Chapter 9: Gabriel's POV

Gabriel's POV

I did not go home after my father's dinner.

I drove to the tower with the heater off and my window down, because I needed the cold.

The night security guard saw my face and didn't say a word.

I went up to the control room on the twelfth floor, where my own voice had gone out to four million people three nights before.

It was empty.

A single technician sat at a bank of screens with a sandwich.

"Mr. Falco," he said, and stood up so fast he knocked the sandwich to the floor.

"I need the Saturday gala audio. Every channel. Mine, the director's, and the talkback."

"Sir, that's under legal hold. Your father's office said nobody pulls it."

"I'm his son."

"Yes, sir. But the order says no exceptions."

"Do you want to explain to my wife's family why you wouldn't give me the tape?" I said.

I don't know why I said that.

It came out of me sideways.

The technician went white, and he sat down and pulled it up.

I put on the headphones.

For a long moment I heard the ballroom, the clinking glass and the murmur of three hundred people, and my own voice, bright and warm.

*Welcome to thirty years of Falco Media.*

Then a crack, and glass.

A flat mechanical silence.

Then, in my earpiece, a voice I had known my entire life.

*Leave the wife.*

I took off the headphones and put them back on.

*Leave the wife, Gabriel. Take Brooke. Go.*

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Don's Daughter He Left to Bleed from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.