I hung up the phone and rose to open the door.
“You okay?” he asked and I nodded, smiling warmly.
“I’m fine. It was just Alex. She was worried about me.”
“Well come back to bed,” he said, grabbing me around the waist. I saw Bash slowly opening one eye and I beamed at them.
“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be,” I promised.
* * *
I hadn’t entirely fallen asleep when the phone rang again but this time it was almost four o’clock in the morning.
Once more, I was entangled in a stock of warm bodies and I considered ignoring Alex but when she wouldn’t stop calling, I was forced to get up and answer.
“Yes?” I breathed pleasantly.
“You need to get the hell out of there. Right now!”
“Alex,” I moaned. “I told you, I’m totally—”
“You’re not!”
I hated that I’d told her the truth. She wasn’t going to relax until she had me back in the States but there was no way I was going anywhere without my boys.
“Alex,” I sighed. “I love you like a sister but—”
“They work for Mirror, Mirror.”
I froze.
“Who does?”
“Your new friends,” she hissed and I looked at the pile of sleeping men. “They’re under contract with Mirror, Mirror.”
“No way,” I breathed, retreating into the bathroom with my eyes trained on them as I moved. “They’re drillers. I’ve seen their equipment.”
“I can email you their contract,” she growled. “Seven Drawers LTD, right? That’s the name of the company?”
My heart leapt into my throat.
“Wh-what could they possibly be doing for Mirror, Mirror?” I gasped, trying to reconcile what I’d been told.
“I guess that’s something you need to ask them yourself,” Alex growled. “But I would highly recommend you get out of there, considering their employer already shot at you.”
No, none of this made any sense. Why would they lie to me? They loved me, I knew they did.
“Are you still there?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Please tell me you can get out of there,” Alex begged me and I knew she wasn’t blowing smoke at me. Her information was sound or she wouldn’t be telling me. No one wanted me safe more than Alex.
“I’ll figure out a way,” I murmured.
“Sasha, there is no giving the benefit of the doubt in this case. You need to go before something terrible happens.”
Why didn’t they just kill me? Was any of this real?
Humiliation and fear flooded me in a tsunami.
I’d been played by the seven men I’d trusted to protect me.
“I’m going,” I told her through clenched teeth. “I’ll call you in ten minutes when I’m out.”
24
Graham
I could feel a change in the atmosphere when I woke up but it took me a minute to figure out what it was that had shifted. Call it an intuition but I’d always been one of those people who knew what kind of day it was going to be, based on the way I’d wake up in the morning.
Some people might call me fatalistic but I know it’s a gift.
It was only me, Harry and Stevie in the room when I lifted my head off the pillow, really nothing out of the ordinary but as the sleepiness cleared out of my vision, I just knew…
“Where is everyone?” I yawned.
My friends eyed me with mild surprise as if they had forgotten I was there.
“Seth and Jimmy went to their rooms,” Harry replied. “Dan muttered something about food. Bash…I dunno.”
I sat up and looked around again.
“And Sasha?” I asked. “Where is she?”
The men exchanged a look as if the question hadn’t even occurred to them until that moment.
“Uh…with Bash maybe?”
A trigger of alarm sounded in my head and I rose from the bed to pad across the floor to the bathroom.
It was empty.
“Did anyone think to get her new number?” I asked aloud but again, I was met with shrugs.
“Not really,” Harry replied, slipping his t-shirt on over his ripped body. “I mean, it wasn’t really a matter of urgency when she’s going to be with one of us all the time, right?”
“Except she’s not with any of us!” I countered, anxiety mounting in me. I reached for the phone to do a room-to-room call.
“I’m sure she’s with one of the others,” Stevie told me, shooting Harry an exasperated look. “Stop having a panic attack.”
But I could feel that he was wrong. Inherently, I knew something was off.
Seth mumbled that Sasha wasn’t with him and Jimmy did the same when I dialed their rooms. I had no doubt that they both fell back asleep after I hung up.
Bash was with Dan getting breakfast at the hotel restaurant and neither had seen Sasha that morning.
“She wasn’t there when I woke up,” Bash commented and I nearly exploded with anger. By his own admission, he’d been the first one to wake.
“And you didn’t tell the rest of us?” I fumed. “She’s being hunted by Mirror, Mirror!”
“We’re all being hunted by Mirror, Mirror now that we helped her escape,” Bash replied reasonably. “They wouldn’t just take her. She’s probably getting a massage or something.”
I couldn’t believe the nonchalance, as if they’d already forgotten what had happened in Iceland.
“Put Dan on the phone.”
I could hear Bash mutter something to Dan. When a voice spoke into the phone again, it was Bash, not Dan.
“Never mind,” Bash sighed. “Stay where you are. We’re coming to you.”
* * *
Again, the seven of us were together in the room we’d allotted for Sasha but she was nowhere to be found.
In the time I was waiting for Bash, Dan and the others to come back, I’d called the desk to see if she’d booked an appointment at the spa or if anyone had seen her.
“I do believe she left in the middle of the night, sir,” the concierge kindly explained, her thick Scottish brogue softening her words but the sting of their implication burned into me all the same. “If I had to wager, I would say near the hour of four.”
“Left?” I echoed in disbelief. “How? Was she with anyone?”
“No, sir. She was alone and with one single bag. I did not see nor order a hackney for her, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I hung up the phone without thanking her but I was fueled by shock.
She had left in the middle of the night but not by taxi? How the hell did she get anywhere if not on foot?
I ran to the wardrobe and threw it open.
It was empty.
All of the new clothes we’d purchased for her, the three pairs of boots and two pairs of shoes, gone.
She’d disappeared without a word to any of us.
I was incensed and sick to my stomach. None of it made any sense.
“How could none of you woken? She cleaned out the closet for Christ’s sake! Are you all on drugs?” I howled at my companions, knowing my anger was misplaced.
“Uh, you didn’t wake up either,” Dan reminded me tightly.
“YOU THINK I DON’T KNOW THAT?!” I fumed. There was enough blame and guilt for all of us.
“We need to find her,” I huffed, pacing around the room. “She can’t have gone far without transportation. Maybe her friend Alex knows where she went.”
“Graham, if she wanted us to know where she was, she would have told us,” Dan told me reasonably. “Since she didn’t, it’s safe to assume that Alex isn’t going to help us either.”
“We can’t just stand around and let her fend for herself!” I roared. “How can you guys be so damned stoic about this? Doesn’t she mean anything to anyone but me?”
That caused a charge of furious energy among the others and they all tensed.
“Are you kidding me right now?” Jim sna
rled. “Just because you’re making the most noise doesn’t mean you love her the most! She’s a part of us, all of us.”
“Then we need to find her and fight for her.”
“Graham, be reasonable for once in your goddamned life,” Dan barked. “Can’t you see she was running away from us?”
I stared at him blankly.
“Why? Why would she run from…oh…”
In my worry, I hadn’t even stopped to consider that maybe Sasha had figured it out, that she knew we were employed by the very company that wanted to see her dead.
“She knows who we are,” Dan sighed and I hung my head, shaking it in disbelief.
“This is all your fault!” I spat at Dan. “If we’d told her from the beginning like I said—”
“And when would we have done that, huh, Graham? When she was bleeding from Jim’s bear trap? When she was getting bathed by Bash? Felt up by Harry? When were we supposed to tell her when our contract is protected by an NDA? For all we knew, she was sent to us to spy on us and make sure we were doing our job!”
“We could have told her when we got here!” I cried. “You outvoted me but I knew it was the right thing to do.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” Bash said quietly. “The outcome would have been the same. She would have felt betrayed.”
“But at least if it had come from us, we could have talked it through! Instead—”
“You’re beating a dead horse, Graham.” Harry put his hand on my shoulder to calm me. “You need to be rational.”
“How the fuck do you expect me to be rational when Sasha is out there, alone, without money or contacts and a death warrant?”
I looked at him.
“Well?”
Harry had the decency to look away and I grunted, wrenching my shoulder away from his touch.
“What should we do?” Jim asked but he was talking to Dan, not me.
“We need to go after her,” I answered anyway. “See if we can at least talk to her.”
I met Dan’s eyes.
He was struggling with the right thing to do.
“Dan, she’s alone, wandering around in the cold,” I insisted. “We need to do something!”
Our gazes locked and I silently willed him to give the order. It would have to be an all or nothing approach.
“You know what you have to do,” I told him coldly and he nodded.
“Yes,” he sighed. “Let’s put it to a vote.”
25
Dan
In some ways, it was colder in Scotland in November than Iceland but I don’t know how that could be true when Hof was so much further north.
Maybe it just felt colder since we’d lost Sasha.
We’d been tracking Sasha for a week now. Well, we’d been trying to track Sasha for a week. She’d managed to disappear off the radar completely, not that I was surprised. The woman was intelligent, beautiful and smart. If anyone could figure out how to get away, it was her but at the same time, I thought about her laying in the snow, bleeding from the gunshot wound.
The others were growing disheartened and restless. We knew we were chasing a ghost. There was no way of knowing what direction she’d gone and we were arguing constantly about what way to search.
So far, we’d tried every tactic known to man to find her. We’d split up, pretended to be cops, driven down every road we could find leading away from the Kingsmill and stopped in every shop.
But no one had seen her.
Or if they had, they weren’t saying anything to us, an unlikely group of American men searching for a lone woman.
Nothing the least bit suspicious about that.
We knew she didn’t have her purse or any ID on her and we tried to think of where she might have gone to get some money.
“We can’t stay here forever,” Seth told me on the seventh day and I knew he was right but I also knew that pulling Graham off the search was going to lead to problems.
“Let’s head north for once,” I said, knowing it was futile. Even if she had gone further up into the Highlands, she had a week’s head start on us.
“We don’t even have a decent picture of her,” Graham grumbled as we piled into the van I’d rented and I stifled a sigh. He was right, after all. The only one we had was the one we’d printed from the Mirror, Mirror website and it wasn’t the most flattering one I’d ever seen. You needed to squint to see the blue of her eyes.
“Graham,” I told him as Bash took the wheel. “We’re going to have to call this off soon if we don’t find her.”
He scoffed at me.
“You’ve just been biding your time to say that, haven’t you?”
I bristled.
“Actually,” I snapped back. “I’ve been indulging you for days longer than we should. This may come as a shock to you but we have a life, a business to get back to.”
“Do we?” Harry asked and I whipped my head toward him.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that Mirror, Mirror is not going to be happy when they figure out we helped Sasha escape.”
I eyed him warily.
“So we lost the Mirror, Mirror contract, Harry, big deal. We never even wanted it in the first place, remember? We’re drillers, not babysitters.”
And it was true. We’d only taken on the job with Mirror, Mirror because I’d insisted. My concern about money had always overridden my common sense and this instance was no different.
When we’d been approached, we’d been on contract in Switzerland and the poised, elegant woman from Mirror, Mirror Inc. had offered us an opportunity that sounded too good to be true.
And you know what they say about something that sounds too good to be true, don’t you?
“All you need to do,” she explained. “Is keep an eye on some of my client’s land while we engage in some testing.”
My eyes had narrowed immediately.
“Is this illegal? A grow-op or something?”
Her laughter had filled our ears.
“I assure you, Mr. Appleton, Mirror, Mirror Incorporated is a reputable, public and listed company on the DOW. We don’t engage in illegal activities.”
Still, there had been something that didn’t ring true about the entire thing.
“Why don’t you hire a security team for that?” I’d wanted to know and she’d laughed.
“Because you already have a job out in Hof lined up, don’t you? Ice drilling?”
I recalled how her knowledge about our comings and goings had unnerved me but I’d dismissed it.
“You keep an eye on our properties and you’ll be handsomely rewarded.”
“What is it you’re worried about, exactly?”
“Polar bears?” Jim asked and I’d resisted the urge to smack the back of his head.
“Reporters, mainly,” the woman said. “We’re working with some highly classified materials and it’s always bound to cause some controversy.”
“What’s the catch?” I wanted to know.
“Aside from four hours of daylight in the winter?” she chuckled and I gave her a deadpan stare. I didn’t want to get my hopes up but this cash flow would help us with a lot of things.
“As I just said, the subject matter is highly sensitive. If anyone ever asks what you’re doing in Hof, you simply tell them the truth—you’re there to drill.”
It had made sense then, why they didn’t hire a security team. They didn’t want anyone there to seem out of place. Since we were already headed that way, they just added us to the employee list.
And I had been so taken in by the dollar signs, I ignored the warning signs.
All had gone so well for that first year. I’d almost felt guilty about accepting the wire transfers coming in to our account at Seven Drawers LTD. We didn’t do anything except keep an eye out on the high-tech security system that the company had provided for us, along with the luxury log cabin.
If we hadn’t met Sasha, we would never have known that Mirror, Mi
rror was poisoning the earth.
“Where are we going to go from here?” Jim asked nervously as we made our way north. “We haven’t even talked about that.”
“Why don’t we worry about finding Sasha first and then talk about that,” Graham bit back.
“We’re not going to find Sasha.” The words came from Stevie and I had to admit that they stunned me. He was our resident joker, after all. It was rare to hear him say anything so gloomy.
“You don’t know that!” Graham barked back and I realized that everyone was reaching their breaking point.
It was time to make a decision about what to do.
“We need to go home,” Seth said quietly and without yawning for once. “I’m tired.”
“You’re always tired!” Graham screamed back.
“She knows how to find us…if she ever decides she wants to,” Bash said softly.
“She’s upset!” Graham insisted. “If she doesn’t think we’re looking for her…”
“We need to give her space,” Harry sighed.
Graham stared at him, his face falling as he saw that one by one, we were all throwing in the towel in this search.
“No!” Graham howled. “We voted! We voted and agreed to find her.”
“We agreed to look for her,” Jim corrected and Stevie nodded.
“And we’ve looked everywhere we can.”
Graham shook his head miserably.
“No!” he begged us. “No, just one more day…”
“It won’t make a difference,” I told him tiredly. I knew that it would be “just one more day” ad infinitum. We needed to stop the madness somewhere.
He looked around at us and seemed to see that we had made up our minds.
“I guess there’s no point in voting on this, is there?” he muttered. No one bothered to respond. The answer was already implied.
“Turn the car around, Bash,” I instructed. “We’re going back to Inverness.”
I caught Bash’s gaze in the rear-view and he nodded curtly before doing a U-turn on the A96.
I turned my gaze out toward the Moray Firth and kept my eyes trained there. The heaviness in the car was making it hard to breathe.
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