Page 6 of 10,000 Hours With A Rich Menace

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, nolonger 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 weneeded 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 ontaking 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 dowithoutthe Eaton money.

My cousins, his children, were distant as fuck. You would have thought we were stepchildren, and not his brother’sbiological 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 abilitiesandname.

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 wantedit 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.

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