“But me—”
“You’re family. You’re blood. You’re Giannis Drakos’s son. They have no choice but to follow you, and I believe you can handle the role until Antonis comes back.”
Nikos stared at Christos in disbelief. Christos clasped his shoulder with an iron grip.
“Since you’ve gotten here, you’ve managed to do what most people couldn’t do. You rose up the ranks, not with your father’s name, but with your own hard work. There are many people who skate by on blood ties alone, but you didn’t do that. You’re smart, sharp, and clever, and you have the leadership skills we need right now.”
Christos gripped his shoulder harder. “Even if your father had given the order, I would have been against it if I didn’t believe you could take on this role.”
Nikos snorted. “You’re admitting that you would have gone against my father’s word.”
“Yes,” Christos said. “This is my life, and I’ve been doing this for fifteen years now. We can’t let this fall, not when we’ve all worked hard for this. I know your relationship with your father isn’t good, but I agree with his decision.”
“I can’t do this,” Nikos said, shrugging off Christos’s hold as he walked away. He ignored Christos as he called after him. This was all too much for him. He walked out of the building, taking in the cool night air and the city lights. It felt like New York never slept, no matter what time it was.
He looked up at the dark night sky and wished he could be up there flying, so he could run away from all of this. All he wanted to do was get on a plane and escape his obligations. He wanted to go back and change every decision he made that led him here.
If he could go back, he wouldn’t have accepted his father’s offer to come here during a momentary lapse of judgment whenhe felt that he should pay the price for what he had done to Raelyn. If he could go back, he would never have sex with Rheagan and lose the woman he had loved in the process. And if he could go back, he would have never fallen in love with Raelyn. He would go back and reset everything all over again and not notice the beautiful dark skin Black American woman radiating like a light in the middle of the club.
But Nikos knew that the time for running was over.
Nikos reached into his pocket, grabbed his phone, and scrolled through his call list until he found his brother’s contact and called. On the third ring, there was an answer.
“Why me?” Nikos asked his brother. Even after Christos’s explanation, he still couldn’t understand it. His reasons were right, but he still felt that he wasn’t ready for this role yet.
At such a critical time like this, where their enemies would be gunning for them left and right with Antonis out of commission and the elephant in the room that no one had spoken on yet— whether Antonis would ever wake from that coma— it could be a few days, weeks, months, and even worse, years. It was a responsibility that he didn’t want to take on.
“If not you, then who?” Aris asked.
Nikos sighed as he wiped his face. “Uh… Christos.”
“Christos isn’t good in leadership roles. He strikes fear, but he doesn’t bring followers, and he isn’t blood.”
“What about you then?” Nikos asked, exasperated. “New York is practically your second home, and you know the business. You worked with Antonis for years before you returned back home for the pact.”
“Right now, I can’t be there. Mia’s in her third trimester, and our baby should be coming any time soon. I can’t leave her, and I won’t,” Aris said, and Nikos couldn’t argue against that. Eventhe grim reaper wouldn’t be able to pull Aris away from Mia right now.
“That’s why you need to step up.”
Nikos scuffed before sighing deeply. He wanted to ignore them, but he could understand their logic, and that made it worse. That meant that he couldn’t keep denying this.
“I don’t want to do this,” Nikos stated plainly. “I’m not ready.”
“I wasn’t ready either. Neither was Pierce. No one’s ever ready to take on the role. You just have to do it. I believe that father gave you this role for a reason. It’s not just because you’re his son—”
“Aris, come on—”
“It isn’t,” Aris said. “Our father is smarter than that. If he genuinely believed that you weren’t cut out for this, he wouldn’t put so much pressure on you. He has many people under him. He can’t just operate on blood alone. If that were the case, I wouldn’t have the position I have now.”
Nikos could say nothing because his brother was right. Pierce thought he would take on his father’s mantle alone just on the basis of him being their father’s firstborn son, but his father had made it clear that he would have given the role to Aris whether they shared blood or not.
“Aris, I c—”
“Do it for the family,” Aris said. “You want to know why I do what I do? Why I’m able to go to sleep at night and sleep peacefully with the things I have done? It’s all for my family. Nothing else matters to me. Not the power, not the money. It’s knowing that my family is healthy and protected. Everything we do is about protecting our own and sharing the wealth with our own. And while our uncle is out of commission, you haveto protect what’s ours, or we’ll lose it all. Don’t think about yourself. Think about your family.”
Times like this really showed that he was the youngest out of his brothers because right now, all he wanted to do was rage and whine about how unfair all of it was. To tell Aris that he wasn’t nearly as selfless as him, to tell him that maybe he did it for family, but their father and brother did it for greed.
But Nikos knew it would all be pointless. It would be nothing but meaningless complaints, a waste of air and time, time that they didn’t have. At this very moment, their enemies were plotting against them.
