Page 74 of Pretty Lies

It was already too late for J.

“Cory, stop! Stop it!”

Probably too late for Jennika, too.

He didn’t speak. Cory just did his job. He got her out, and he kept Della safe. Even when she sobbed, begging him again to help, and he had to physically lift her up to carry her through the exit door. The rest wasn’t on his hands, and yet, it felt like it was.

“My brother. My brother … my brother …”

She kept saying it.

Cory wouldn’t soon forget it.

•••

“I couldn’t get an update from the nurses on Jennika,” Cory said to Della.

She said nothing.

Didn’t even look his way.

He sighed. “Not family, and all.”

Although from what he understood, Della’s friend had somehow managed to avoid any gunshot wounds and wasn’t in the warehouse by the time the rest of the crew showed up shortly after the attack and subsequent robbery happened. They’d found her passed out in the back of the warehouse with a busted mouth and a bad gash on her forehead.

It all made Cory wonder …

The crew wasn’t in—had the three of them not been there, would the end result still have been the same?

“She doesn’t have family,” Della said, her words coming out in monotone and her lips barely moving at all. “We are her family. Her dad died a month after we graduated high school. Her mom was never around. She doesn’t have anyone. It’s just us.”

Well, Cory supposed that explained a lot about why Jennika and Della seemed so close.

“I’ll try again in a bit,” he said. “Maybe a few hundred dollars into the right hand will get us the information we want.”

It was not by accident that whenever something bad happened out on the streets, and it involved the mafia, their people tended to gather. And because violence was almost always followed by a visit to an emergency room—or a surgeon on their payroll, if possible—Cory had spent more time in hospitals than he wanted to admit.

White, sterile walls. Floors that made shoes squeak. The smell.

All things that instantly brought a hundred memories rushing to the surface that he would much rather forget. He could still feel the backs of hard chairs biting into his shoulders, the sleeplessness that weighed down his eyes even though he wanted nothing more than to stay awake, and then horrible news that always came at the very end.

Nothing good happened in hospitals. Not like this.

“Do you want a drink of water or some—”

Della looked away from the large windows overlooking the emergency room’s parking lot. He didn’t like what he found staring back at him when she met his gaze. She wasn’t mad—earlier, she’d even told him she understood he had just been doing his job. Now, though?

There was nothing in her eyes. Those dark brown orbs just looked numb.

Cory knew that feeling well, and it was hard to hide. All she gave him was a quick shake of her head before she looked back at the rest of the room and the people who had gathered.

So far.

About twenty, or so.

Della and J’s parents.

The Capo—Georgie—that J had been working for. Some of the guys from the crew who showed up on time but only to find the warehouse was in flames.