The Don's Daughter He Left to Bleed novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Gala
A rifle shot drops Nina on live television and her husband steps over her to carry his co-anchor out; she dials the number she swore never to call and a man answers: I'm already in the building.
At 8:14 on Saturday night, four million people watched my husband step over me on live television.
I was lying on the marble floor of a ballroom with my hand pressed to my side.
My blood was coming through my fingers.
Gabriel Falco looked down at me for one full second.
Then he stepped over my legs and ran to his co-anchor.
In all our years of marriage, Gabriel had never learned the first true thing about my family.
He thought my parents died when I was nine.
He thought I came from nowhere.
That was the story I told him on our third date, and I had kept to it ever since.
The truth was that my father is a Don, and he sends men to the bottom of the harbor without losing a night's sleep.
My brother pulls the teeth of anyone who is late paying.
And my mother was shot in the throat beside me, in the back seat of our car.
I had run from all of it, and I had never said a word of it to the man who stepped over me.
The night had started so well.
It was the Falco Media Founders' Gala, thirty years of the network, with my husband hosting the live broadcast beside his co-anchor.
My father-in-law, Vincent Falco, owned every camera in the room.
That afternoon he had texted me himself.
*Nina, stand stage left by the pillar tonight. Best light for the cameras. Wear the green.*
He added a heart, which he always did.
Vincent had been kind to me from the first dinner.
He had paid for our wedding and given us the penthouse.
In seven years he had never once asked where I came from.
I used to think that was good manners.
At six, Brooke Baxendale found me in the powder room with my zipper stuck halfway up my back.
She was twenty-nine, red-brown hair, a perfect on-air smile, and she had been Gabriel's co-anchor for three years.
"Hold still," she said, and eased the zipper up with two fingers. "There. You look like a movie."
"Thank you," I said. "You saved me."
"Always," Brooke said, and squeezed my arm.
At eight, the cameras went live.
I stood where Vincent had told me to stand, on the left side of the stage, beside the one stone pillar in the room.
Gabriel opened the show with his best smile.
"Good evening, New York. Welcome to thirty years of Falco Media."
Three hundred guests applauded.
Then something hit me in the side so hard that I didn't hear the shot.
I heard the glass first.
A chandelier panel burst overhead, and the second crack came a moment later, and then everybody was screaming.
I was already on the floor.
It did not hurt yet.
It felt like a hand had shoved me, and my legs had stopped working.
"Gabriel," I said.
I said it again, louder.
Across the stage, he turned and found me.
Our eyes met.
Brooke was behind him with her hands over her mouth, crying, and his earpiece cord swung against his collar.
He touched his ear.
He listened to something.
Then he looked at me, and I watched his face decide.
He stepped over me and ran to her.
"I've got you, Brooke," he said, loud enough that the live microphone on his lapel carried it into four million homes. "Stay with me. I've got you."
He lifted her off her feet, though she was not hurt.
He carried her down the steps, past the cameras, and every camera followed him.
Nobody pointed one at me.
Guests ran for the doors.
A man in a tuxedo stepped on my dress and didn't stop.
A waiter stopped for one second, saw the blood, and went white.
Then he ran too.
I lay there and looked up at the cracked chandelier.
The marble was cold under my cheek.
My ring was still on my hand.
Somebody was going to come back for me, I thought.
The hostess, the security guards, the husband who had said *in sickness and in health* in front of two hundred people.
Nobody came.
The live feed cut to a commercial break.
I steadied my breathing the way my mother had taught me, in the back of a car, when I was nine.
In for four.
Out for four.
My hand was shaking when I found my clutch beside me on the floor.
I did not call Gabriel.
I did not call 911 either, because by the time an ambulance pushed through that crowd I would be a headline.
I had one number saved under no name at all.
I had sworn I would never dial it.
I was thirty-one years old, and I was bleeding out alone on my father-in-law's stage.
So I dialed it.
It rang once.
"Stay awake, Nina," a man's voice said, low and steady. "I'm already in the building."
I knew that voice.
It was Giacomo Bellandi, my father's right hand, the one man in my old life I had never stopped hearing in my head.
He had picked up on the first ring, as though he had been holding the phone for seven years.
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