CHAPTER TEN:
1896 Words
The biggest shoes to fill are the ones left behind by the people we love.
NIKOLAS
“Fifty percent.”
I don’t respond.
I just sit and stare at him.
He’s a large man, quite young too from what I’ve heard, but his hairline is already running away from his forehead and the jowls around his mouth make him look older than his supposed forty something years.
The wall behind him is made entirely of glass and in it I can see my reflection.
Everyone says Earl and I look almost exactly alike.
I say it’s bullshit.
But it doesn’t make it less true.
While my hair may be longer and darker than his, we have the same hardness to our jaws, the same Roman nose beneath thick dark brows.
We are even roughly the same height, both being well over six foot.
But the main difference is our eyes.
Like our sister Rosalind, mine are a dark brown that appears almost black in certain light.
Earl however, got the light blue eyes that had once belonged to our mother.
I look past my own face to the skylines of New York, our city.
There are five major Mafia families in the country.
And all five of us live in New york.
Manhattan belongs to the Salvatores.
But the other families also hold territorial claims to other regions.
And if you wanted to pass shipment through any of the territories, you had to give a cut to the family running that region, or your goods would magically disappear.
The man seated behind the massive desk of the rooftop office in his legal firm is the adviser to the Castelleno family who hold Brooklyn.
Hotshot lawyer by day, mafia consigliere every other minute in between.
He grunts at me, shifting in his seat.
“Fine. I like you Nikolas Salvatore, you’re a smart man. So I tell you what, you give us forty five percent,” he points his heavy cigar at me. “But that is as low as I can go or Don Castellano would have my head.”
He’s lying.
Only a moron would demand anything higher than fifteen percent from my father.
The bastard wants a cut for himself.
I knew from the minute he saw that it was me and not Earl or my uncle who came for this meeting, that he would try something like this.
He would not have dared make such an absurd demand were it either one of them seated in this chair.
I should reach across this table and slam his leering face into the wood.
Instead, I uncross my legs and lean forward, elbows resting on my knees.
“Thirty percent. You deliver the goods like you’re supposed to and you get thirty percent.”
The man sucks in his teeth. “Forty.”
My eyes narrow in warning. “Thirty five. Or we take our business elsewhere and you can answer to my father.”
The man leaps to his feet. “Deal.”
Thirty five is more than he would ever have gotten from my father and he knows it.
He grabs my arm, clasping it above the elbow and grinning like a cat, his beady eyes glistening in his round face.
“Tell your father it is always a pleasure doing business”
“Save your thanks.” I say curtly, letting go of the handshake and redoing the button of my suit. “Deliver the shipment is all we ask.”
The Consigliere grins at me, smoke from the massive roll of cigar between his lips wafting up like curling gray white tongues.
He steps around the desk, one arm outstretched, the other heavy around my shoulder to lead me to the door. “I understand it was your brother who was supposed to be here today.”
My jaw ticks and I resist the urge to shrug him off.
He is right. This meeting should have been Earl’s or my Uncle’s.
But unfortunately for Earl, a little “problem” he had to attend to had waltzed into town just before he could make the trip here.
A problem I might have had a hand in arranging:
At the door I hand over my briefcase to the nearest bodyguard waiting for me outside and to the Castellano consigliere I say,
“Salvatore is Salvatore.”
He nods. “True. But respect is respect.”
I'm already standing outside his door yet his hand remains on my shoulder.
“See, I like you well enough Nikolas.”
I’m sure he does.
No doubt because he thinks I might be easier to manipulate.
I shrug off his hand as subtly as I can. “Well I appreciate your vote of confidence.”
Which is short for he can shove it up his hole.
His grin falters and he clears his throat again.
“Well, vote of confidence or not, unless you are next in line, you tell your father…he sends you again instead of your brother or the Consigliere to do business, and Don Castellano might take it as an insult.”
I do not give him a reaction. I don’t need to.
His words have found their mark anyway.
Instead, despite the heat beneath my skin, I look him straight in the eyes and I see it the second he realizes that he has no idea who he’s dealing with.
“Deliver the shipment.” I say quietly. “Or so help me God, you will wish it was my brother you met.”
The cigar hangs limply from his mouth.
And before he can think of a reply, I’m already walking away.
“How did the meeting go?”
The question is out his mouth before I’m even fully into the car.
I answer without looking, sinking into the soft leather seats of the matte brown Cadillac Escalade I had gotten as a gift one year.
“As expected,” I start with my lips pressed together. “He tried to cheat me.”
In the seat beside me, my uncle frowns. “And?”
I look at him, unable to stop the small smirk of satisfaction that tugs on the corner of my lip.
“I offered him a higher rate, with a not so subtle threat.”
At this my uncle, consigliere to my father and advisor of the Salvatore Mafia family nods.
“Good. Good. This will help. He will realize you are not to be trifled with but at the same thing, you appear more generous than your father.”
I sit back, satisfied.
Like me, my uncle knows the truth.
After Earl left, denying us, betraying his family for ten years, I stayed.
I was the only one who stayed.
The only one who worked.
Fuck a right by birth.
The seat of Don should be mine. I earned it.
My uncle clasps my shoulder. “This is good Nikolas.”
I undo my button, speaking as the car starts.
“He asked for Earl.”
My uncle rolls his eyes, leaning into the seat. “Of course he did.”
I reach for a bottle of Remy from the car’s inbuilt bar and pour myself a drink.
Lifting it cautiously to my lip, I gaze at my uncle over the rim of the glass. “And where pray tell, is my darling brother?”
“Busy.” My uncles replies without looking at me.
“Is that so?” I ask flatly and at this he raises his head to look at me.
His hair is going white around the edges.
He frowns at me. He’s always frowning, my uncle.
“He’s been to see Frank.”
A slow smile crawls its way onto my face.
Frank.
The problem I had arranged.
With my Uncle’s help of course.
Frank’s appearance is the wrench I had thrown in the works of my brother’s path to show my father exactly what his “successor” was made of.
When he caught him stealing Earl should have put a bullet in the i***t’s skull.
Instead, my dear brother had let the man go.
Earl may be cold but he lacks one thing.
He is not ruthless.
I am.
Despite knowing it would mean his death, I had sent word to Frank that it was safe for him to return for his family and the exiled man had come running back.
Frank's mere presence in Manhattan would not only be an insult to the Salvatore name, it would undermine Earl’s authority.
My brother would have to deal with it immediately or risk making his decisions look questionable.
And my brother, callous and cruel as he could be, he hated killing.
I was banking on that.
If my father got wind that Earl had spared a thief not once but twice.
Of course the timing of Frank’s return also meant Earl could not attend the meeting with the Castellano family.
And my uncle, on my side as he is, had readily agreed to seat this meeting out and let me take the lead.
Besides me my uncle taps away on his phone, confining what I already know. “As you predicted, Earl went to see him.”
“And?”
“Frank swims with the fishes.”
I raise one eyebrow at this but the rest of my face remains flat.
I take another sip.
“Well well well. It would appear my brother might have some monster in him after all.”
My uncle snaps his phone shut and stuffs it into his jacket.
“Word on the street is, he has a new bird on his arm.”
I roll my eyes at this, my lips twisting in a sneer.
“My brother always has a new bird, or ten on his arm.”
It’s one of the things about Earl that annoys me the most.
In our line of work, discretion is of the utmost importance.
Yet my brother chooses to throw caution to the wind and sleep with women whose mouths for the right amount, probably open much wider than their legs.
And this is the man traditionalists like Don Castellano would rather have as Don.
It didn’t seem to matter to them that for the past ten years, they have been dealing with me.
The minute my brother came back, the hierarchy shifted and everything changed.
My whole life I had looked up to my elder brother and when he left, it was like something had been violently torn out of my life.
My court mandated therapist after my fifth bar fight, once threw down her writing pad asking me in frustration.
“We don’t talk about your childhood or your mother, or your father…then why are you here?”
My response.
“I am here because Earl would never be caught dead seeing a therapist. And because I do not have time for grief.”
I had my older brother's shoes to fill.
Shoes that had been forced upon me without a second thought.
And now just as I am about to finally claim them as mine, the former owner thinks he can just waltz in and demand them back.
Over my hot, suit clad, dead body.
I grit my teeth and lean forward in the car.
“Who’s next on the list?”
- Writer
