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

“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 didn’t know how that could be true when Hof was so much farther 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 lying 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 constantly arguing 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 farther 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?”