Chapter Forty-Seven
Nico
The elevator opens directly into the foyer, and I stand in it for a moment longer than necessary, cringing at the drop cloth covering the floor where the white marble tile used to be.
Used to be. Weeks ago.
I step out fully and the elevator closes behind me.
Cal’s penthouse smells like construction—sawdust and joint compound, wood and the chemical bite of new paint on the walls. There are drop cloths and piles of new wood flooring all over, buckets in corners and power tools sitting on what used to be the kitchen island as I make my way into the space.
The kitchen is stripped down to the studs and subfloor, the white cabinets stacked in pieces across the room.
I sigh again, shaking my head at the rolled-up blueprints lying on the floor.
I kick at them gently and they roll out, exposing all the plans Cal had made for the penthouse months ago.
Before the explosion.
The floors are the biggest job.
All the white, shiny marble had to be broken up by jackhammers, the rubble hauled down to dumpsters in back of the building.
The contractors have been here for over a month just for the demo on the floors and the kitchen.
Hardwood gets installed next week. The dark cabinets with gold hardware the week after that.
The kitchen is behind schedule. Because of course it is. But the particular marble Cal specified in the blueprints had to come from a small Italian quarry because it has a very explicit gold vein running through and took longer to source than I anticipated.
He had specified everything.
Flooring in every space, every cabinet, every fixture, every piece of furniture, every plant.
There’s a list in his handwriting—I found it in the site manager’s folder—that details exactly where it all goes, too. All annotated in his precise, irritating handwriting that somehow manages to be both a doctor’s scrawl and completely legible when it wants to be.
The reading chair in the corner; the antique gold lamp behind it. The specific type of trailing plants for the mantel. The type of couch—not hard, not lumpy—fluffy and like a hug, he wrote.
The mantel that sits above the real fireplace.
Because the fake one had to be torn out.
And we had to get a structural engineer involved and the building owner and three weeks’ worth of effort getting a permit from the city to put in a real, wood-burning fireplace in a penthouse. Which shouldn’t be my job.
But none of this should be. It was all supposed to be his job.
I roll my eyes and curse my brother under my breath.
I walk through the living room and down the hallway, paint swatches on the walls. Decisions I must be the voice for because these plans aren’t mine.
Just like I must be the voice for every other decision and plan and operation.
I stop at the top of the staircase that leads down to what was his study and Max’s office. The study has remained untouched through all the renovations. It stays locked. The contractors have strict orders not to leave this floor.
This is the part I’m not good at, I think as I make my way down the stairs towards the waiting door.
The administration is fine—I’ve been doing most of it for years anyway since Dad got sick. The meetings and the decisions and the managing of men who need managing. I’m not bad at it. I’m actually, if I’m honest with myself in a way I prefer not to be, reasonably good at it.
But I hate it.
I hate the meetings. I hate being the one everyone looks at when something goes wrong. I hate that Mikey has started calling me boss without irony, which means it’s real, which means this is actually my fucking life.
I hate that Ferraro comes to me now with the things he used to bring my father into and I have to sit in that fucking chair—the new one, the temporary one, not my father’s because that was in pieces on the patio thanks to Cal.
Then they expect answers. Answers that should be my own since they’re coming from my own mouth but they aren’t.
Because I think about what Cal would say, then say it louder and with less patience.
Cal would say don’t shoot first. Cal would say take them alive. Cal would say we do this with some semblance of decency—and now I have to pretend like I have any decency.
And if he were the one making the decisions and having the answers for everyone, I’d roll my eyes and do it his way, and it would mostly work and then we’d argue about the parts where it didn’t.
But now there’s no argument. Because it has to work. There’s no option because the option is doing it his way because of that fucking explosion.
And I miss him being in that room. Not because I miss him making me do things his way or even that I miss being near him. I miss being able to leave the good side to him and do things my way on the side. I miss running with the guys some nights, finding trouble and just being a part of the crew.
But no.
Cal had to go and get himself blown up.
I come face to face with his office door and sigh, shifting the bag of food from Carlucci’s Bistro down the road.
Here we go, I think. Back into his damn lair. Where nothing changes and the moon phases are still carved into her desk and it still smells like his fucking cologne—that Max so generously pointed out I now reek of.
I’ll have to sit in there and go over all the shit I had to do today and make sure every fucking decision was exactly how he would have wanted it.
I can’t believe this shit.