10,000 Hours With A Rich Menace (Caselli Family Book 1)

I didn’t talk until I was five years old.

My mother always said I was different, and because I refused to use my words she worried. I was always the kid she worried about the most, even though I was the oldest. When Kora came, she had to split her time between a new baby and her nonverbal son.

Since the age of two, I had been to every therapist or enrolled in every therapy that money could buy. My father was the kind of nigga that didn’t feel the need to worry. He’ll talk when he got something to fucking say… don’t seem like he got much to say, Constance. I would hear them arguing because I wasn’t verbal.

The worry lines always appeared when she rubbed my head and kissed my cheek. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to talk, I knew how to talk. I just didn’t want to talk, and I would always stop myself when I felt like it.

In school, they picked on me because I didn’t say shit, and the teachers paid me extra attention. When it came to my schoolwork, nobody could touch me because I knew my work. It wasn’t that I didn’t know anything – I knew plenty. I just didn’t talk and never felt moved to say anything. Every grade, test, assignment I passed without ever saying a fucking word.

I went to private school, and there wasn’t a bunch of kids that looked like me in that bitch. I was an easy target being the Black boy, and then not speaking, they just knew they hit the jackpot. Until I cornered the biggest one in the bathroom during recess and beat his ass with the cover from the back of the toilet.

The teacher was horrified when she went into the bathroom and found him on the floor barely hanging onto life. She screamed while shaking me and asked why I would do such a thing, as if she hadn’t witnessed these pink bitches bully me since the school year started. I smiled in her face and told her, “Bitch tried me, and I showed him.”

No matter how much time had passed, the look on her face as she shuttered while looking at me was something I would never forget. I wished I could have taken a picture and showed her ass what she looked like, then printed it on a T-shirt.

My father paid off that boy’s family and it was never spoken about. They graciously accepted the money because they could have been burned to death in their home instead. The Eaton family wasn’t anything to fuck with, and my uncle, Nash Eaton, ran a tight ship. Nothing happened without him or my father knowing.

After I spoke to my teacher, it was a wrap after that because I never shut up. I ran that school like my name was on the sign outside of it. Always correcting them when they were wrong and talking out of turn. There was no way they could control me or stop me from doing whatever I wanted.

The teachers spoke with my parents and told them that I was different. I learned early on that being different in that school was bad. They might as well have branded me with a scarlet letter.

It was in seventh grade that I met my best friend. Corleon D. Bruster walked into the school, another Black boy. He came in like he knew he was the shit, and he was smart, which made me feel better. I hated a stupid person, and the fact that he was another Black boy and smart piqued my interest.

Baked chicken, white rice and corn – had to be fresh corn. That was my lunch every day. Every time I opened my lunch box; it was like I was having it for the first time. Corleon sat at the table with me and watched me every day for a week before he decided to ask what the fuck was wrong with me.

“You hate looking at people in the eyes, huh?” he broke the silence between us as I cut into my chicken breast and peered up at him for five seconds before returning back to my food.

I counted.

He respected my silence before I decided to speak to him. “I don’t like when people stare at me.”

“Or touch you,” he noted.

“Yeah.”

“We can sit in silence, and you don’t have to worry about me touching you… shit weird anyway.”

I looked up at him and smirked as he continued on eating his school lunch and I continued with mine.

Corleon was heavily into technology. Loved the shit and would be a computer if that was an option when he was born. Our friendship was organic, he was patient with me and never pushed me. He understood that I moved differently, and that I wasn’t like everyone else. He became my right hand in everything.

Core was like a second brother. His loyalty to me and my family was something that I could never overlook. He didn’t give a fuck what the last name Eaton meant; he was just there because of who I was.

Maverick.

In high school, I was picked up from school early by my uncle’s driver and brought to his mansion. I hardly ever spent time with my uncle because he was always so busy, and truthfully, I never really liked his ass.

He treated his younger brother, my father, like he was his flunky because he was the first born, the heir to the Eaton throne. When my grandfather passed away, my uncle stepped into his role and ran everything the Eaton’s touched how he wanted.

Our family was powerful, and one of the founding families on Staten Island – the oldest founding family. We had our hands into everything, and it was my father who decided to step into his own.

His older brother had been given everything, and he was often overlooked. He had this beautiful family, wife, and nothing ever seemed good enough for my old ass grandfather. Nash was his star, and my father was the spare that he really didn’t even want. I always watched how my grandfather and my uncle treated my father.

They acted like he was a stranger trying to mooch off the family’s name. As if he wasn’t good enough to reap the benefits of what had been built. It was my father who decided to start Case House.

My uncle nor my grandfather wanted anything to do with his pipe dream, as they called it. I watched my father do all the leg work and grind it out knowing he had something to prove. He named it Case House, short for my mother’s maiden name – Caselli.

As much as he loved his last name and knew how powerful it was, he wanted to do something without using the Eaton name, and he did. It didn’t happen overnight, but Case House had got a reputation for having some of the best pussy in the city. He was making so much money that he didn’t need that Eaton money.

His connections were no longer from his brother, they were his own. Shit, he even started walking like he was that nigga, no longer having to play second because Bash Eaton was doing shit on his own without using his family’s name.

The day that I was driven to my uncle’s estate and sat down in his office, he told me that my father and mother had been killed. Someone came into our home and shot them while they slept. Shit never sat right with me because my mom was an early bird who was up before any of us. She saw me off to school earlier that morning.

Just because she was a kept woman, didn’t mean she sat around eating donuts while painting her nails. She was always on the go, doing what needed to be done around the house or anything to make the family’s life easier.

My pops wasn’t even in town, so how the fuck did someone murder them in our home? I had a man that I was supposed to trust, a man that was the head of our family and I didn’t trust him. Something in my stomach told me shit was off, and when I questioned him, he couldn’t get his story straight.

The shit never felt right to me.

We stood in front of our parents’ caskets holding hands. Landon was only four, Zoya was seven, and Kora was fourteen. Everyone always promised to take care of the kids when someone passed. The promises of keeping the kids together and being there for them were all lies. I heard so many people crying and promising that they would step up, and they never did.

Nash Eaton never stepped up in the way that I thought he would have. We were moved out of our family home and into a single-family home that he bought for us. He hired an au pair that lived in with us, along with her daughter.

Jeffie.

Nash didn’t give a damn about the woman having a daughter or having her move in with us. Long as he didn’t have to waste time out his day to care for his deceased brother’s kids, he didn’t care. Angelica was heaven on earth, and everything that we needed because our parents were gone. She was tough as shit, but she had this soft side that came out whenever I needed it.

It was because of her that I had been diagnosed with ADHD and OCD. She kept telling me that I was special and there was something that she couldn’t quite put her finger on and had me get tested. Aside from being diagnosed with ADHD and OCD, the doctors just said my brain was wired differently. It made a lot of sense because I always knew I was different, and the way I did stuff wasn’t shit that other kids my age even cared about. Things had to go a certain way, and if they didn’t, I felt like my entire world was ending. I hated that I felt like this and wished like hell that I could change the shit. After my parents were murdered my obsessive-compulsive disorder became worse. The shit didn’t only fuck with me, it messed with my siblings as well.

Angelica never tried to change me, though. She recognized what I needed and made sure that I had those things to keep my head on straight. A red beet smoothie every morning, my favorite Coldplay song had to play while I worked out. Breakfast was always hard-boiled eggs and toast, and if I was really feeling different, I might have a salad.

Jeffie grew up watching her mother do everything to make my life normal, and she naturally picked up on it, and took on taking care of me – let her tell it.

I witnessed Angelica putting her life on hold because of me and my siblings. She had her whole life out there that she should have been living, and she stuck around because of us. Soon as I turned eighteen, I made sure I got full guardianship of my brother and sisters and stepped up to raise them. Nash barely did his part and money was decent, never enough to raise three children and put them in private school like he did for his kids. I had to figure out what to do without the Eaton money.

My cousins, his children, were distant as fuck. You would have thought we were stepchildren, and not his brother’s biological children with the way they treated us. Corleon was right there along with his mother helping me when it came to raising three siblings.

He was right there helping me with homework and when Zoya went through her rebellious stage. Girl always wanted to be in the hood when I was trying to keep her from it. Kora always listened, always doing what was right and following my plan. My uncle was powerful because of that name, and I wanted to make sure that we were powerful because of our abilities and name.

The root to evil was that Eaton money, and it had my uncle around the neck choking him out. I refused to ever beg another nigga for anything, and I didn’t care if we shared the same name as each other. My parents were gone, and my siblings were all I had left, so I went out there to do what needed to be done to provide for them.

Give them a fair advantage and to make sure they could fulfill the roles that I had for them. They would hate me for it but thank me when they were in rooms because of their abilities and not their names. Seeing their faces was all I needed to make sure we never had to ask a nigga for shit. I never wanted them to ever have to ask anyone for anything. I would provide for us, stepping into my father’s shoes.

Raising them wasn’t easy and it came with more damage to our relationships than anything. However, I did what I had to do to make sure they were good. I can’t say that I would ever change things because then they wouldn’t be where they were now. I’d be the bad guy and wear the scars if that meant they could have the life that wasn’t given to me.

That was taken from me.

Before he was murdered, I got a call from my father’s best friend. He called me from an overseas number and told me a lot of shit that connected a lot of pieces that never made sense to me when I was younger. My uncle wanted Case House. He wanted it because it had grown bigger than he ever expected, and my father wasn’t willing to part with it. He built that shit brick by brick even when no one believed in him.

It was Nash Eaton who ordered the hit on my parents, so he could take over Case House. As if he didn’t have enough. He had to take my parents away from me because of greed. His access to money and pull was so large that he didn’t need Case House.

He wanted it.

My father’s best friend was murdered shortly after, and I knew it was Nash. It was clear that he wanted to make sure that anybody who knew something was wiped away. I noticed after my father’s friend was killed; he started coming around more.

He wanted to know if I knew something.

Years had passed since my parents were murdered. Had I not received that call, my uncle showing up more wouldn’t have made sense. He was tossing around money and things that would have been helpful years ago. I had already put two sisters through college and law school and was putting a brother through college. Where the fuck was his ass when I needed him?

When we needed him.

I played my part, pretending like I was so excited to have my uncle around. Nash Eaton may have been smart but I was smarter and played my role the way that I needed to play it. Doing what I wanted meant that I had to step to the other founding members and get their approval, which wouldn’t be easy.

It was me asking them to kill the head of the third family, something that wasn’t a light thing to ask and was risky even putting my neck out there and asking the shit. I remember going in there with Core right by my side and laying everything out in front of them.

That bitch had my parents killed because he wanted something that he had no rights to. A business that he never wanted anything to do with. Nash was used to getting everything he wanted. He had never been told no before and that was what fucked him up.

His younger brother – the spare – telling him no didn’t sit right with him. When he took him away from us, he never considered his nieces and nephews. He didn’t give a fuck that we would be in this world without our parents.

There were technically four founding families, however, the Vanducci-Cromwell’s were always counted as one because of their close ties to each other. The heads of the Vanducci, Cromwell, and Davis families sat at the table and stared me down as I told them everything. They all sat at that table reading me, taking in my body language and seeing if I understood what I was asking them.

With a deal that I had to fulfill on my end, they gave me the blessings to do my uncle in, and I did just that. Taking my uncle out wasn’t as easy since he had children, and they would step into his role if he was murdered.

With the way my cousins acted with me and my siblings, like they were better than us, as if we didn’t deserve to have the Eaton name, I had fun making sure they were no longer with us. Ego was something that would be a man’s biggest downfall.

Nash was all too excited to have his nephew groveling at his feet, wanting to learn the family business. It turned his freaky ass on to know that his brother’s son needed him.

I admit, the shit tasted like poison.

For my family, I would make sure that we were good, so I did what I had to do. Getting close to my uncle was easier than I thought. So easy that he didn’t see it when I played Russian roulette with his children and wife in front of him before turning the gun on him.

I smiled, as my chest heaved up and down with blood across my face. Core was right there to hold a towel for me, so I could quickly wipe the blood from myself.

“You did it… you good… Maverick Eaton runs shit now.”

I remember turning to look at him. “The Eatons are gone… the Caselli’s are here. Menace Caselli runs shit now.” I got rid of any trace of my father’s name, and we took on my mother’s maiden name.

I was Menace Caselli, and I owned Case House along with everything that the Eaton’s used to own, and the lawyer that I sat down with after the funeral made sure of that.