Snow and the Seven Men (Seven Ways to Sin 1)

I stared at the man and woman standing before me.

“Hi,” the man said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but we’re looking for a member of our research team who’s gone missing. Is there any chance—”

“I’m here, Hunter,” Sasha said, appearing at my side. I watched as the pair’s eyes flashed in disbelief.

“You’ve been here all along?” Hunter howled. “Are you joking me?” He turned to the woman. “You were right,” he muttered. “She was just sticking it to us.”

I felt an instant dislike toward him. “I wasn’t sticking it to you,” Sasha barked. “I got hurt, and the power was down. I’ve been here for days, waiting out the storm.”

Hunter’s eyes narrowed. “The storm’s been over for hours. What have you been doing?”

“Why don’t you come inside,” Dan suggested.

Funny, I was going to slam the door in their faces. Suddenly, every dark thought I’d had before came flooding back.

“Yeah,” Sasha mumbled, stepping back. “Come in while I grab my things.”

The couple exchanged a long look, and I was instantly wary. What was that about?

“Well, hurry up,” Hunter muttered. “We’ve been looking for you for hours. You should have called.”

“Like she said,” I snapped. “The phones were down.”

“The phones are fine,” Hunter retorted, and we glared at one another.

I didn’t want to be left alone in the entrance with these two, so I hurried back to find Sasha, who was dressing into the only clothes she’d had with her—the ones she’d worn into the cabin. I could see the resignation on her face as she dressed, her lower lip quivering slightly.

“Sasha,” Dan was saying. “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

She raised her head and stared at him and then around the room at all of us. I could see she was seriously considering his words, and my heart leaped with hope. We could work something out if she decided to stay. We could—

“You know there’s nothing I’d like more,” she told us in a hushed voice. Her eyes darted nervously toward the doorway as if she expected her team to be listening. Was she embarrassed? Did she regret what she’d done with us?

She looked conflicted more than anything, and I willed her to look at me, but she seemed to be avoiding my eyes more than anyone else’s.

We knew this was coming. We all knew. We couldn’t make a big production out of it now.

But that was so much easier said than done. We loved her. She belonged with us. How could we let her go?

“Hello?” Hunter yelled. “Can we get going?”

“Is he always that obnoxious?” I snapped, and Sasha smiled wryly.

“Always,” she conceded. Slowly, she lifted her head and walked around the room, pausing to hug us one by one.

“I’ll miss you,” she murmured. “I’ll send you an email.” The words were empty, stupid. There was nothing an email could say that would recapture what we had. “I’ll come and visit,” she promised when she got to me. “You’ll have to send me your itinerary and—”

“Please don’t,” I mumbled, feeling a lump forming in my throat. “I know you’re trying to make this easier, but…just please.”

She nodded and sighed, drawing me toward her. Her lips brushed against the base of my ear, and I exhaled in a tremor. “I love you,” she whispered, and I knew she meant it. But what good did that do really?

With a sickening feeling in my gut, I watched as Sasha picked up her knapsack and ambled toward the doorway, pausing to cast us one last look.

“Thank you for everything,” she breathed before disappearing into the hallway. As if her departure had sucked the air completely out of the room, we all sank back, falling to our respective beds in shock.

The front door closed with a bang, and I heard the sound that had initially caught my attention: the snowmobile starting.

And just as quickly as she’d come into our lives, Sasha had gone, taking a piece of us with her just as Collette had before.

The dream had died, and as I looked at my friends, I could tell they were thinking the same thing as me. There would not be any recovering from this.

At least I knew there wouldn’t be for me.

18

Sasha

Everything about the research unit made my skin crawl. There didn’t seem to be a single place I could feast my eyes which didn’t make my stomach flip with contempt. Hunter, Queenie, the bed, the mere air I was breathing. I’d been back an hour, and I wanted to run screaming from the place and back into the arms of my saviors, but somehow, I managed to keep my composure.

I deserved a damned medal for it, in my opinion.

“You better call your mother,” Queenie barked at me. “She was going to call the police even though I told her you were probably—”