LIAM
We leave in the morning for Tokyo. Or at least, the plan that the three of us had assembled was to fly to the nearest private hangar and from there meet a driver who would take us to Tokyo, where we could then inquire as to how we might speak to theoyabunof the Nakamura faction of the Yakuza.
On paper, it seems simple enough. Levin’s password has opened several doors for us now, but as we board the plane, I can see that his expression is terse and set, edged with worry.
I eye him as we take our seats on the plane, Levin, directly across from Max and me on the other side of the aisle. Unlike a commercial flight, there’s no worry about cramped legs or screaming children here, no flustered flight attendants or too-cold air, and the whiskey is top-notch.
Though the Kings are as rich as any of the crime families, we don’t flaunt it the way the Russians, and especially the Italians, do. My father never owned a private jet, and just the mention of it would have earned him a good deal of censure from the table. The older and even more conservative members of the Kings, wouldn’t have faltered at letting him know how they felt about that sort of wastefulness. Why fly private when commercial gets you there just fine?
In fact, one of my brother, Connor’s worst fights with our father was over exactly that.
He’d gone to a conclave on his own, in our father’s place on account of illness—and I had thought privately then, as a test. Our father had enjoyed doing that—testing Connor to see if he continued to embody the leader that our father was trying so industriously to build him into, and he’d done it often. Connor might not have resented it so much if our father had treated it like a necessary evil, a part of the burden of fatherhood and the process of raising a leader of Kings. But instead, it was always clear that he enjoyed keeping Connor on edge, making him guess as to what the consequences of any given word or deed might be. He would praise him effusively, make him feel as if there were nothing he could do to lose our father’s love and pride, only to viciously cut him down over nothing minutes later.
Sometimes, I think that it’s not a surprise that Connor left, so much as that he didn’t do it sooner.
It was our father’s fault, too, that Connor and I weren’t closer. While the pressures and burdens and responsibilities of being the future heir were heaped on Connor early on, weighing him down by the time he’d only barely become a teenager, our father largely ignored me. I was left to do what I wanted, to pursue whatever took my fancy at any given time. If I’d acted out or disobeyed or even caused trouble, our father hardly noticed. Even if I’d doubled down, wanting some of our father’s attention for myself—positive or negative—I usually got nothing at all.
Connor, on the other hand, couldn’t make so much as one misstep without our father raining down the fires of hell and brimstone on him, as if the slightest mistake on Connor’s part would mean the instant end of the Kings and life as we knew it, the culmination of hundreds of years of tradition and rules passed down, turned to dust because Connor had—what, exactly? Been a few minutes late to a meeting? Kissed the daughter of the wrong man innocently enough? Made a friend from a lower-ranking family?
He’d ended up alone, for the most part. And now he’s gone, likely for good.
You were wrong, da,I think grimly as I look out the window of the jet.He’s been gone a while now, and nothing’s crumbled to dust. In fact, if the Kings fall, it won’t be Connor Mcgregor’s fault. It’ll be mine, the one you ignored because you thought I was incapable of causing trouble damaging enough to be worth noticing.
Well, I’m causing it now, and I can’t help sometimes wondering if the nagging, gnawing guilt I feel is just our father heaping it on from beyond the grave, making up for lost time.
I let my hand drift over the buttery leather of the seat next to me, knowingexactlywhat my father would have to say about this.
At that particular conclave, one of the Italian bosses had invited several of the attendees, including Connor, onto his private jet. When Connor had come home, he’d done something he very rarely did—pulled me aside excitedly to tell me all about the experience. I’d never even imagined setting foot on such a thing. As a second son and a largely ignored one, there wasn’t the expectation that I would ever rub elbows with the kind of men that our father and Connor did, the kind with private jets and summer villas.
I’d eaten every bit of it up, listening to my older brother wide-eyed and eager to hear as he’d described it in vivid detail. But unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one listening to Connor’s tale.
Ithadbeen a test, according to my father, to see how Connor reacted to the excess of some of the other families, if he stood true to our values in the face of such gross material wastefulness and ostentation. The fact that Connor had enjoyed it so much, been awed by it—envied it, even—was evidence of yet another moral failing on his part, just another way that, if not strictly guided, his future leadership would be a weak and pitiful one, leading to the downfall of all that our father had worked so hard to build.
And as to the fact that I’d been equally excited to hear about the private jet, the leather seats and pretty stewardess and expensive wine served?
My father didn’t give the first shite about whether or notImight grow up to be materialistic and shallow. Only my brother, the one on whom everything would one day rely.
Ironic, isn’t it?I think dryly, as if Connor can hear me somewhere.All that, and it was da who almost destroyed it all with his traitorous machinations.
But ultimately, he hadn’t. And that was the second half of the irony, that it fell to me and not Connor to keep it all together.
Me, the misfit, ignored child, the one my father called a changeling because my mother had died giving birth to me, as if I could have somehow stopped it from happening.
As if I hadn’t grown up wanting my mother, just as much as he’d wanted his wife.
More, maybe, since he hadn’t had any trouble planting seeds in Francesca Bianchi while his wife was still alive.
I do my best to shake the thoughts away, to banish the ghosts of the past. They won’t help me here and now. My father, for all his insistence that the excess of the other families was reprehensible and wasteful, had failed to apply the same lessons to himself when he’d seen the opportunity to grab more territory. He’d been just as greedy as anyone else, at least for power and blood, if not for money.
And as for my brother, he’s long gone. I’d often longed to be able to rely on my older brother as a child, but as an adult, I’ve come to see that there is rarely anyone in this life that you can rely on at all. Even in the short time that I’ve been truly paying attention to the machinations around me, ever since my father begrudgingly brought me under his wing to replace Connor, I’ve seen how quickly others will put their own self-interest above those they’re meant to stand shoulder to shoulder with.
It had never occurred to me that I could have something that I’ve never seen any man of my acquaintance have—someone closer to me than even a brother or a right-hand man. Marriages in the crime families aren’t about love or even partnership—they’re about alliances and children, bringing families together through comingling of blood and sometimes simply the threat of loss if someone in the other family puts a foot out of line. It’s all politics—it has nothing to do with the man and woman joining in matrimony at their core.Since I was a child, that has always been my impression of marriage.
But I’ve seen something different since getting to know Luca and his wife, and now even Viktor and Caterina. I’d never thought too long for a wife that I couldlove, a woman who could be more than just a homemaker and the mother of my children. You can’t long for what you never even knew existed.
I see the potential for something different, though, now. Somethingmore. And when I try to envision it, the only person I can ever see by my side is Ana.
I swore to her as Alexei took her away that I’d come for her. I don’t know if she could hear me, if she remembers, if she even believes in anyone’s promises anymore.