Menace
Losing the people that were responsible for you growing into a decent human was traumatizing.
I could admit that quietly.
It was a thought I revisited way too often. One minute they were alive and thriving. The next, they were lying on a cold slab waiting for their teenage son to identify their bodies.
I never thought it could get any worse than losing my parents. Actually, I thought my siblings would have to put me in that grave with them one day. After they were murdered, life wasn’t as important to me anymore. I got by because that was all I could do.
Get by.
You did whatever the fuck you had to do to make it to the next day.
I was always putting one foot in front of the other, even when I didn’t feel like it.
I wasn’t living for me, I was living for my siblings, and I’d be damned if I let them down.
I continued to tell myself that I needed to see Kora get into law school and Zoya graduate college.
I continued to tell myself that I needed to see Landon graduate next.
God had to be keeping me here for a reason, and just because he wanted me here, didn’t mean I had to be happy about the shit.
Those were all excuses I told myself because when you didn’t give a damn about your own life, you had to give a fuck about somebody else’s.
My siblings.
Those were the lives that I gave a fuck about, which is why I busied myself with curating their lives the way I saw fit. It wasn’t because I was a control freak and wanted them to be miserable, as Bean thought.
It was because I wanted them to be taken care of without me. If I should have to depart from this earth, I knew they could take care of themselves. None of this shit was promised, so I wanted to make sure their careers and income they made were promised.
Zoya had always been the one who challenged everything when she was younger. You could tell her that her bedtime was seven and she would make a good argument on why it should have been later. By the time she finished, not only did you agree, you also just wanted her to shut up, so you folded.
It made sense for her to become a defense attorney.
I was never wrong when it came to my siblings.
Witnessing her in the courtroom, I remained undefeated in my assumptions.
Bean was a shark who put fear in even the most seasoned prosecutors.
I knew all those men looked at her and thought who the fuck does she think she is?
Zoya Caselli.
Don had always been good with numbers, and as he became older, his interest in computers took off. He could compute numbers like a human calculator.
When Corleon started showing him the ropes in cyber security, he took a strong interest into it.
It was Corleon who told me to let it rock and see if it was something that would stick.
It was the best decision because not only did I have Corleon Bruster, I also had Don Caselli behind me.
Don wasn’t going to sit around and not get a degree, so I made his ass go to college and do what I made both his sisters do.
Then Kora.
While people thought Zoya was stubborn, rude and abrasive, Kora Caselli was worse.
She was a force to be reckoned with, and she had always known what she wanted for her life.
Kora had her entire life planned out before she turned six.
It was when she told me she was in love with Zoo Kenzotti in her twenties, I knew there was nothing that I could have done to change her mind or discourage her from loving that man.
Not even when he was sent away to prison.
I say all this to say, I may have had a hand in putting them in the right place at the right time when it came to their careers, but it was their hard work and determination that helped them keep those positions.
Despite how much Zoya and Landon got on my damn nerves; they worked and never had their hands out for shit.
They were resourceful and figured shit out.
I wanted them to grab life by the horns and prove why their last name had been changed to Caselli.
There were a bunch of people out in the world that wanted shit given to them. I could have very well handed them everything and had them eating off the fruit of my labor. What good would that have been? Imagine Bean being a leech and having a smart-ass mouth?
Shit gave me chills.
Don running around here dicking everything moving down but couldn’t provide for himself.
Tragic.
Watching them in their positions and with lives of their own was enough for me to fade into the shadows and die happy, should someone decide to take me out. They would always be good. With me alive or buried with our parents.
Then Stevie Raye walked into my life.
She actually fucking robbed me and then had the nerve to be fucking cute while doing the shit. I ain’t never had anyone steal from me that I wanted to fuck, kill, and marry all at the same time.
Fate wasn’t something that I was into or cared about. However, it felt like fate had something to do with her stealing from me. Usually, I never got involved with the bullshit of disposing those who decided to have sticky fingers. This time, I was glad that I did.
My wonder.
At a point in my life when I didn’t care if I lived or died, she appeared, making me more conscious of my life. Stevie and my son made this life worth living for, and I thanked her every day.
My wife.
When people met the bubbly woman with glasses that was as warm as pie, then met her colder than ice husband, they questioned how we were a match? I loved watching them try and figure the shit out like it was their business.
We just worked.
Nothing mattered when I was with her. I found myself rushing from work trips to make it home to her. No bed felt comfortable unless she was lying right next to me. Wonder was used to giving everything to everyone, and no one ever tried to give her the world.
None of that shit mattered in this moment.
Someone decided they hated me enough to take her away from me, and because they tried, I needed to wipe their existence from the earth.
“You hear me?” Don pulled me from my thoughts.
I was in the midst of getting fitted for my suit. Don was my twin in every way but brains. The man still couldn’t figure out why we called his nephew Dennis.
Fucking shame.
My mind couldn’t even focus on anything this past week. This wasn’t some shit that I took lightly. Someone tried to end me at his engagement party. Someone wanted my head.
They almost had it.
When I thought my wife was on the floor dead, I couldn’t breathe. Everything moved slow and the smell of gun smoke started choking me. I’ve always known I had a target on my back, which is why I moved the way that I did. It was another thing witnessing it and having my wife caught in the crossfire.
Her life could have been ended, and it would have been my fault. The shit bothered me immensely. It kept me awake at night, haunting me every second of the day.
“Luci landed and is in route to us,” he repeated himself, once he realized that I wasn’t going to ask him to.
I nodded my head.
Luci Caselli.
Correction: Lucipher Caselli.
My cousin from my mother’s side. The Caselli family wasn’t completely extinct. The more skeletons I pulled out the closet, the more I discovered that we had a bit of family everywhere. Our grandmother just chose herself and cut them off because they were toxic.
From what I heard.
By the time my mother had married my father and then had us, she wasn’t connected to anyone on her family’s side. Which made it easy for her to hide a mother that we never knew was alive.
Scotsman was a small town, and my mother never really spoke about where she came from. As far as we knew, it had always been just her and her mother, and from what she told me, she was dead.
Shit.
I mean, in a way she was practically dead to her. She wasn’t the same woman who had raised her, and now she had the mental capacity of a child. I guess it was easier to pretend she was gone than to admit what the truth actually was.
Back then, as far as I knew, my mother was the only child. There was never any talk about having uncles and aunts. She never spoke about her family and poured everything into her children and her husband.
The one thing she always instilled into me was that I was to keep us together should anything happen to her or my father. She made me promised that we would stick together.
I kept that promise, Ma.
After I found out that my grandmother was alive, I started uncovering a lot of shit about my mother’s family.
One of the things I found out was that my grandmother had a child when she was thirteen. It was a secret among the family, and nobody ever spoke about it. The child in question was sent to New York and raised as a distant relative.
My mother knew about her older cousin, Cyrus, but not that he was her brother.
She never knew that her mother had a child before her, and it was hidden from her and most of the family.
Scotsman was filled with a bunch of distant relatives that never left, so it was easy to piece things together from those that were living.
I used Bruster to piece together some missing pieces that didn’t make sense to me. My uncle passed away from cancer a year before I found out about him. I learned that he had a son, and his son had been right under my nose the entire time.
Because he used the Caselli name, it wasn’t hard to find out about him. Especially when I found out about Caselli Imports.
The shipping and import business for everything under the sun. Anything you needed brought in or out, he was responsible. It wasn’t something that many knew about. It was one of those if you know you know things, but lucrative as shit.
Bruster was the one who did some research and found out about it. My uncle was known for getting anything in and out of the city from his hub. He had built a name but rarely went by the Caselli name.