Prince of Blood and Steel

by Nazarea Andrews

  Bethania smiles, icily. “But you’ve been gone so much longer than you think, Emma.”

  She blinks, staring at her mother in shock. Bethania sighs, and for the first time, exasperation seeps out. “Emma, you may have left only a few weeks ago, but you’ve been your cousin’s creature for years. I’m not blind, you know.”

  “He’s been gone,” she protests, and even to her ears, it’s a hollow protest.

  Bethania shrugs. “And you were under Caleb’s protection almost all of that time. Do you think I don’t know that? That you would always choose your cousin over me?”

  “He is the rightful heir.”

  “Only by accident of death,” Bethania snaps furiously. “You left me and gave your loyalty to a leech. And for what? He made you an assistant!”

  Emma laughs, a low incredulous sound, and shakes her head. “You’re offended for me? Is that it, Mother?”

  “You could run this syndicate. Instead you fetch and carry.”

  Emma smiles, says softly, “Maybe it’s that I’m more than a ‘fetch and carry’ and you know it. Seth trusts me in a way your brothers never did. And in my way, I will rule the family. And you hate that.”

  Bethania is pale under her expensive makeup. “They would have told you. In time, they would have been forced to tell you.”

  Emma’s eyes are sharp, hard. “What?”

  Bethania flinches away, and Emma wonders if her mother fears her. She shakes herself, and color seeps into her cheeks. “Why are you here, Emma?”

  She gestures at the empty room. “I came for some of my stuff.”

  “It’s in storage,” Bethania says distantly. “I’ll get the address for you.”

  In the modest office, Bethania sifts through her files. Emma knows her mother has always kept a dossier on her—knows it’ll take her a moment to find the information hastily shoved there. She takes a moment to survey the room. Two pictures hang on the wall—a painting of Isaac, holding her as a baby, and a framed shot of Bethania, Gabriel, and Mikie.

  For the first time in she cannot remember how long, her gaze is drawn to the second picture rather than her dead brother. She stares at it, at the way Mikie and Bethania are close, Gabe a little distant, his dark eyes staring at something away from the camera.

  Bethania always favored Mikie.

  “What do you know about Ratchaphure?”

  The question is blunt, and she bites her lip, wondering if it was smart. Bethania stills in front of her file cabinet. Her voice, when it comes, is measured and cold. “Why?”

  “I remember Caleb mentioned it, once,” she lies easily. “No one talks about what he did. Why Uncle Mikie purged after Caleb’s death. And I’m curious—what did he know that was so dangerous Mikie killed his nephew?”

  Bethania whips around. “Mikie has nothing to fear from Caleb—he never did.”

  “Then what?” Emma asks softly, her voice a challenge. “Was it that Mikie knew Seth had been through hell in Cuba, and if the Cubans found out he was thinking about Asia, they’d kill him? Why send Seth away in the first place, Mother?”

  Hatred fills Bethania’s eyes, but she remains silent against her daughter’s questions. She wonders how Emma learned so much—and how much of it Seth knows. How had they learned of Ratchaphure?

  “Seth wanted to go,” Bethania says, pushing her doubts aside.

  Emma laughs openly at this. “Seth went thinking he was going for a few months—a summer. Mikie left him there for two years!”

  “You act like Seth was the only one who left,” Bethania snaps. “Caleb left the city for the summer; you know that.”

  “A summer is not two years, Mother. And why send Caleb to Asia if we were going Cuban—and everyone knows that’s why Mikie sent Seth south.”

  “Ratchaphure approached Caleb,” Bethania protests and then stills. Emma smiles, but it is a sad smile—a smile of pity. The older woman stares in shock at the daughter she has always ignored, always discounted, always dismissed.

  Emma shifts forward and plucks her dossier from her mother’s nerveless fingers. She slides it into the Burberry purse and gives her mother a final glance. “Mikie sent his nephew to forge an alliance. He should never have responded to the Thais.”

  “Caleb…” Bethania begins.

  “Loved this family. He would kill to protect Seth and me. Yes, he was misguided,” Emma snaps. She jerks her sunglasses into place, more to hide her tears of anger than anything. Pain is beginning to replace the anger, and she wants solitude so she can fall apart. “But misguided or not, he loved this family—if he didn’t trust us, it was Mikie’s fault. And you allowed it.”

  Her mother flinches at the anger in Emma’s voice. At the door, her back to her mother, she says softly, “My loyalty is given, Mother. And yes—it has been for a long time. But I, at least, gave it wisely. Did you?”

  She doesn’t wait for her answer, her defense, or excuses. She all but bolts from the icy tomb, with all its reminders of her brother and her childhood. Her car is waiting patiently, and her driver looks alarmed as he holds the door for her. She is sobbing as he shuts it and drives them away from her family home.

  Chapter 23

  Astoria, New York City. June 16th.

  The building is smallish, even for the area, a mere five stories. The front of it is dirty brick, and the stair well smells like piss. A woman in a sequined mini-skirt, who must be a hooker, sizes him up just outside of the exit to the fourth floor.

  She seems interested for a moment, shifting the tiniest bit as his eyes pass her by, but just as quickly she stops. He is obviously out of place here in his rich-textured button-up tucked into his low-rise business slacks¸ definitely not worth the trouble of trying to tangle up with him. She resigns to obvious visual appreciation.

  He gives her just a passing glance, one warning not to approach him, that he isn't her dinner ticket. Then he leaves her behind for the off-putting endless green tunnel of apartments, like drawers in a filing cabinet. His destination leads him most of the way down, past smudged and unkempt white doors that represent the squalid lives of the street.

  Caleb took shelter in the slum? Of course, where better to avoid the radar of court life?

  The hesitation that plagued him the first time he opened his brother's door never comes. He'd rather face harsh reality than waste to nothing in this wretched hallway.

  The smell inside the place might be worse than the rank, piss-scented hallway. He takes a deep breath and crinkles his nose in errant disgust. He uses his phone to give him enough washed-out light to find the switch to a standing lamp. The bulb blows when he turns it on.

  From the faint illumination, he can gather that the door opens directly into the living space. He creeps past a coffee table to the kitchen, which is definitely the source of the smell, he decides as he flips on the light.

  Two bulbs come to life above him, the third most likely long dead, the fixture at some point lost. This is more like it.

  His eyes sweep a sink full of dishes; a grease spot on the stove, the open trash can reeking. An empty wine bottle sits on the counter, glass beside it complete with finger smudges and cracked, dried remnants of purple in the bottom. He slams the lid down on the trash, which blocks the odor somewhat.

  He wanders back into the living room, letting his eyes roam over the coffee table. His resolve shakes violently, threatens to dismantle stone by stone. Maybe an eternity of nothing is better than this. A sheathed katana leans against the side of the couch and the wall, its handle wrapped in dark blue. A chrome .40 caliber gleams from the table top, resting next to a black butterfly knife and a pack of cigarettes, probably empty. A 24 karat-rimmed ashtray overflows in the middle of the table. Ash rests in peace on every available surface.

  This setting screams of Caleb Morgan, the older, messy brother with a dark fascination with most types of weaponry, a smoking habit, and no maid. The cost of the sword would pay this apartment's rent for several months, the price tag on the gun several mo
re. The drab, once-white paint is peeling off the ceiling in places, and a light blue dress shirt hangs haphazardly across the back of the couch, tag boasting the mark of Dolce & Gabbana.

  Seth's chest contracts as he collapses onto the couch, staring at the orchestrated mess for a long time. These are the tiny details that created the map of Caleb's inner chambers: a blue deck of Bicycle playing cards, a Maxim magazine, another empty wine bottle, this one Chardonnay. A girl’s sweater, sedate and modest. His eyes narrow—did Caleb really bring Emma here? Or did the sweater somehow follow him home, left in his care by a relaxed and forgetful cousin?

  He picks up the cigarette pack:—Marlboro Reds, always. It's not empty, he finds, shaking it like he has seen Caleb do so many times to gauge his supply. Four, he guesses, then flips the top to see. There are two cigarettes and a folded piece of blue paper.

  Once, when Seth was fourteen, he found one of Caleb's first packs of cigarettes while snooping in his room. He had stolen them just for spite, since Caleb couldn't tell on him for something he wasn't supposed to have, but he had also tried one in some attempt to relate to his cool and mean older brother. Caleb had kicked his ass for taking them. He kicked it again when he realized one was gone.

  He hasn't smoked one since that day, yet his fingers choose a brown filter instead of the mysterious paper. He can smell the rich tobacco as he puts it to his lips. He scans the tabletop with innate faith in his kin until he finds a green Bic lighter beside a tray with a shriveled bud of marijuana on it. His eyes drop closed as he lights the thing and inhales.

  The smoke is harsh and earthy. It burns his throat and lungs, but he takes it anyway. He watches his breath swirl as he exhales, long and slow. There's no television here, he notices. Not surprising, he thinks. Caleb never took much from the fictional worlds of shows, and he never put much stock in the evening news.

  He takes another hit, and with resignation, slips the paper out of the pack. When unfolded, it reveals only a phone number, scrawled thickly in black with stylish dots where most people put dashes. It could have been any number, some girl from a bar, a business contact, except that it's so familiar it makes Seth choke. Not so very long ago he stared at this sequence of numbers written in the same hand. Vera Rohan’s.

  Why is her name the only thing that keeps coming into play as he digs through Caleb's life? He takes a hard hit and thinks of the newspapers in the other apartment, all her stories about other organized crime rings. His stomach flips, and he forces himself not to imagine the ways in which Caleb and Vera could have been connected.

  His head buzzes, so he stabs the cigarette into the pile in the ashtray. Relating to Caleb is proving much easier than he could have prepared himself to handle.

  At what point, he wonders, did Caleb stop tasting the cigarettes? When did it just become a part of him? When did it stop being cool and become just another burden? He tosses the pack onto the table and pockets the number as he stands. Just as before, he knows the bedroom will tell far more secrets. Unlike before, those secrets may be heavy enough to suffocate him for good.

  The door to the room is beside the couch, mostly closed. The switch inside brings to life a glass fixture hanging on a grimy chain. It is a sad ghost of the gleaming, modern lighting of his other place. A twin bed runs along the right wall, covered by a mess of blankets and silk sheets. A closet takes up most of the other wall, and there's just enough room to walk between them. A nightstand takes up most of the rest of the space, filled with papers and folders, another full ashtray beside two Trojan Magnums, and a dusty clock radio. There's a pile of clothes in the corner and some more hanging from the end of the bed.

  He couldn't ignore the files if he wanted to. Ash scatters as he picks up the top one and opens it. The low wattage bulb above him and meticulous chaos around him make him feel like he's in a movie filmed sometime before he was born. He quickly recognizes the lists of numbers in neat columns as accounting figures. Simultaneously, he realizes that nothing is labeled. Every column and row is carefully lacking what it represents. He drops himself onto the bed with a frown. None of these numbers match anything within the Morgan Estates or the syndicate's operations, and these numbers are massive. His hands have begun to shake.

  Uncle Mikie isn't so sure about that little plan you two had anymore, Caleb had said. Seth hadn't believed him. But here seems to be proof of a very solid change in direction. He releases the file to flutter and scatter to the floor and picks up the next one. It is full of Morgan Estates’ financial information. A pack of papers at the end show different projections for the company based on some sort of major restructuring, the information in the other file, Seth can only guess. He throws it beside the other in the floor.

  Beneath the manila folder is a wrinkled, yellow carbon copy, some sort of receipt, Seth thinks from first glance. It is folded around a neon-colorful brochure. He picks it up as if it might explode at any moment, unfolding the thin paper. The top is all in a language he doesn't recognize, something Asian. He thinks we should go Asian instead, Caleb had said. Those words meant so little then.

  Seth flips open the brochure. It has pictures of small, bare, yet very stylish rooms with big empty beds, and beautiful, young, barely clothed women. They are smiling and posing around happy-looking men of different nationalities. His stomach turns as he thinks of Emma's seemingly innocent question to him, her inquiry about whores.

  What does she know? What is she getting herself into? The receipt is written for Trent Carraba, an alias Caleb had developed in his early teens during their boyhood games, a name he always thought sounded cool. He notices a passport is next in the stack. He snatches it up quickly, knocking the clock radio askew, which sends the condoms into the floor. He stomach threatens to return his dinner as he forces his attention away from the flashing gold packaging.

  He flips open the passport, is accosted by Caleb's grim visage beside that name: Carraba, Trent Gabriel. It has several stamps, London, Tokyo, Bangkok, and a false living address in New York.

  “Fuck,” he spits, flinging it at the floor.

  He presses his fingers against his eyelids as if it will stop the flood of confused betrayal. He thinks of Caleb's assets, his portion of company shares that still sit in limbo on Seth's insistence. He has been inexplicably resistant to the pressure from all angles to come to an agreement to split those shares among several key family members. They have been coaxing gently, trying so hard not to seem like they're worried about what he might do with them, because it is ultimately his decision. The unified kingdom he has envisioned is quickly losing its luster. He feels like both Robin Hood and King Richard, returned to his home to find the interim king has made extensive measures against him.

  He lifts his head as if it carries the weight of all the buildings of Manhattan that are under his control. His heavy eyes roam the nightstand, noticing a brown-skinned, black-haired beauty staring seductively at him from the cover of yet another issue of Maxim. The words on the cover are a mix of English and the same language from the brochure, Thai, he realizes now. Bamboo. He had mentioned it himself, to Emma. The place had been hip and new when he left town. Caleb had loved it then. Seth had been less than pleased to hear, when he returned, that it was still open. It is a syndicate hot spot, a tangled mess of drugs and, yes, the skin trade.

  He stands swiftly, clearing the top of the nightstand with one well-placed swipe of his arm. The ashtray launches into the wall and shatters, exploding into a cloud of ash, spent cigarette butts, and shards of glass. Papers scatter across abandoned clothing and thread-bare carpet. The numbers on the clock go black as the chord jerks from wall socket, and the plastic casing slams against the floor and comes apart. His brother's words continue to break him. You don't understand, Seth. You never did.

  He takes hold of the stand with both hands. Tears make a play to rise as he flings it down the length of the room. The drawer falls out en route, scattering more knives, condoms, and bits of paper in a fluttering trail to where the stand
crashes into the wall beside the door. The wood splinters, and it punctures holes in the paper-thin construction. Sheet rock dust bursts forth to join the cloud of distress.

  I am more like our family than you could ever hope to be.

  He bites back the tears. He's so tired of crying, weary of this anguish. Instead he takes an armful of the stylish, rich-textured clothes hanging in the closet, and rips them free. Several of the wooden hangers snap and bend, the pieces of which go flying in all directions. Fabric tears and buttons whiz by his head. The remains float to the floor around him.

  Because you are weak.

  “Because you were weak!” he screams, grabbing a built-in drawer by its handle and sending it sailing into the wall above the bed with one fluid movement. Again, plaster cracks and crumbles, and the drawer falls apart. Designer boxers and socks rain onto black sheets. Seth watches another gun ricochet into the silky heap, a black .357. It lands beside three photos that must have been in the drawer as well.

  “But you were right,” he says softly as he retrieves the pictures. The first is a genuinely smiling Caleb, laughing, Seth can tell from the way his eyes are crinkled at the corners. His dark blue shirt is mostly unbuttoned, toned chest bared proudly, and he holds a bottle of what looks like sake. “I'm not like them.”

  The next is Caleb, sleeves rolled up past his elbows bent in a left-handed arm wrestling match with a brown-skinned, bare-armed figure, whose his head is leaned forward and whose face is obscured by long, black hair. Caleb's eyes are locked on the mysterious face, and they are both covered in a sheen of sweat.

  The third is a snapshot of Caleb with his arm around Emma. His wide smile shines brilliantly next to the reserved, sweet curve of her lips. He wears a black vest over a white tux shirt, and her hair is significantly shorter. They are holding champagne and exemplifying luxurious beauty. They look so much alike, it hurts.

  Their father believed that family was the most important force in the universe. Gabriel believed in it so fully that he spent some of his last breaths putting his voice to the philosophy in order to instill its value within his heir. Seth took it to heart, but three years later he finds himself doubting the principle upon which he has based his actions, his whole life. Would Caleb really have pulled the trigger? And was he really so wrong when he said the family was dead? Most importantly, what if Seth had stayed? What if he had been here for his brother, instead of completely cut off from him? He had believed in the idea of gaining such a powerful ally by himself; he had believed it so wholeheartedly because he was naïve and selfish. He had believed that Mikie's support came from grounded and seasoned experience, but hindsight tells him that his uncle should have known better, which means he most likely did.