Unfiltered & Unsaved by Payge Galvin, Bridgette Luna Read Free Book Online

have to,” he said again. Underneath that calm there was something else, something she didn’t understand. “Just tell me: is there a back way out of here?”
    “Yes. There’s another door through there,” she said, and nodded toward a shadowed hallway on the other side of the long banks of blinking servers that ran the IT behind the Media Center, and most of the classrooms in the building. It was cold in here, on behalf of the delicate computer parts, and she shivered as he looked at her directly. “It’ll sound an alarm when you push the bar, though. And there are cameras outside the door.”
    “Cameras,” he repeated. “Yeah, of course there are. We probably got caught on them coming in here, didn’t we? So they’ll know it was you who got me inside.”
    “They would anyway. I used my code.” Her voice had gone almost as soft, almost as even as his. “Don’t worry about me. Please don’t do this, Elijah. I know you don’t want to go with him, and I know you don’t want to hurt me.” She knew, even as she said it, that it was true … she could feel the struggle in him, see it in the play of muscles beneath the skin. “I’m already involved, right? Whatever happens. It’s my choice now.”
    He let out a slow breath. He was still holding her injured wrist, but gently now, and his thumb stroked over the forming bruises. “What are you, crazy? You don’t even know me.”
    “That’s true, I don’t.”
    “I already told you I’m basically a con man. Hell, I tried to take your money for magazines that never would have arrived, you know that, right?”
    “I suppose I did. But I wasn’t buying the magazine. I was buying—time with you, I guess.”
    “That’s the con, Hope. I’m selling you the fantasy that you’re going to get to know me, but you won’t. And then you’re out the money. I told you, I’m not who you think I am.”
    She laughed, just a little, and it sounded bitter. “ You don’t know me at all, either. You think I’m one thing, but—” She ran out of words, because it was too big to say, even now. Even here. The tears were burning in her eyes again, and it was the wrong time to break down, no matter how good it would have felt to cry in his arms. He would have put his arms around her, she knew that. He would have given her his shoulder and his shirt would have mopped up her tears, and maybe, just maybe, some of the misery would have finally gone away.
    But she couldn’t cry. Not now. He’d take it the wrong way.
    “Hope, please listen to me,” he said. “I have to go back. It’s not for my stuff. It’s because—the way this works is that if one of us leaves, the others get punished. Their money disappears, food gets withheld. Sometimes worse. I have friends back there, and I can’t abandon them—especially one of them. I wish I could, believe me.”
    “Oh God,” she said. “You can’t be serious. I said it was like slavery but it really is, isn’t it? How bad does it get?”
    For answer, he unbuttoned the collar of his shirt. Then the next button, and the next. Beneath it was smooth skin … and then discoloration.
    The bruising started halfway down his chest, in vivid red blotches; the ones on his stomach were older, blue and green. Hope caught her breath and, without thinking, reached out to put her palm against the injuries, a gentle touch that she meant as sympathy.
    Even that light touch must have hurt him, because he flinched. His eyes closed. In that moment, he looked so much younger than she did. Than she felt. His skin felt as if it was shimmering with heat beneath her palm, and she felt angry for him, and so very sorry. “This is evil,” she said. “Elijah, this is evil what they’re doing to you. You can’t go back. If it was this bad before, what will they do to you now that I made trouble like this?”
    “I can take it,” he said, and pulled his shirt back together with a quick tug. “There’s this other girl in the crew, she’s young.