if the drinking had done anything to dull his reflexes or his body language, it wasn’t apparent. If anything, it seemed to have only emboldened him, to have made him meaner somehow, to have given him courage.
I shivered as I had a flashback to one of my foster fathers, who was a mean drunk.
“Yes,” Colt said. “You are.” He reached down and picked up his uncle’s beer glass and moved it to another table. “Out.” He pointed toward the door.
This infuriated Mick. He stood up and pressed his finger into Colt’s chest. “You little shit,” he said. “I built his fucking club.” He grabbed another drink off a waitress’s passing tray, drained it in one gulp and then threw it to the floor, where it smashed into a million pieces.
I gasped and my hand flew to my mouth.
I looked around for security, but Colt had lost a lot of his security team once he’d cleaned the place out, and now… now there was no one around to help.
The music was still going, but the girl on stage had stopped, and now a crowd was starting to gather around Colt and his uncle, and I got out of my chair and tried to fight my way through.
When I finally got up toward the front, Mick was holding his hands up in surrender.
“Fine,” he said. “Fine. I’ll leave. I just need to get my delivery from the back.”
“The delivery’s been dealt with,” Colt said, his voice steely, his eyes never leaving his uncle’s face.
“What the fuck does that mean?” his uncle sneered.
“It means it’s gone.” Colt said it simply, and I could tell from his tone that he wasn’t scared of his uncle, in fact, he was relishing this. Which made me even more scared, because I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next.
“You little shit,” Mick roared, and he grabbed Colt by his shirt and pulled him close to him, shaking him. “You fucking little shit. I built this fucking place.”
“My father built this place,” Colt said.
“Your father built a shitty little restaurant that no one cared about,” Mick spat. “I’m the one who made this place! I’m the one who moved thousands of pounds of drugs through here, I’m the one who made money off all these little sluts spreading their legs. I’m the one who’s special! Not your pussy ass father or his pussy ass son.”
I watched as Colt smiled, a cold hard smile, and then before I knew it, he escaped from his uncle’s grasp, then hauled back and punched his uncle in the face.
Mick staggered backwards and now the circle of people around them was widening, the regulars starting to hoot and holler. Colt may have cleaned out some of the dirtiness of the club, but it was too soon for a lot of the regulars to have realized this, and they were the kind who were spoiling for a fight.
“You little prick,” Uncle Mick said. He grinned and put a hand to his face, where his bottom lip was bleeding. “You fucking little pussy. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“What I should have done years ago,” Colt said and he was rolling up his sleeves now, and I was yelling his name, but the catcalls of the crowd around us had started to get louder, the men jeering and hollering, and there was no way Colt could hear me.
Colt rushed at his uncle and then I was really screaming, screaming, screaming his name and begging him to stop, but it was swallowed up in the sounds of the crowd.
And then the two of them were fighting, rolling over each other on the floor, the two of them punching and kicking, before springing back to their feet. Colt threw Mick into a table and Mick stood up, stumbling, and then suddenly, there was a glint of something metal in Mick’s hand.
A gun.
He smiled and licked his lip and I saw the murderous glint in his eye.
He was going to kill him.
I screamed Colt’s name again and tried to rush toward him, but someone grabbed me from behind, one of the men, probably thinking they were protecting me from getting hurt, not realizing that the only thing that could hurt me more than a gunshot was someone hurting Colt.
“Yeah,” Mick said, cocking the trigger. “You little shit, you think you’re a big man now, you think you’re so fucking smart.” He spit onto the ground, his spittle black and tinged with blood.
The crowd had quieted