Page 76 of Pretty Lies

Everyone had to consider what it meant.

Theo fixed the button on his blazer through the loop and stepped away from Frankie in the chair with a quiet, “I’m sorry, old friend …”

Cory swallowed hard.

Frankie shook his head. “He’s not dead—he’s not.”

“Frankie—”

“He’s not, Theo.”

His uncle nodded once but gave Cory a look that said something entirely different. “Expect your father and brother to come around. When, I can’t say, but they will make their way to you. Tommas, too. He’ll have questions. Before, this was just a blip on his radar. Other people could and were handling it. Now, he’s going to be all over it. Behave, Cory.”

“Yeah, I got it.”

And he did.

What had started as a little issue had become a huge problem.

The Outfit would react accordingly.

Cory watched his uncle take a moment to speak with another man close to the emergency room’s doors that led out to the parking lot. When he was done, Theo held one of the doors open to let a woman in that Cory recognized.

Abriella Rossi.

The boss’s wife.

He couldn’t hear what she said to his uncle, but when Theo pointed to the woman sitting on the row of chairs across from where Frankie sat and Cory stood, he understood well enough what Tommas’s wife was there to do.

“Thank you,” he saw her say.

In their world, friends tended to be other people within the life. Outsiders were harder to trust, and people who didn’t have their entire world smothered by the mafia didn’t understand what it was like to be these people.

He wasn’t surprised that Della’s mother was friends with the Outfit boss’s wife.

Abriella already had her arms opened to hug Chloe Costello when she came into the woman’s view. Cory felt like he was intruding on a moment that wasn’t his business or concern when the two women sunk into a chair, faces wet with tears.

He could have sat down beside Frankie. Instead, he rejoined Della.

She still said nothing. Cory let her have the silence. Soon, he knew, that would change. It was the only thing the mafia did guarantee in this life. Change always came.

Cory wasn’t wrong.

A doctor exited the double doors with the sign that said HOSPITAL STAFF ONLY with a nurse at his side who directed him to the waiting parents of a man Cory knew had been dead before he even left the warehouse.

The sounds J’s mother made when the doctor apologized and confirmed the man’s death? He would never stop hearing.

Chloe’s screams and sobs echoed behind him when he chased Della out of the emergency room. She only needed to look at the doctor’s face while he spoke with her parents to know the truth. She didn’t actually wait to hear it like Cory had.

She kept walking.

Past the doors.

Over cobblestone.

Beyond the parking lot.

Cory kept walking too.