Page 26 of Cosmo

“Exactly,” he said as if Haze had made Mims’s point for him.

“Okay, okay,” Goldie said, waving over the papers. “Who won tonight?”

“Is this a contest?” Liam asked.

Murphy came across to the table with a tray of drinks. “Everything is a contest with this crew, Cosmo. Everything.”

“Speaking of Cosmos, I didn’t make even one of those tonight.”

Everyone laughed until Abs bragged, “Anyone who’s a regular here knows to come to me. That is my specialty.”

“Well, then, shouldn’t that be your name?”

Goldie answered for him. “He says red makes his face too pink, and you can see he likes it milky white. He had the option of red or green, jumped on green and named himself Absinthe.”

“You got to name yourself?” Cosmo asked, but stared at Murphy with his brows high.

“You had the option, but you just took Cosmo because I said it. Gotta be more assertive to get ahead around here, Cosmo.”

While they all laughed, Cosmo laughed with them. It felt good.

Just then, however, Tally, Murphy’s sister, came into the room from the back. They all greeted her warmly, but she seemed in a hurry. Still, she stopped and set her eyes on Cosmo, smiling broader, then patting him on the shoulder. To the room, she asked, “Can I steal Mims and Murphy, please?”

“I don’t want to know what that threesome looks like,” Abs teased.

“That’s just all kinds of wrong, Abs,” Goldie scolded.

As the two left with her, Hippy mused, “Wonder what’s going on with them?”

Goldie threw him a scathing look that Cosmo caught, and Hippy hushed immediately. Cosmo feared it had something to do with him…

Chapter Eight

Once Murphy was inthe secret room, the bookcase/door closed behind him, he demanded of his sister, “What the hell was that? Why didn’t you tell him to his face we were going to talk shit about him?”

“I’m sorry, but I came down here to see if anything had come up from Mims’s search and what I found…God, Connor, it’s horrible.”

Tally rarely called him by his given name, always using Murphy like everyone else did. His anger quelling instantly, he whispered, “That bad?”

“Mims, sweetheart, can you show him? I don’t think I can look at it again.”

“Sure, Mama,” he said, then hurried into the computer room and Murphy heard him gasping loudly. “What the fuck?”

He rushed into the room with Mims and sat in the metal chair while staring at the screen. “What is this?”

“I found his father’s name and searched it while I was doing one on Cosmo.”

The screen was filled with the front page of a newspaper, and the picture on that front page was a small boy with a tear-streaked face under the headline,Boy Walks into Home to Find Mother and Siblings Dead.

“Is that…?”

“The family’s only surviving child, eight, walked into his home Saturday morning to find his mother and siblings dead in the living room of the family’s home. Early reports are that the mother, Elizabeth MacManus, 32, mother of five, may have poisoned her children while the surviving child and his father, Jonah MacManus, were out running an errand,” Mims read.

Tally could be heard quietly sobbing in the next room, and Murphy was just about to join her. “Well, no wonder why he wants nothing to do with family.”

“Huh?”

“My friend let me know that. It’s why he ran from or was kicked out of all the foster homes he was sent to.”

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