with me.

The ballroom was almost empty.

Overturned chairs, a dropped shoe, champagne glasses rolling on their sides.

On the far wall, a giant screen showed Gabriel carrying Brooke through the lobby while a reporter narrated.

*The anchor himself, a hero tonight,* the reporter was saying.

Giacomo turned my face into his shoulder so I wouldn't see it.

"Don't watch that," he said.

"Was it a rehearsed thing?" I said. My voice was thin. "The way he looked at me. He listened to something in his ear first."

"We'll find out."

He carried me through the catering kitchen, past stainless steel counters and a line cook flat against the wall with his hands up.

Giacomo nodded to him, and the man nodded back as though they had met before.

Two of my father's men held the back door.

I knew one of them.

He had taught me to ride a bike on the driveway in Bay Ridge when I was six.

He did not say hello.

He took off his jacket and laid it over my legs.

A black van sat in the alley with its engine running.

Inside, an old man I had known all my life was already snapping on gloves.

"Nina," the family doctor said, without looking up. "Still stubborn."

"Hello, Doctor."

"Lie back. This will be unpleasant."

It was.

I do not remember the middle of the ride.

I remember Giacomo's hand holding the dressing flat against me the whole way, and the white scar through his eyebrow above me, and my own voice saying the same thing over and over.

"Don't tell my father."

"He's already waiting," Giacomo said.

We stopped at a brownstone I did not know, in a street I did not know, behind a green door.

They carried me down a hall to a kitchen with a long table, and laid me on it under a bright lamp.

The doctor worked.

Somebody held my hand.

When I could finally turn my head, the room was full of men standing against the walls with their arms folded.

My father sat at the end of the table.

He looked older.

His hair had gone fully white, and the big hands I remembered lifting me onto his shoulders at the parade were folded in front of him.

He said nothing.

He looked at my face for a long time.

Then he looked at the gold ring on my left hand, and his jaw moved.

"Seven years," he said at last.

"Papa."

"Seven years, you hide from me. You don't call at Christmas. You don't call when I'm in the hospital with my heart. You call tonight, with a hole in you."

"I called," I said. "Didn't I?"

His eyes were wet, and he looked angry about it.

"You called," he said.

Behind him a door banged open.

My brother Franco came in with blood on his knuckles from something he had done on the way here, and he stopped dead when he saw me on the table.

He is thirty-four years old, and he cried like a boy.

"Nina," he said. "Nina. Who did this? Give me one name."

"Gabriel," I said. "My husband. He stepped over me."

The room went very quiet.

Franco's hands closed.

The doctor lifted a small metal dish with something in it and held it up under the lamp.

A bent, ugly bullet, still wet with me.

"It missed the bone and the lung, and you are lucky," the doctor said. "Two inches to the left and we would not be talking."

Franco took the dish.

He rolled the bullet in his palm and went still in a different way.

"This isn't a street round," he said. "This is a rifle round from a long way off. Somebody had time and a clear lane."

"There were three hundred people in that room," Giacomo said.

"And they put my sister at the one pillar with no cover on the whole stage." Franco looked up. His voice dropped. "That isn't a bad shot, Giacomo. That's a seat assignment."

I stared at the ceiling.

*Nina, stand stage left by the pillar tonight. Best light for the cameras.*

I had worn the green because I had been told to.

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