Snow and the Seven Men: A Reverse Harem Fairy Tale Romance(22)

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 snarled. “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?”