Page 1 of Marcellus: House of Drakos

EIGHT YEARS EARLIER

He lifted up again, she placed the deep bowl in front of him again, and he threw up once again.

“I’m dying, Vanna.”

“No you aren’t.” She handed him a bottled water. He dropped it to his side. “Drink it, Niko.”

He drank, cleaned his mouth, and spit the water into the bowl. She took the bowl and bottle away from him, and he plopped back down onto his pillow. “I can’t take this any longer. I swear I can’t.”

Nikolas Drakos could feel the bowels of his very being shifting within him.

He had been sick, throwing up and nauseous when he wasn’t throwing up, for three long days.

If it wasn’t for his secretary by his side the entire three days, he would have suffered this indignity alone.

But good old Savannah came to the rescue.

He couldn’t depend on anybody but her. That was why he obeyed her every command as if she was his boss.

Because, in his miserable state right now, she was.

Another hour would past and he would feel better.

His pancreatitis would seem more manageable.

But then, like clockwork it seemed to him, he’d upchuck again, Savannah would help him get through it again, and he’d lay his head back down on his pillow once again.

“I’d rather be dead than live like this. ”

“If you don’t stop complaining,” Savannah said in her always sincere, but no-nonsense tone, “your wish might just come true. Through me,” she said with a smile.

Niko would have normally smiled, too. They had that kind of boss/secretary relationship. But he was too weak and sick to even try.

Savannah stood there and looked at the handsome younger man with concern in her eyes.

He was only a twenty-three-year-old kid trying to make it in this rough and tumbled world.

She started working for him when he was twenty.

When he had just received his inheritance and was starting his very own fashion house.

He was the talk of the town back then, after a successful launch at Chicago Fashion week.

She, a girl from Indiana, had just been laid off from the factory and needed employment bad.

A secretary’s job in an air-conditioned office seemed like a life line to her.

It turned out to be more like a hook, line, and sinker. She’d never worked harder in her entire life. Fourteen-hour days were not unheard of working for Niko. She’d go home well after midnight and would be back in the office before eight am. Still tired from the day before.

But it was always work to be done. Hard, honest, good work. There was never a dull moment in that office either, and over time she grew to love it. But there was a hefty price to be paid for that love. That was why she’d already made up her mind. That was why she’d already typed up her resignation.

“You’re getting better, Niko,” she said to him, her voice less no-nonsense and more encouraging now. “Every single day you’re getting a little better.” Then her voice turned Savannah again. “So stop with the complaints, get over yourself, and just get through it.”

“But I’m dying here, Vanna. You don’t seem to understand what I’m saying to you. It’s easy for you to say get over it. You act like it’s just that simple. I can’t get over it. I’m dying here!”

“Then die. Or shut up. You think I wanna be here smelling your puke all day?”

Niko’s face turned red with anger, which was what she wanted from him: Some fight. “Then why haven’t you left already? Since you don’t wanna be here. Nobody’s got a gun to your head. You can just take your ass out of my house and leave right now!”

“Okay. I think I’ll do just that,” Savannah said, and she turned to leave his bedside.

“Vanna, no. Please don’t go,” he cried out, grabbing her arm, his bright blue eyes revealing his terror. “I was just messing with you. Please don’t leave. I need you. Don’t leave me here alone. Please stay.”

He was a child in a man’s body as far as she was concerned.

But at least he was finally showing some gratitude, which was something he too often forgot to show.

“I’ll stay this time. But if you keep complaining I’m telling you I’m leaving, Niko.

I’m a human being too. I can’t take much more of this. ”

Then her look turned more worrisome. More seemingly introspective. “As soon as you’re out of this bed and able to take care of yourself, I’m out of here. I can’t do it anymore.”

“Once I’m up and about again, then I’ll want you to go. You won’t have to be cramped up in this apartment not a second longer. That’s a given.”

“I’m not talking about this apartment. I’m leaving the company. I can’t do it anymore.”

Niko frowned. “You can’t do what anymore?”

“Work these crazy hours every single day and half the night too. I can’t keep putting my life on the backburner. And all for what? To be somebody’s secretary? I have dreams too.”

Niko looked at his secretary as if he was seeing her for the first time.

She was his tower of strength. What was she talking about?

“I’m sure you have dreams too. And I’ll understand when you leave.

But you saw the numbers, Vanna. We had a tough season for the first time in three years.

My last collection barely broke even and that was the strongest collection I ever had.

I ran through my inheritance just getting the business off the ground, but now I’m barely keeping the lights on.

You know that. I need you to keep everybody in line just a little longer.

Then you can move on and I’ll completely understand.

But just give me one more season, please Vanna.

To get it right. So I can get back on top again. ”

But before Savannah could say another word, he was coughing again, and then lifting up again, and she was placing the bowl in front of him, and he was upchucking again.

When he laid back down, he fell back. It was an especially rough round that uncharacteristically came within minutes of the last round. And Savannah, who knew the heart of Niko better than anyone, knew she wasn’t going anywhere any time soon. He was a pain in the ass, but she was devoted to him.

She left his bedroom, just to get a breather, and went into the guest bathroom to flush the contents of the bowl and to clean it out the way she’d been doing seemingly every hour on the hour for the past three days.

She looked in the mirror over the vanity as she scrubbed the bowl.

She looked like death warmed over. Even older than she actually was.

She felt as if her life was off-track somehow.

As if she was so busy taking care of somebody else’s house while her own house was falling apart.

Then the doorbell to Niko’s penthouse apartment rang. Surprised since no one requested to come up, she wiped her hands on a towel, tossed it aside, and made her way to the front door.

“I don’t want any company. Get rid of them,” Niko yelled from his bedroom.

“You’re not the boss of me,” she yelled back at him. Which used to always make him laugh since he was in actual fact the boss of her. But this time all he did was cough.

Savannah made her way to the front door and looked through his peephole.

When she saw two white men standing at the door, one of them immediately caught her attention.

It was a familiar face, although she couldn’t place it, but she knew she’d seen it before.

The thick brown hair. Those deep blue eyes.

That seemingly perfect face. She would have never forgotten that face.

But when she opened the door she realized why that face looked so familiar. It was an older version of Niko’s face!

Marcellus Drakos had no intentions of coming to that apartment when he first arrived at his Chicago mansion for his monthly dinner with his children and their mothers.

A dinner no one, including himself, was allowed to skip.

But when Niko didn’t show up at all and the reason was given to him, he couldn’t in good conscience catch a plane back to France without at least paying him a visit.

Especially since Niko was the only one of his children that didn’t work for him and, as a consequence, rarely had any communication with him.

He had to see for himself that he was okay.

So there he stood, in his tailored suit and his knee-length brown cashmere coat with a thick, white scarf around his neck, impatiently waiting for his son to answer his ring.

But when a black woman he’d never seen before opened the door, he suddenly wondered if he was mistaken.

Not about the apartment. It was difficult to mistake the penthouse apartment inside a building.

But about her. He certainly didn’t remember her face: he was right about that.

But it absolutely felt as if he’d met her before.

“May I help you?” she said to him as he stared at her, and as she found herself staring at him. They both felt a kind of unrehearsed warmth toward the other immediately. A kind of otherworldliness, an oddness, a strangeness even, they’d never felt before. What on earth?

But his curiosity got the best of his manners. “And you are?” he blurted out.

Savannah didn’t normally give out her name so easily, but for some reason she did without hesitation. “I’m Savannah Richardson. How may I help you?”

That name didn’t ring a bell to Marcellus at all. But he had to have known her. Why else would he have such a robust reaction to her if he’d never met her before? “I understand my son is not well.”

And that was when she was certain. She had Googled Niko’s father once, when she first started working for Niko and he was constantly talking either very good or very bad about his father.

Even online he had one of those unusually attractive faces that made it difficult to ever forget.

And Niko looked so much like him. “You’re Niko’s father? ” she asked him.

“I am. May I enter?”

She detected a very slight French accent in his voice as she stepped aside and he walked in. His bodyguard, the second gentleman at the door, remained out in the hall to guard that door as long as the boss was inside.

Marcellus kept looking at her as she closed the door.

He had just turned forty-one and had celebrated his birthday with his family at the dinner, so he was conscious of age int that moment.

And he placed her age in her late twenties, maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine if he had to venture a guess. Around six years older than Niko.

But he could see by the bags under her eyes and her long, thick hair that was in such a messy ponytail, that she’d been under some severe strain. Was she his caretaker during his ordeal and his maid? Or was she something else to Niko entirely? “How is he?” he asked her.

A look of concern registered on her face.

“He’s getting better,” she said. “Three days ago he couldn’t hold anything down at all and was throwing up every few minutes it seemed.

Now he’s able to eat a little and throws up every hour or so, with a few exceptions.

He’s improving, but the doctor already reminded him that pancreatitis is a painful recovery. ”

“He’s a heavy drinker.” Marcellus said it as if it was a fact.

Savannah thought that was presumptuous of him. “Not to my knowledge.” She answered his statement as if it were a question.

Marcellus looked at her with a flash of anger. “What do you mean not to your knowledge? Why else would he have pancreatitis if he isn’t a heavy drinker?”

“He has these bouts every year. He has a chronic case that has nothing to do with alcohol. At least according to his doctor. But what does he know? He’s just a doctor.”

Marcellus looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. Did she just get smart with him? With him? Surely if she worked for Niko she had to know who he was and the power he wielded. She had to know that nobody dared to get sassy with a man like him.

But strangely enough, he didn’t lash out at her. The fact that she wasn’t afraid to speak up to him, even in that sardonic way, and his reaction to just seeing her, piqued his curiosity.

“Would you like to see him?” she asked him.

“I would, yes.”

“Right this way please.”

As she escorted him to Niko’s bedroom, he couldn’t help but check her out.

She wore shorts that highlighted her smooth-brown, slender legs, and a loosely-fitting shirt she had tied up above her navel, revealing a flat stomach.

She was a slender woman overall, but with more than enough curves and in all the right locations to elevate her body.

Tight ass. Nice hips. Dark hair that was probably attractive if it wasn’t so messy and in that ridiculous ponytail.

She was nicely packed. Very nicely packed.

And he couldn’t help it. Just watching her ass made him go hard.

Which was a first for him. He’d never had a maid turn him on before, nor a caretaker if that was what she was, and especially not one that smelled like throw up.

“You have company, Niko,” she said to him as they approached his room door.

“Didn’t I tell you I don’t want any company,” he yelled out at her.

“Sounds like a personal problem to me,” she yelled back to him, to Marcellus’s surprise, as they entered his son’s bedroom. What kind of way was that, he wondered, to speak to your employer?

But when he saw Niko lying in that bed, he realized that her smell was coming from his son. And that his son wasn’t just “under the weather” the way it was said to him, but appeared to be deathly ill, he forgot that maid with the nice ass and hurried to his son’s bedside.