By fifteen, I was helping him deal alongside all his other men.
By sixteen, I was a part of his team just as any of the others. Not because of nepotism, but because I fucking earned my place.
Two days after I turned seventeen, I walked into our apartment to see him lying in a pile of his own blood on the living room floor. He wasn't dead, his chest rising and falling in a weird, unnatural strobe-like motion. His eyes went to me as I froze, and he tried to lift his hand to indicate something to my side. I missed the meaning though and the next thing I knew, I felt a knife slice through the skin of my cheek from my eye to my jaw.
Then there was pain.
A lot of it.
Until there was none because I passed out.
I woke up to a cop kneeling over me checking my pulse.
I didn't have to ask. I just read the grim reality in his face. My uncle was dead.
Me, I was taken to the hospital to treat my face with thirteen stitches, my busted ribs, my concussion. I was released the next day and had to go back to Uncle Seth's apartment and clean up his blood and plan his funeral and try to figure out what the fuck I was supposed to do from that point on. He was all I had in the world. He was the only person who ever gave a good God damn about me.
And he was gone.
He had a lavish funeral four days later, all of his men showing up. My mother, not surprisingly, never showed. I hadn't expected her to. Hell, I had never actually seen her again after she showed up fresh from the hospital looking for me. Seth had given her an earful, a wad of cash, and pushed her out the door.
It wasn't long before the shit hit the fan with his men. Everyone was vying for his position, trying to lead the others, trying to control the trade.
But, fuck them, that was my fucking legacy.
"You really slithered into his role," Wayne, my Uncle's second, said, nodding his head at me. Wayne was Seth's oldest friend and, in a way, became another uncle to me over the years. He taught me to play pool and tie a tie as my uncle was a staunch advocate for never wearing anything other than jeans and tees. He was big and reasonably fit with a taste for bourbon and dime store cigars, black hair, and eyes to match. I nodded at his comment, shrugging away what I thought was a compliment. "Like a snake," he added, drawing my attention from the pills I was sorting.
"A snake?"
"Yeah. And you know what they say about snakes and snitches," he went on and I felt myself stiffen as the unmistakable click of a pocket knife filled the quiet room. I knew. Oh, I knew. It was his fucking favorite phrase. I'd heard it hundreds of times over the years. "They get it where they slither."
"You mother fucker," I shouted, pushing away from the table so hard that I pinned it, and therefore him, against the wall.
"Clueless little shit you always were. Never meant for fucking leadership. All loyalty, no fucking brains of your own," he seethed, pushing the table away and making his way toward me, knife still in his hand as his words landed hard, settling somewhere on my soul.
"Here's the thing about loyalty," I said, taking a step back, letting him think I was scared, like I was scarred from being worked over the night of my uncle's death.
"What's that, Rye?"
"It extends beyond the grave you fucking backstabber," I yelled, charging suddenly and sending us both flying to the ground. My hand grabbed his wrist, squeezing until I heard a crunching sound that was a sick sort of music to my ears. I grabbed the knife out of his useless hand as I straddled his center. "Is this the same knife?" I asked, knowing it was. The bastard was oddly attached to his pocket knife. His father had given it to him on his thirteenth birthday. "Say it!"
Wayne's face twisted. "Yeah, that's the knife I plunged into your uncle's heart when he told me that he was moving you into second when you turned eighteen. Same knife I carved into your face, boy. See, Seth was made for leadership. Until your ass showed up and softened him. Me and the men, we'd been seeing it for years. We'd been planning on pushing him out. We'd come over that night to talk to him about stepping down. But then he pulled that shit about forcing me down a peg and pushing you in my place. And, well, me and the boys, we had no patience for that shit."