Never Cross the Mafia Don's Hidden Lover novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Balcony Door
On her wedding night Viola hides a shot stranger, hears her groom call her his alibi, smuggles the man out and takes the bullet out at her clinic, and he wakes to say he's the Don her husband shot, just as her husband's car pulls in.
The man who came through my balcony door had a gun in one hand and a hole in his chest.
I was sitting on the end of the honeymoon bed in my slip, waiting for my husband of six hours.
The glass door cracked from top to bottom when his shoulder hit it.
Rain blew in after him.
He went down on one knee on the white carpet and pointed the gun at my face.
"Don't scream."
I didn't scream.
I looked at the blood.
It was coming through his black shirt below the left collarbone, dark and fast.
"You're going to pass out in about two minutes," I said. "Then you won't need the gun."
He blinked at me.
He was big, dark-haired, in a black suit that cost more than my van.
His face had gone the color of skim milk.
"You a doctor?"
"Close enough. Put that down or bleed on my carpet. Your choice."
He lowered the gun an inch.
That was enough for me.
My overnight bag sat by the closet.
I never go anywhere without my trauma kit. My best friend Dina calls it my purse.
I tore his shirt open and pressed a wad of gauze into the hole with both hands.
He hissed through his teeth.
"No exit wound," I said. "The bullet's still in you."
"Tell me something I don't know."
Outside, red and blue lights were bouncing off the wet glass.
A helicopter swung its searchlight over the building across the street.
Seventeen floors down, police cars were pulling up nose to nose.
My new husband was a homicide detective.
Half our wedding guests were cops.
Then the door lock beeped.
Somebody was sliding in a key card.
The man's hand closed on the gun again.
"Who is that?"
"My husband."
I didn't think. I hauled him up by his good arm.
He was heavy and he swore the whole way, but he walked.
I yanked the curtains shut over the broken door as we passed it.
I got him into the bathroom and down on the tile, and I shut the door and turned the shower on hot.
The suite door opened.
"Vi?" Trent called. "Babe?"
"In the shower!" I yelled.
"Take your time."
I knelt on the tile with my hands pressed into a stranger's chest.
Steam filled up the room.
Through the door I heard Trent's phone buzz.
He answered it low.
"He's not dead. He's somewhere on seventeen. Find him before the uniforms do."
The man under my hands went very still.
So did I.
There was a pause.
"She's in the shower," Trent said. "She's my alibi. That's all she's for tonight."
I stared at the bathroom door.
Four hours ago that voice had said "I do" to me in front of a priest.
The man on the floor was watching my face through the steam.
He didn't say anything.
He didn't have to.
Trent knocked on the bathroom door.
My heart stopped.
"Vi, there's a shooting upstairs. Captain wants everybody. Lock the door behind me, okay?"
"Okay," I said.
My voice sounded completely normal.
That scared me more than anything.
"Love you," he said.
The suite door closed.
My shoulders dropped, though my heart was hammering.
"Your husband," the man said, "is a liar."
"I know."
"He'll be back to check on his alibi."
"I know that too."
He tried to sit up and went gray.
"Call nine one one, and you're a widow before morning."
"I'm not calling anybody." I pressed harder. "The police are the ones looking for you."
There was a housekeeping cart parked by the service elevator.
I'd seen it when we came up.
I wrapped my wedding robe around him and got him into the laundry bin on top of the dirty towels.
I threw sheets over his head.
I put my coat on over my slip and pushed.
The service elevator smelled like bleach and cigarettes.
Nobody looked at a woman pushing a laundry cart.
My clinic van was parked on the second level of the garage, where I'd left it that morning in case anybody's dog ate a sock during my wedding.
He climbed into the back on his own.
He nearly fell on my surgery bag.
I called Dina from the driver's seat.
"Are you drunk?" she said. "It's your wedding night."
"Meet me at the clinic. Scrub in. Gunshot."
"A dog got shot?"
"No," I said, and hung up.
At two in the morning, under the big light my father bought the year I was born, I took a bullet out of a man on a table built for Great Danes.
Dina handed me the forceps with her hands shaking.
Biscuit, the Great Dane we were boarding, barked at the door the whole time.
The bullet came out bent and dark.
I dropped it in a specimen jar.
I wrote a label on it without thinking. BISCUIT, foreign body, 6/7.
Dina looked at the label. Then at me.
Then she leaned in under the light and looked at his face.
She dropped the clamp.
"Viola," she whispered. "Do you know who that is?"
His eyes opened.
They were very dark and very clear.
"Elio Massaro," he said.
Everybody in Little Italy knew that name.
His family's café was four blocks from my clinic.
His family was the reason nobody on Mayfield Road ever got robbed.
He looked at the ring on my finger.
"Your husband shot me," he said. "Ten minutes before he went back to cut your cake."
Headlights swept across the clinic window.
I knew that car.
The dent in the front bumper was from the night Trent proposed.
He'd backed into a fire hydrant, laughing.
It was pulling into my lot.
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