Chapter Thirty

Nina

Augh. My head. My feet. My pussy.

Everything was so sore.

What happened to me last night?

My eyelids cracked opened, and the motel room around us made several details fall back into place. Oh, that’s right. The darkness that blanketed all of Montclair. The sudden snowstorm. Running through the streets. Mr. Gilligan and Ms. Ginger at a motel called, simply, L:MOTEL.

The lamps were all still lit. Why would we sleep with the lights on?

Oh, that’s right.

The sticky sensation on the inside of my thighs and the happy twinge in my ragged pussy brought all that back, too. We’d passed out in our rumpled clothes.

I gave my armpit a tentative sniff and crinkled my face. Blugh.

The thick drapes were still drawn to a close, and one thin tendril of grainy gray light filtered through. Eli’s soft, steady snore against the back of my neck let me know that he was still deeply asleep, too.

A little smile tickled at the corner of my lip.

He told me that he was in love with me last night.

I didn’t say it first this time. He said it first. He said that I was his girlfriend, too.

I knew that we were in the middle of a vigilante mission, and that the stakes were high. But, at the same time, I had a little tingle in my chest. At the same time, I felt like I was back in high school, finding out that the quarterback of the football team was going to ask me to prom.

I traced my manicured fingertips over Eli’s corded, tattooed arm.

Okay, he wasn’t exactly a prom king, but he could convince me to ditch prom on the back of his motorcycle.

Moving slowly so that I wouldn’t disturb Eli, I slithered off the motel mattress and took stock of myself in the mirror. I wasn’t wearing any makeup or jewelry and my hair was an untamed wilderness, so my face looked like someone else’s to me. My sweater and my pants were wrinkled and stained with sweat, among other scents. I wouldn’t go out into public wearing this, even if a band of Freaks broke into this motel room right now and tried to drag me out.

Peeling off the old clothes and wrapping a bathrobe around myself, I called down to the front desk and asked, in a whisper, if there was a laundromat here where I could wash a load of clothes. “Right next to the ice machine,” he answered, sounding like he was chewing potato chips at the same time. I grabbed the electronic keycard and slid on my trainers to hobble with stinging, screaming feet toward the laundromat. I dumped my clothes inside, paid a quarter for a packet of dry soap and another three quarters for the hot water in the machine, and slammed the lid down. It latched and immediately began to swirl and rock.

“It’s important to always choose the absolute best brands in regards to one’s own possessions, from the light fixtures to the soap,” Dad had explained to me often during my teen years. “Every little thing counts.”

Sorry to disappoint you, Dad. I crept out of the laundromat again. It was probably going to ruin my clothes, but maybe I would become the kind of woman who could handle that—if I no longer felt crushed by the constant pressure to be perfect-looking.

Back at the motel room, Eli was still sleeping. Good. He needed sleep. He fucking carried me half the way here last night.

I pulled my laptop out of his knapsack and opened it, logging into the free Wi-Fi and hunting for those files on my Cloud account. Now that the snow had stopped, and the signal was clear, we should have been able to see…

Yes! There they were. Several accounting files all lined up pretty in a row. I was sure that some of this was federal record, like tax returns, and some of it was private code to cross-reference and unearth the true meaning behind the files. It wouldn’t take long to figure this all out, but I couldn’t be the one to do it. I didn’t have any authority. Someone else needed to get these, and we had them. It was almost over! All we needed to do was pass them to the right people. No one would get hurt, and Dad would be exposed for what he was. He would get what he deserved.

I glanced over at Eli, still breathing deeply in and out, face pressed into the pillow. There was a damp spot next to his mouth where drool had fallen. I smiled fondly down at him.

But at the same time, I wanted to take these files to the police.

Eli told me once that the police in this city were useless, but that doesn’t even make sense to me. There are so many police officers at the department, and there’s oversight. Sure, some cops must be crooked, but you can’t have an entirely crooked crew. Someone had to help us. There was no way that Dad had even infiltrated the chief, and Eli could be paranoid.

An hour later, my clothes were washed and dried, and I took my laptop to the “business center.” The business center was a corner of the front lobby with a Windows computer from the early 2000s, an equally massive, prehistoric printer, and a fax machine. But it would do. I plugged my laptop up to the printer and several files came scrolling out on warm, fresh paper.

I took my laptop back to the motel room and left it on the desk.

Deep down, I was relieved that Eli was still asleep. Deep down, I knew he wouldn’t approve of my venture to the Hinton City Police Department, but I wanted to be sly. I could slip there in a cab, pass the police the files, and slip back with Eli never knowing. I’d be back in half an hour.

Eli snored softly in agreement. I told myself his tendency to sleep deeply was god’s way of giving me his blessing, and I hugged the files to my chest. I called for an Uber with my cell phone, and I put Eli’s leather riding jacket back on. I checked the app. The man was supposed to be driving a silver Honda, and I directed him to pull up at the front of the motel. I’d meet him there.

But when I hugged those files to my chest and went to stand outside and walk to the lobby, though, a silver Honda was already idling outside of my motel room. Its exhaust pipe blew heavily into the cold air and a shadowy man sat behind the wheel, waiting. He wore a puffy winter coat and what looked like a wool cap.

I furrowed my brow. How did he—? How did he know where I was?

But there was definitely an Uber sticker on his back windshield. This was the guy.

And maybe, deep down, Eli’s paranoia was leeching into me too. But not everyone could possibly be a Freak. There was no way that an Uber driver affiliated with my father knew that I would need a ride right now. There was no way that he could predetermine that I would select him as my driver.

The icy fingers coiled around my chest slowly released their grip. Everything is going to be fine, girl. You’re not even in Montclair anymore. You took all the backstreets to get here, in the dark, in a snowstorm. There’s no way! There’s no way.

I shook off my intuition and opened the back door of the silver Honda, collapsing inside.