Free Unfiltered & Unsaved by Payge Galvin, Bridgette Luna Page A

more miles to the motel. She’d only noticed it vaguely before, as an annoying neon blinking sign with a cartoon-y man in a nightgown and cap lying down on a mattress; the building had always looked more like a prison than a good night’s sleep, to her.
    She supposed that impression might have actually been correct after all.
    It occurred to her that she should be watching out for Skinner; he knew what her car looked like, after all. She tried to spot him as she drove, but if he was behind her, he was too good at it for her to see him.
    She managed to make it to the Rio Verde Valley Inn’s blue neon sign in record time.
    The parking lot was, as always, about one-third full, mostly of anonymous sedans and a couple of dusty pickups, with one familiar panel van sitting near the far corner. She supposed at least a few people checked in were there to actually sleep, not party, but she suspected that the cars probably changed in the lot at least three times during the night.
    The southwest corner was where Elijah had told her he’d meet her. Hope took the turn into the parking lot and cruised slowly past the lined spaces and rooms with lighted windows. All the curtains were closed. She waited for someone to burst out of a room and charge at her—like Mr. Solomon—but it was quiet out.
    Elijah, ominously, was nowhere to be seen.
    She slowed even more, craning to look around. Shadows moved inside of the occupied rooms—and some of them were obviously occupied with each other, considering the interestingly intertwined silhouettes she saw—but she didn’t see anybody waiting outside.
    If you don’t see me, keep driving, he’d told her. And that was good advice, of course; if he couldn’t get out of his room, or decided it was too big a risk, then she needed to get the hell out of here and make a new start altogether—somewhere Mr. Solomon couldn’t follow, or wouldn’t bother. It meant giving up her life here, but it wasn’t much of a life, really; she could start over somewhere else. She had the resources in the bag sitting on the seat beside her.
    But you said you’d do something good with it, her conscience whispered. What happened to giving it away to a charity, or to people in need? Why can’t you just start handing it out to the homeless? There’s probably a half dozen within a block of this place.
    “I’m doing something good,” she whispered aloud, to silence that increasingly loud voice. “I’m helping Elijah. And his friend.”
    What do you really know about this friend Avita anyway? You didn’t even ask him, did you?
    How do you know Elijah didn’t just lure you here so they could rob you?
    She hadn’t thought of that before, but suddenly it seemed like an imminent, chilling threat. This was the kind of place where screams for help went unanswered, after all, and the police response was slow. Hanging out with a hundred thousand plus in cash at a sketchy motel seemed like a really bad idea.
    She yelped when a form suddenly lunged out of the shadows and into the white glare of her headlights, and she slammed on the brakes more out of instinct than real thought. The thin shriek of tires skidding sounded very loud to her in the silence.
    Elijah looked terrible. They’d avoided bruising his face, but she could tell from his pallor and the tense way he held himself that he was hurt, maybe a lot. He pressed one hand to his side, and beneath it, his shirt leaked red. The other hand he held out, palm out, in a silent plea to stay still.
    Then he leaned forward and rested that palm on the hood of the car, breathing hard.
    Hope didn’t think, she just jammed the car in park and jumped out to grab his arm. His weight sagged against her, and then he managed to find his strength again and pull away. “Help her first.”
    For a second she didn’t know who he was talking about, and then she saw the dark-haired girl huddling in the shadows near the parked panel van. She looked young, very young—sixteen, maybe