Unfiltered & Unsaved by Payge Galvin, Bridgette Luna

going to beat him. “Wait,” she said, and fumbled with her backpack. “E.J.—what if you went back to them with money?”
    “What do you mean? Your cash? It won’t buy me out of anything.”
    “Maybe this will.” She took a deep breath, unzipped the backpack, and yanked out a thick stack of bills. She thrust it at him. “Take it.”
    For a frozen second he just stared at the cash. Its well-worn edges riffled in the breeze, and then he looked up into her face again. “What the hell , Hope?”
    “Take it! Just—”
    “Where did you get this?”
    “Doesn’t matter. Just take it, if it’ll help you.”
    “Jesus Christ, I can’t take that to Solomon. If I did, he’d know—” He looked down at the backpack, and she saw a physical flinch go through him. “He’d know there was more where that came from. He’s seen you with me. It wouldn’t take them long to track you down, and I can’t—”
    “Don’t be stupid. Just take it. “ She saw the big, bulky shape of Elijah’s pursuer—his jailor, she supposed—come around the side of the building and look up at the emergency exit stairs. He turned in a slow circle, and then he focused on the parking lot, exactly where they were hiding. “There’s no time, you have to take it. Please!”
    He shook his head and peeled off four bills to stick in his pocket, then thrust the rest back into her hands. “For God’s sake, take that somewhere safe, and crawl in after it,” he said. “I’ll tell them I ripped you off for all the money you had. I hope that it’s enough to keep them from checking.” He hesitated for a second. He wasn’t looking at her. “I guess this is goodbye. Wish it could have been different.”
    He kissed her again, a quick, warm thing that tasted of longing and a bitter note of fear, and then he was turning before she could reach out to keep him. He walked straight out into the open, and headed for the bald bruiser, who watched him approach with what was unmistakably an angry glower. They met a football field’s length from her, but she still saw the punch that the man drove into Elijah’s stomach—a real, serious, do-some-damage blow, and E.J. bent at the waist and staggered, then collapsed to one knee. The man didn’t give him any time to recover; he hauled Elijah up to his feet and pushed him at a stumbling, erratic walk back around the corner of the building.
    Hope stood frozen, watching him go, and she couldn’t think what to do. Running after him was stupid; at worst, she’d just get E.J. hurt worse, and she couldn’t get him away; even if she did, she knew he was thinking about his friends in that van. The ones who would suffer for what he did wrong.
    She had a lot of money, and she had no idea how to use it. All she wanted to do with it—all she had ever wanted to do, from the first moment those strangers in the coffee shop had put it into her hands—was to do something good. Something clean. Make it all mean something.
    You have to call the police and tell them about Elijah. It was, on some level, her default answer to things, but she’d made the decision not to call the police about the killing in the coffee shop. It all flashed back on her in that moment, as real as if she was sitting in The Coffee Cave, trying to concentrate on her Bible verses while the (surprisingly great) musician on stage strummed guitar and sang, and two drunk girls banged loudly on the bathroom door, and a man at the counter grabbed the barista’s arm. She smelled the warm, thick scent of coffee, felt the old wood of the table under her fingertips, heard the sharp, alarmed scream from Sugar as the man dragged her over the counter and punched her.
    Heard the crack of the shot as Jess fired a pistol before the man could fire his own gun.
    Then blood, and the smell of burned powder. The smell of death.
    Her heart was racing. She sagged against the SUV, blindly staring after Elijah, and tried to breathe through the crushing sense of panic. The