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“Mickey got… stabbed.”
Well, there was the throat slashing first. But did that really matter?
Uncle looked to his left. Looked to his right. “My nephew got stabbed.”
“In the stomach,” Evan tacked on.
“And you’re coming here to tell me this.” Uncle pointed to the floor at his feet again. “To this club.”
Evan glanced around at all the other strangers in the VIP section. The fact that they were drinking and laughing and sexing it up in the loud music was a kind of privacy veil. But his uncle would have found a way to humiliate him even if they’d been on family turf.
“Huh?” Uncle said as he cupped his ear and leaned forward. “I didn’t hear you.”
“?’Course I’m here to tell you. You’re gonna wanna do something about it. I mean, he’s… your nephew.”
“This guy.” Uncle shook his head at the other cousins. “Can you believe my nephew.”
There was some kind of grumble in response from all the man’s people. And then… nothing. No one, even Uncle, said nothing.
“I don’t understand.” Evan swiped his hand across his eyes again. “You’re not gonna let that guy get away with it. Are you?”
Uncle rose to his feet, pulling the two halves of his finely tailored jacket together without buttoning them. “You dumb sonofabitch. You come here, expecting me to pat your fucking ass. You want a fuckingreward? For watching my nephew die? Get the fuck outta here.” Uncle jabbed two fingers into the meat of Evan’s pec. “You saw it? Why didn’tyoutake care of the problem. Where’s the head of the asshole who took one of us, huh?”
Each demand was punctuated with another punch of those fingers.
As his eyes stung, Evan mumbled, “I don’t… understand.”
“You’re a fucking pussy. You shoulda done something when it happened, but you ran, didn’t you, you little fuck. You saw the blood and wet your fucking pants. Jesus Christ, my sister should be alive to see this. Her fucking baby boy, looking for a pat on his back and a goddamn jerk-off ’cuz he saw his cousin get dead and did nothin’ about it.” Uncle thrust his jaw forward. “Get the fuck outta my sight. Before I decide to do something aboutyou.”
Evan stumbled away, tripping over the feet of the lieutenants, hearing the curses of the other men, the real men, who had his uncle’s respect. As he scrambled up the little set of stairs to get out of the pit, he caught the toe of his snow boot, fell to the hard carpet, and heard laughter.
Pulling himself off the floor, he elbowed his way forward with that mocking sound in his ear, so loud that it drowned out the music, so loud that he was blinded by humiliation… and the next thing he knew, he was back on the sidewalk in front of the club. Shuddering in the cold, he looked up to the sky. He couldn’t see any stars. Whether that was because there were still clouds from the storm or because of all the lights from the streets and the buildings, he wasn’t sure.
More likely, his vision was all fucked up because he was crying.
With a hand that shook, he touched the cheek Mickey had slapped. Then he pictured his mother, withered in her bed, her lips the color of the pale blue light that had fallen from that ceiling onto those couches his uncle and cousins were on, all those men so far above him, even though they had been sitting down.
Finally… he remembered Mickey jerking as that knife had been driven into him—
Evan clapped a hand over his mouth to keep from throwing up.
Laughter brought his head around. A group of men his age were striding toward him, and they were dressed in club clothes, their suits not as slick as his family’s, but way better than the jeans and ski jacket he was wearing. The fact that they had deliberately groomed their beards into shadows on their jaws and had the same longish hair made it seem like they were a branded set, something off the shelf that came in a charismatic six-pack, regardless of their differences in ethnicities.
A family by choice.
He didn’t even have that.
As they passed him, the decision he had been putting off gelled inside his queasy gut, and he took out his phone. Going into his DMs, he scrolled up and reread the conversation he had been rereading for two weeks, at least. And with every line that he’d already memorized, he realized a precipice had been built. Word by word, the cliff had been constructed, and now, it appeared, he was standing on the lip of the great drop-off, staring into an abyss, the mysteries of which seemed safer and more comforting than the world he was living in. The world… he had been born into.
He knew he’d decided to jump when the shaking stopped: His hands were perfectly steady as he composed a text, and he didn’t read it through twice, which was what he usually did when something mattered.
The response was immediate.
Evan put his phone back in his pocket and wiped his eyes.
Then he squeezed his lids shut, held his breath, and ran right out into traffic.
CHAPTER TEN
