“I’m with the drillers,” I sighed, sorry that I’d dragged them even further into this mess than I already had. “They saved me after Queenie shot me.”
“After Queenie…” she trailed off, and I was terrified that she’d fainted with the information. “Oh my God…”
“Listen, I know this sounds really bad, but they’re good guys. They saved me once already, remember?”
Alex inhaled deeply. “Sasha, I’m scared for you.”
“You don’t need to be,” I promised. “I’m fine.”
“You’re fine.” She was scoffing. “You are not fine. Not in the least. You are the furthest thing from fine that could be.”
“Sasha!” Graham’s voice startled me.
“I have to go,” I told Alex. “Keep in touch, okay but swear you won’t say anything to anyone about where I am.”
“I don’t even know where the hell you are!” Alex screamed.
“Sasha?” Graham knocked on the door, and I called out to him.
“One second!”
“A-are you sharing a room with one of them?” Alex demanded.
“Oh, take your time,” Graham called back, relief in his voice. “I just panicked when you weren’t out here.”
“Oh God, what are you doing?” Alex chided me. “You’re fucking one of the drillers?”
“No,” I replied truthfully.
I’m fucking all of the drillers. Or they’re fucking me.
“I’ll call you later,” I promised again. “Love you.” 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 leaped 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 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 knew it was 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.