Page 114 of Brian and Mina's Holiday Hits
I throw the other wine glass, and then I grab the bottle. I’m just getting started.
“Mina!” Brian shouts. “We have to go. Now! We don’t have time for this shit.” As if I’m having a tantrum over something silly. The fucking nerve of this guy.
I seered.
I turn and fling the wine bottle at him. He ducks just in time, and it hits the window behind him. And now I’m on a roll. I throw vases, plates, everything that can shatter that isn’t nailed down.
I grab a steak knife off Clarissa’s napkin… it’s covered in her own blood. I don’t know why she needed a steak knife for chicken primavera, but I don’t care. Brian’s eyes widen like he thinks he’s going to have to defend himself from me. I can’t stab the bastard, but I need to stab something.
I plunge the knife over and over into the wall, screaming. I feel like I’m completely unraveling, my rage becoming a separate living entity with its own soul and backstory.
Brian is behind me a moment later, prying the knife from my hand. He drops it onto the floor. “Shhhh,” he says, holding me in his vise-like grip. He pets my hair like I’m some kind of mental patient, instead of the only one in this house having a normal fucking human reaction to anything.
“Shhhh, Mina. Calm down. Just calm down. It’s okay, just calm down. Just breathe, baby.”
But there’s no time for me to calm down… several doors burst open at once and what I can only assume are members of the rival gangs come flooding into the Nolan estate.
FIFTY-SEVEN
brian
Fuck me.Could my life get any worse right now? I keep Mina behind me. I count twelve men. They’ve seen the damage Mina and I have done. A few of them seem particularly pissed off about the girl. Yeah, I get it, I fucked up. Moving on.
We’d have no chance at all right now if it weren’t for the fact that about half of them are from each criminal organization, and they really want to kill each other more than they seem to want to kill us.
The men assess me and Mina and then assess each other while Mina and I assess them. It’s a lot of assessing.
I see the fight in them. I see the unspoken question. Do they kill us first or do they just start the war they wanted to begin with now that their leaders can’t hold them back? I’m not sure what the right move is. If we start shooting, do they just focus all their efforts on us until we’re no longer the bigger threat?
I’m sure this isn’t all the members of these two groups. But it’s clear now in hindsight that someone suspected something was up and they knew Cole wasn’t actually going out of town. I wonder if some of them knew about the affair all along and wanted to catch them in the act. Maybe their presence here wasmeant to be a sting operation to confront Cole and Clarissa on their betrayal.
These guys may not have even known about the contracts on their bosses’ heads. Why bother putting out a hit when they could just depose their leaders themselves? Why bring in tourists?
That’s a lot of money for something they were perfectly capable of doing on their own. Suddenly I’m not even sure if we’re getting paid for this shit, and that pisses me off. I could have just done irreparable harm to my relationship with Mina, and if there’s no payday on top of that, what exactly is the point?
I wonder where they waited outside and how many listening devices they had planted to know when to come in here. Did they see me shoot the Uber driver? Did they hear the fight between me and Mina? The very idea that these pieces of shit would eavesdrop on such a private moment enrages me.
But maybe the originators of the contracts aren’t even here at all tonight. Maybe the money is already being wired by people who have no idea how this all went sideways.
Maybe there are different factions within the ranks with different goals and ideas on how things should be run around here. It isn’t as though putting a hit out on one of your leaders wouldn’t be frowned upon in this kind of life. Can one ascend the throne if they aren’t next in the line of succession?
Isn’t such a line meant to stop hostile takeovers like this to begin with?
I wonder if our clients are members of either of these two groups at all. Maybe it’s just someone wanting to take advantage of chaos to take over a territory. Maybe these guys were tipped off and this entire thing was a set-up from the start.
“Well, this is interesting,” one of the men finally says, his gaze trained on me. I’m not exactly sure why he felt the need togive me the space for three minutes worth of inner monologue before saying something so uninspiring, but whatever.
“How so?” I ask.
He just looks at me like a big dumb jock which he probably was in high school. I think he didn’t expect to have to explain why walking in here to find me and Mina with their leaders, a teenage girl, and a full string quartet dead is so damn interesting. But, like a math teacher, I like when people show their work.
“Shut the fuck up,” He says.
I just chuckle. Hopefully they fight as bad as they verbally spar. If so, we might actually get out of this alive. I hear a metal click, and I realize Mina just loaded another magazine into her gun. She’s ready.
And I’m always ready.
I’m relieved that she isn’t too fucked up over me shooting the girl to defend herself. I may have lost her, but I can’tloseher.
