It just took me almost a year to actually get on with it because it took me that long to stop feeling guilty at the thought of adding onto a story written for a time-based challenge after the time limit had passed.
I hope everyone enjoys it!
Amber thought she had them all wrapped around her little finger. With their dad dead and not one of them named his rightful heir she actually thought she could slip under the radar in all the confusion and steal the whole fucking company right out from under his nose.
Well, he'd let her go right on thinking that. She seemed to have forgotten that he was Luigi fucking Largo, the only one of the three of them to inherit a god-damned brain from their dad instead of somehow finding a way to wander through life with an empty skull. If she'd had any sense at all she would have realized that he'd only be playing along like a good boy if he had a plan of his own running in the background; it was useful for him that she didn't.
He'd realized how useful it would be to let her take the spotlight first practically from the minute she'd started grabbing for it. Every sycophantic organ-junkie who would have fallen all over themselves just for a chance to lick up the sweat from his dad's nuts and couldn't stand to see anyone else, especially anyone who Rotti hadn't chosen himself, leading GeneCo would pile their hate on the first person to take his spot, and be a hell of a lot less bitchy about whoever kicked the 'usurper' out of their seat. Every fucking peasant who started throwing around words like 'evil' or 'monsters' every time they had trouble scrounging up enough cash to make a payment would be softened up by Amber's 'kinder and gentler GeneCo' campaign without Luigi himself having to do any of the hard work, and once he announced that his first plan as president was getting rid of the Repo Men they'd practically be creaming their pants over him. They were all too afraid of the big, bad, organ-stealing boogeyman to focus on the fact that he'd be getting rid of the payment plans targeted towards the dirt poor assholes most likely to go delinquent on their payments along with them. And it would give Pavi a chance to get used to the idea that he was the last and least of their family in business affairs, the spot that should have been his right from the start even if Amber was younger, and once the idea was firmly in what passed for a mind with him it wouldn't matter if the people in first and second place switched.
As for Amber herself... well, she was the best possible choice as the buffer between his dad's presidency and his own. No matter how good of a face she was managing to keep up in public, she was still a Z-junkie. It wasn't as if it would be hard to wrest control from someone who spent most of the day as a complete fucking zombie.
Besides all that, it gave him time to work on his very own secret weapon, and for once that didn't mean a knife.
His brother and sister were both content to completely forget about little Shilo Wallace. He couldn't blame them; it was fucking enraging to think about how close they'd come to losing everything because of some god-damned game their father decided to play. But thousands of people had watched Rotti declare her his chosen heir from the audience, millions more saw it as that night's opera went on to become the most popular holorecording in history, and that right there lead to the potential for one hell of a tool in the hands for anyone who knew the right way to use it.
And not only was Luigi the only one of them smart enough to realize that, he was also the only one of them with a chance in hell of winning her to his side. He'd watched the security recordings his dad had kept of the girl and had seen that Amber lost any chance of winning the kid over with her bitch fits about Blind Mag; the look on Shilo's face the second she spotted Mag made it obvious that she was practically getting wet in her panties over any attention at all from their pet singer. And Luigi had seen for himself that Shilo reacted with the same amount of disgust any sane person would give Pavi; Luigi had been the one who'd needed to pull her safely away from the freak, after all.
And it had been in that moment, when he'd had his arm wrapped tightly around her shoulders, that he'd realized that all the batshit insanity that had gone on that day had been enough to distract her from the one tiny little thing he'd done that might get him on her shit list as well. She'd seen Nathan go down, but hadn't noticed just who had shoved the knife in his back; she was the type of girl who would never have let Luigi lay a hand on her after stabbing her beloved daddy otherwise, no matter how pissed off she'd been with him. He sure as hell wouldn't have been the one she'd turned to when she was begging someone to explain things to her if she'd noticed that Nathan's blood was still wet on his hands.
And that was the only thing he needed to know.