Wicked Mafia Prince (A Dangerous Royals Romance, #2)(33)

“I understand you have a beautiful heart.”





Chapter Eleven




Lazarus


Tip of the day: When faking empathy, less is more.

A frown and a simple sentence, that’s all you need. At funerals, for example. The grieving wife or something. I’m so sorry for your loss. So sorry. Even if you laughed as you put a blade into the guy, you look his wife right in the eye and repeat as needed. I’m so sorry, truly sorry.

It’s helpful to think of it as a form of jazz, with variations on the basic riff.

Empathy is absolutely critical for a leader to have, according to my online executive coach Valerie Saint Marco, whom I’m inclined to believe. “If they feel you don’t understand them, they’ll lose respect.”

She thinks I’ve recently taken over an accounting firm.

Valerie often talks about mirroring people’s feelings back to them. “You may not be familiar with the frustrations of a help-desk clerk or a first-year hire, for example, but you can listen to their frustrations and mirror them back, showing you understand.”

That bit really helped me; faking empathy is easy, but it’s hard to know when to put the empathy in. Valerie’s way of taking cues is excellent. I’ve noticed that some people want you to do an immediate leap to empathy, but with others, it’s apparently more appropriate to go from anger to empathy along with them. You have to get that part right, or else they think your empathy is fake.

If people think you’re faking empathy, that’s worse than no empathy at all. Trust me on that.

I’ve found the mirroring thing also helps to make sure you don’t empathize with the wrong things, because that’s a sure sign that you’re faking it.

So when I get to Valhalla, I ask Charles to tell me the story in his own words. It gives me a chance to figure out where to put the empathy regarding the nun situation. Charles is critical to the brothel operation, and I really need to keep him on board.

We’re in his little office at the front of Valhalla, the small apartment complex positioned on the corner where a residential area gives way to a low-rent shopping and dining district. Dollar stores, that sort of thing. Charles is shaking with rage over the guard taking the nun.

So I do rage, too. I plan to kill the guard either way, but I’m angling to make it all about Charles. I set my face in a frown and show him my balled fists. Valerie says physical cues are 80% of your message. Who knew?

“That man needs to hurt,” I say.

Charles nods, slowly.

The man is fixated on his nuns. He takes women to his home, dresses them in nun’s outfits he’s had specially made, and two weeks later they’re hacked up and he needs another, because that last one wasn’t quite right.

What the f*ck are you supposed to do with that? I would defy even Valerie to feel empathy for this particular frustration.

But I need him running Valhalla. He was doing it under the old boss, Aldo Nikolla. Aldo himself would often say how f*cking valuable Charles was. If I lose Charles’s loyalty, I’ll have to kill him, and there will be no one to run Valhalla. That would be a hell of a hit on the bottom line.

I know they don’t see me as leader material. They see me more as an untrustworthy psycho who’ll go bananas at the drop of a hat. That was part of Aldo Nikolla’s PR, though I’ll admit to doing my part to stoke it.

A kumar needs to instill fear. It’s in the job description.

Aldo Nikolla made me heir apparent as a kind of insurance policy, knowing none of the ambitious kryetar would kill him and risk having me in charge.

Making a half-crazy, bloodthirsty killer your second-in-command…sure, it was a good plan for a man who didn’t want the rank and file offing him.

But hello—when you make a bloodthirsty killer your heir, let’s just say it’s not the best longevity plan.

Needless to say, I was vague in explaining all of this to Valerie during our initial consultation.

Engaging an online coach—how desperate is that? But I was feeling desperate. I told her I wasn’t a people person, that I didn’t have the trust of my organization, but that I’d found myself in charge, asked whether she thought she could help.

She grasped the whole thing right away. “You’re moving from a task-oriented role to a leadership role,” she said. “It’s common for people who excel in a support role to be thrust into leadership before they’ve developed the skills. And these first weeks are crucial. Your people are watching you.”

I liked that she understood, and yeah, I know they are f*cking watching me, a lot of them looking to defect, especially with the f*cking Dragusha brothers out there.

“What do you think? I need those skills fast. Can I get to where I need to be? Get as good as my old boss fast enough?”

“Hell no,” she said.

I was pretty f*cking unhappy with this answer. Visions of tracking her down and breaking her neck danced through my head, but then she added, “I think you can be better than your old boss, Lazarus. I’m going to help you knock this f*cker out of the park.”

I felt such intense gratitude right then and there, which is saying a lot, because I don’t tend to feel much. But for this I felt gratitude.

“Do you see what I did there, Lazarus?” she asked. “Give them a vision to believe in. Be their champion, and they’ll be your champion. This is what I’ll teach you to do, with actionable steps you can start taking right away.”