The Man Behind the Empire (Who "Screamed" When the Mantis Got Out)
He built an empire from nothing and controls every room he walks into—until a seven-year-old, a praying mantis, and a bodyguard named Raya prove he doesn't have it handled. Meet Rafe Silva, the billionaire hero of Susan Gable's The Billionaire's Ninja Nanny.
MEET THE CHARACTERSBEHIND THE BOOK
Susan Gable
6/2/20264 min read
Let's get something out of the way first. I know billionaires aren't exactly beloved right now. Trust me, I'm aware. You can't swing a cat on the internet without hitting a think piece about why billionaires shouldn't exist.
And here I am, writing one. More than one, actually.
But Rafe Silva isn't the kind of billionaire who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. He grew up near Boston with nothing, and that includes no father. Scholarship kid at a prep school where legacy meant everything and money was the only language that mattered. He built his empire from scratch, with his hands and his brain and the particular stubbornness of a man who grew up knowing that if he didn't build it himself, nobody was going to hand it to him.
That matters. It matters because his relationship to money isn't "I deserve this." It's "I built this, and I'll be damned if anyone takes it from me."
His motto, if he had one on a bumper sticker (which he wouldn't, because Rafe drives a Porsche and doesn't do bumper stickers), would be: What I build, I keep.
That sounds strong. It sounds like confidence. And it is. But turn it over and look at the other side, and it's also the motto of a man who's terrified of losing things. A man who controls everything because controlling everything is the only way he knows to keep himself safe.
Sound like anyone else in this story? (Hi, Raya.)
The prep school part of Rafe's backstory came from real life. Someone I work with has a son who's a scholarship kid at one of those schools. The writer brain filed that one away under "interesting things for a story," and a couple years later, it grew into something bigger than I expected. Four scholarship boys, in fact. A brotherhood. But I'll save that for the next post.
Right now, let's talk about Rafe's problem. And it's not the death threats.
Rafe means well. He loves his daughter, Ellie. He loves her so much it physically hurts him when she smiles at someone else with a warmth she hasn't aimed at him in months. But somewhere along the road to building an empire, he lost his priorities. His wife was pulling away from him before she died. They were probably headed for divorce. And then she was gone, and instead of a difficult marriage he had a ghost and a toddler and a guilt he couldn't outbuild no matter how many zeroes he added to the company valuation.
So by the time we meet him, Rafe is a man who thinks he's holding it all together. He's got the penthouse, the company, the security team, the daughter in the best school. He's got it handled.
(Spoiler alert: He does not have it handled.)
His daughter is lonely. His house is quiet in the wrong ways. And the revolving door of nannies (interchangeable, forgettable, gone within months) isn't a staffing problem. It's a symptom.
Then Raya walks in, and here's what I love about Rafe. He doesn't like her. Doesn't like the situation. Doesn't like that a stranger is living in his home, running his security, telling him what his daughter can and can't do. He's a man who controls every room he walks into, and suddenly there's a woman in his house who controls rooms better than he does.
But he's smart enough, and honest enough, to know she's right.
That takes a specific kind of strength. Not the punching-things kind. (Rafe doesn't punch things. He acquires them.) The kind where you look at your life and admit that the way you've been doing it isn't working, and the woman you want to fight with is actually the person you should be listening to.
He lets Raya take the lead. He hates it. You can watch him hate it on the page. His jaw does this thing when he's clenching his teeth, and he rubs the back of his neck when he's trying not to say something he'll regret. But he does it, because the alternative is putting his ego ahead of his daughter's safety, and whatever Rafe's faults are, that's not one of them.
Ellie is his line. Everything else is negotiable.
I've been writing heroes for over two decades now. I've written the brooding ones and the funny ones and the broken ones and the ones who pretend they're fine. Rafe is all of those things in one body, which makes him complicated to write and (I hope) impossible to forget. He's a man who built a fortress and then realized the thing he was trying to protect was already outside the walls.
And yes. He kind of screamed when Martha got out of the terrarium. He calls it "a sound of surprise." (Rafe insisted that I put "screamed" in quotes in the title of this blog. Pushy character!) Ellie has receipts. Raya pressed her lips together very hard and absolutely, categorically did not laugh when told this story.
(She laughed.)
Next time: four boys, two dorm rooms, and a name (Broke to Billionaires) that started as a joke.