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The ringing horror of watching Martin dart in lightning-quick and latch onto Tim's neck doesn't ease with Jon found safe in his flat and her understanding of Martin's reasons.
She swore that they would be safe. She promised them that Martin was nothing like Nikola or Elias, that he would respect their decision if they didn't want him to bite them. Sasha promised frightened, traumatized people freed from a vampire mere hours ago that they would come to no hard and led them straight into Martin's fangs.
Can they even trust Martin's assessment in the first place? Isn't it convenient that Danny and Tim, delivered on a platter, are perfect and nearly? That Danny is perfect, too vulnerable not to take Martin's offer voluntarily, when Tim was the one Martin chose to bite first?
Jon is perfect. Diane is perfect. Elias would be entirely delighted to find his ailing, perfect bloodbag an addition, rather than a replacement. She trusts that. Jon settled into the things she let slip too easily to pretend that Elias didn't corroborate Jon and Martin's mum. That's all she knows for certain, though. That's all she can trust Martin on, now.
Martin was never her friend. Not really. Everything she's ever seen of him, save the bloody smear of his mouth bent over his mother and snapping forward the moment Tim stopped cooperating, has been a lie. A persona to win and hold her trust until he didn't need it anymore. Tim and Jon warned her about vampires with shining facades skinning over the bone and blood horrors, and she still believed that Martin was the exception.
She's starving, didn't manage to eat much of the leftovers Tim left for her in the anxious waiting before her part in the scheme finally arrived, but she can't bring herself to do anything about it. The thought of food makes her throat close up nauseously with the afterimage of the Stokers standing before Martin, forced into an awful choice on her blind recommendation.
Lucky, that she'll be seeing much less of Martin now, her sacrifice halved by the others'. If he even bothers. He'll have her on marionette strings for the rest of her life, but she was never under any illusion about her quality as a bloodbag. With two perfect and one nearly, Martin might not bother with Sasha. Both prospects make her insides curl and shudder with shame. To pretend to the be same as them, when she's the Pied Piper who led them into Martin's clutches- Jon less so, but she answered Martin's texts and teased him about being on the prowl- or to trade their freedom for her own? Which is more sick and shameful?
Not that the choice is up to her.
Martin doesn't have any friends but her. Will he try to pretend nothing happened, like her trust hasn't been violated so much as hammered to pieces, painful at every blow? What if she refuses to cooperate, will he Order her into it?
No, she won't let it come to that. Sasha can't be the one to empty Martin's social life knowing that he's capable of so much worse than she thought. He's had a crush on Jon since day one; Sasha can't protect the others from much by playing Martin's BFF, but if the pain and humiliation of forced friendship and romance is in her power to prevent she'll play it to the hilt.
She crawls into bed and curls around her aching stomach. She spent weeks dreaming up contingencies for Nikola as she drifted off, but now she can't even split hairs between a six or eight week interval, for herself or any of the others. Or Martin will just feed twice as often as he has been, every single week, and they'll all still see him once a month.
The Stokers could have made a go of it, if she hadn't insisted. They'd have all her notes and knowledge, a stake in Tim's pocket when he returned to work just in case. She doesn't know how the arithmetic changes, with martin and the certainty- is it?- of how great their danger is added to the equation.
Tim told her, in stolen moments when he was sure Jon wouldn't- couldn't- overhear, how terrified Jon looked faced with Elias. They'd agreed that they would weigh the risks of getting Jon away from Martin (if they had to, and she'd been so sure that she could chew him out for how he handled Jon and that would never be necessary) now or after his contract ran out, or killing Elias right away just to banish Jon's nightmare once and for all. She thought he knew that they weren't going to just abandon him- but she thought a lot of things.
Jon wasn't surprised by anything but being treated with the barest minimum of kindness and Martin's carelessness in thinking he had escaped out the window. Is he right? Was it all a setup, the Stokers' fate sealed the moment they knocked on the door? She doesn't know. She doesn't know.
Jon said Martin is better than Elias. He doesn't seem to be surprised by how spectacularly wrong Sasha turned out to be, but she'll have to check anyway. If Jon's opinion has changed in light of what happened, that changes everything. It's an opinion she owes it to him to ask, and to the Stokers to alert them to.
Not tonight, though. Or tomorrow; it's late enough she'd call in if she hadn't already taken it off as a buffer. The one contingency that's actually going to help anyone.
Tonight, this morning, she just curls up and lets herself mourn the friendship she thought she had.