Cowboy didn’t come back for lunch, or dinner, but Sienna woke the next day feeling a little better. She was at least capable of thinking straight for the first time since the night she’d found her mother’s body lying on the floor.

She looked around the room, boxes of stuff she’d grabbed when she’d run piled about the bed. Maybe she should cart them back to the car? They weren’t exactly safe there, but likely safer than in a motel room where more people than just Sienna had a key. Thinking of which, how was she going to pay the bill? The funds she’d found in her mother’s things wouldn’t last long, and Cowboy’s tips weren’t something she could rely on. Time to go speak to the manager. Maybe she could clean the place, too, in return for a cheaper rate. Pulling on sweats, she walked over to the front office, wrinkling her nose at the smell of cigarettes when she opened the door. The walls must have been saturated with it. The desk was unattended, and so she rang the bell. The counter jolted.

“Ow!” The manager crawled out from under the desk. “Little early to be dropping in, isn’t it?”

Sienna couldn’t help but chuckle at the disgruntled look on his face, ruined by the sight of his hair sticking out at all angles. “Hi.”

“Oh, hello there.” The manager was suddenly awake. “You must be Sienna.”

Umm, okay. Had she developed a reputation already? “Yes?”

“You can stay as long as you like. First week’s free, fifteen bucks a day once you get your first paycheck.”

“Seriously?”

“We do that for all employees.” He shrugged. “If they want, I mean.”

Sienna narrowed her eyes. Somehow, she doubted that. Chico had to have put him up to it. She didn’t care. “Thank you, it’s perfect.”

The man’s eyes drooped. “Anything else?”

She hesitated, not wanting to push a good deal. “Umm, could you maybe ask the cleaning staff to give me a heads up before they go in the room? I have some stuff stored there.”

“Sure.” He scratched his cheek. “They’ll call, or find you at the restaurant. Now, if there’s nothing else?”

She backed out the door quickly. “No, it’s all good. Go back to your nap.” He gave her the thumbs-up and disappeared under the desk again before she’d made it out the door.

Now what? It was still early and she wasn’t working until the late evening shift that day. She went back to her room and sat on the edge of the bed, pulling out her cell phone to find the nearest cheap department store. It wasn’t her usual style, but there was no way she was driving back into the city and she needed some more work-suitable clothes. She jotted down the address of a strip mall about sixty miles north. There was also a grocery store and a few other things she needed. Perfect. She jumped in her car and started driving.

The road soon turned straight and monotonous and thoughts of the previous week started rolling through her head. She was still thoroughly pissed at the whole thing, but at least she’d lost the frenzied panic that had accompanied her during the first few days. She hadn’t heard anything from the police, and her cell was still working.

Crap!

Sienna jerked the wheel at the thought, moving quickly to straighten the car before she did the bad guys a favor and took herself out. Could whoever killed her mom track her through her cell? She rolled her eyes. She’d watched too many bad Hollywood movies. She hadn’t heard or seen anything even remotely suspicious since arriving in Foremont—unless you counted the cowboy and his fifty-dollar tips—she was just being paranoid. Still, maybe she’d pick up a new prepaid one today, too, just in case. At least Chico hadn’t made her fill in any paperwork yet. He seemed perfectly content to pay her cash, and she wasn’t going to argue.

As the road grew long in front of her, Sienna’s thoughts swirled. She hadn’t had much energy the last few days to invest any brain power into working out why her mom had been killed. She’d been so busy and frantic running from the who that she hadn’t stopped to find out the why. A slice of pain ran through her, followed by a shiver. Whatever it was, her mom hadn’t deserved what happened to her. She could have been using the fake names precisely because she was scared of something like this happening.

God, Mom. Why did you never say anything to me?

Because she wanted to protect her. That was her mom’s mission in life from as far back as Sienna could remember. It was all she did, but in the end it hadn’t mattered. Now Sienna was on the run, too, and she had no idea what the truth was. Could she risk investigating any further into her mom’s past, or would that just flag her location so she’d have to run again? That was hard to accept. If she ever wanted a life that didn’t involve living out of cheap motels and looking over her shoulder, then she had to start trying to find out what had happened to her mom.

Pulling into the store parking lot, she shook the thought from her mind. She wasn’t going to get anywhere by going over and over the same thing. She needed more details, more information. Problem was, Sienna had no idea where to get it.

So stop torturing yourself until you do!

She wandered through the store, wading through bins of cheap clothing until she found something decent enough that matched the restaurant’s dress code. The trip had sucked away the morning and Sienna’s stomach grumbled as she stood in the checkout line. After the slowest table service she’d ever encountered for lunch and then a slow trawl through the nearby grocery store, the sun was already on the slide down. It had taken longer than she’d thought to find enough snacks she could store in her room. Apparently finding non-perishable foods that she could actually handle preparing, and were healthy enough that they wouldn’t kill her in under a week was a bigger task than she’d realized. By the time she climbed behind the wheel, the setting sun was sending rainbows across the sky and casting more ominous shadows on the flat landscape. She snorted—that was a good analogy of her life right now—glittering rainbows and peace just out of reach and a darkening, unknown future in front of her. Or no future. Sienna shivered and forced herself to shut down her mind and just watch the road as it curved away to the west.

The sky grew darker as she drove back to the truck stop, and the roads were empty. She’d seen several other cars out her way out that morning, but now—nothing. Did everyone in the town go to bed at six or something? Soon after the sun slipped below the horizon, another car appeared behind hers on the road. Headlights reflected in her rearview mirror, blinding her for a few seconds until she flipped it down.

Fucker.

Except of course she couldn’t see anything behind her. Sienna twisted in her seat, looking over her shoulder as long as she could without risking running herself off the road again. The car behind her was a silver sedan, nothing special or different about it except that it was currently accelerating toward her. Fast. She pulled on the wheel, changing lanes, but the sedan slid in behind her again. She pushed her foot to the floor. They sped up, too. Shit. They were tailing her, matching her speed and movements. A tingle of adrenaline ran through her and she pushed down on the gas again. They went faster.

You will not panic!

Her breath came in small gasps as she pushed her mother’s small car to its limits. The sedan kept the pace, but it was hardly struggling as it glided down the highway, inches away from her back bumper.

“Oh, God.”

She was on a long, straight road, nowhere to go, driving over eighty miles an hour, and they were going to hit her.

Were they the same people who had killed her mom? People who could find them hiding under assumed names for decades wouldn’t have any problems killing her and hiding the body. She twisted desperately in her seat, trying to keep an eye on them, but a small twist in the road forced her attention back to the front. She had to slow down, or she’d fly off the road. Dying when her car slammed into one of the pretty rock formations she’d been admiring just days ago wasn’t any more appealing. Closer . . . closer . . . as soon as her foot let up on the gas, the sedan jumped forward, smashing into her bumper, nearly knocking her off the road.

“Shit!” Sienna wrenched at the wheel and managed to right the car, but they were still close. So close, and they weren’t going to stop. Her car jolted again.

I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.

It ran through her head like a mantra, the only thing keeping her sane as the car behind her jerked and then slammed into her again. The words blurred into each other, feeding a frenzy building inside her. God, she was so scared! The words ran over and over in her mind as she stared desperately out along the long, empty stretch of road. There had to be someone out there that could help her. Even the presence of another car might scare them off.

There! A small glimmer appeared on the horizon, a spark, barely on the threshold of her perception. It got closer, gaining in size and speed, until it took over her vision. But she couldn’t hear another car. She couldn’t hear anything else.

She was hallucinating. She had to be. She was lying dead on the side of the road, just like her mom was when Sienna found her.

Sienna tore her gaze away from the glow and dared to let go of the wheel with a single hand. It darted up to move her mirror back into position. The car moved forward again. It was going to happen again. They were both traveling too fast, and her tiny car wouldn’t stand up to a larger impact at this speed.

This was it. The next collision was going to kill her.

The sedan moved up and she shrieked, “No!”

It moved again and Sienna braced herself. It never hit. The sedan surged forward again and she watched in macabre fascination as it bounced off thin air behind her. It lurched forward and then bounced again. She had no fucking clue what was going on, but the driver couldn’t get close to her car. They couldn’t hit her. Laughter bubbled up from inside her. She wasn’t going to die!

Sienna pressed her foot to the floor, praying the car would respond, and it did. The sedan moved toward her one last time before hitting the brakes and swinging around in a vicious circle, peeling off in the opposite direction. It wasn’t until the road was clear behind her for ten minutes and her hands stopped shaking that Sienna realized she’d driven all the way back to the truck stop. She’d heard of people hallucinating when they were facing death, seeing angels and lights or some shit. Was that what had happened? Had she really seen the other car impacting thin air, or had she simply driven fast enough to be back where there were other people and scared them off? She gripped the wheel tightly as her head thumped down, making her jump again as the horn sounded.

She wasn’t going to die.

At least not tonight.