But right now, that damp chill was making her deeply uncomfortable.
After a while, the innkeeper—a woman who’d been loudly arguing on the phone—finally hung up.
With a toothpick clamped between her teeth, she looked Stella and Joshua up and down, sizing them up.
“Looking for a room?”
Stella nodded. “We’d like two rooms, please.”
The woman’s tone was frosty. “That’ll be two hundred for both.”
“Alright.”
“Passports, please. I need to check you in.”
Stella’s voice was soft. “We… accidentally lost our passports. Is there any way you could make an exception?”
The woman’s eyelids flicked up. She glanced at them again, as if something had occurred to her, then let out a short, derisive laugh.
“Rooms are four hundred apiece now. Four hundred deposit as well. Eight hundred total.”
Stella didn’t bother to argue about the sudden price hike. She just nodded.
“That’s fine.”
After handing over the money, they followed the innkeeper up the stairs as she jingled the keys.
Three flights up, she opened the door to a room and flicked on the lights.
“This is your room.”
It was a cramped double room, barely three hundred square feet. Still, the essentials were all there, and it looked reasonably clean.
Stella, though, frowned.
“We asked for two rooms.”
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