Page 119 of Locked and Loaded

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Lennox stood alone on the terrace and watched the Mediterranean swallow the last of the emergency lights.

The fire alarm had fallen silent ten minutes ago, but the echo of it continued to ring in her ears. Behind her, the hotel was alive with voices and footsteps and the crackle of police radios, the whole frantic machinery of aftermath. Someone was shouting in Maltese. Someone else was on a phone, repeating coordinates. A woman was crying somewhere inside, the thin, exhausted cry of someone who had used up all her fear and had nothing left but the release.

Lennox ignored all of it.

She couldn't stop staring at the water. The sea was black tonight, moonless, the surface broken only by the distant lights of a yacht rocking gently against the swell. Georgiou's yacht. She'd heard one of the officers say the name, and she'd filed it away the way she filed everything now. Information was currency, information meant survival. The yacht was still out there. The men on it were in custody or dead or somewhere in between, and she didn't know which, nor did she care.

She only knew that somewhere in the chaos of the last hour, everything had changed. She'd won something and lost something, and she couldn't tell which was which. The anger that had been burning in her chest since she’d left the desert had finally petered itself out, and what was left was hollow and cold and very, very tired.

She wrapped her arms around herself and didn't turn around.

Footsteps sounded on the stone behind her. The heavy tread of boots, the softer shuffle of someone trying to be quiet and not quite managing. Male voices, low and rapid, the kind of clipped tactical exchange she'd been listening to on the comms all night.

"...security sweep's complete. Grounds are clear."

"...three in custody. Georgiou's people. The rest scattered when the alarm went off."

"...boat's secure. Marco's team did a full sweep below deck."

Boat.

Lennox frowned at the water. The yacht. They were talking about the yacht. She'd known it was part of the operation, the floating command center where Georgiou ran his empire, but something about the way they'd said boat's secure made her stomach tighten.

She didn't turn around. She couldn't. She'd spent everything she had getting through the gala and the confrontation and the long, terrifying minutes when the fire alarm was screaming, when she held a deadly knife to a man’s neck, and no one knew where anyone was. She didn't have anything left to spend on hope.

"...Marco found..." The unfamiliar voice cut off.

The silence that followed was different from the silence before. Heavier. Charged with something that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. She heard someone shift their weight. Heard breath drawn in and not released. Heard the particular quality of quiet that happened when people were looking at each other and deciding who was going to say the hard thing.

Then Dragan spoke. "Lennox."

She turned. Not because she wanted to. Because the way he said her name left her no choice. It wasn't urgency. It wasn't the controlled, professional tone he used when he was delivering bad news. It was something she'd never heard in his voice before, something raw and careful and almost afraid. The way you said someone's name when you were holding something fragile, and you needed them to be ready for it.

Dragan stood a few yards away. His tuxedo jacket was gone, his white shirt untucked and smeared with something dark she hoped wasn't blood. Hawk was beside him, the big man's face unreadable. Ryker, on the other side, his eyes red-rimmed in a way that made her chest tighten. And slightly behind them, a man she didn't recognize. Younger. Dark hair. The kind of face that had seen things it was trying to forget. Was that Marco? She seemed to recall that he was part of the Society in some way.

All of them were looking at her.

None of them were speaking.

"What?" The word came out sharper than she intended. Her throat was raw from holding in the fear and sorrow that threatened to choke her. "What is it?"

Nobody answered.

Dragan stepped aside.

The figure standing behind him took one hesitant step forward, and Lennox forgot how to breathe.

The young woman was painfully thin. Her collarbones jutted out above the neckline of a borrowed shirt that hung off her shoulders like a tent. Her blonde hair was long and tangled and dull, the color of something that hadn't seen sunlight in weeks. Bruises mottled the left side of her face, purple fading to yellow at the edges, and her hands were shaking at her sides like she wasn't sure she was allowed to move them.

She looked like a ghost. She looked like someone who had been through something that should have killed her and somehow, impossibly, hadn't.

She looked like⁠—

For one long, terrifying second, Lennox didn't recognize her. Then the young woman's lower lip trembled in a way that Lennox had seen a thousand times before. In the backseat of their father's car. Across the dinner table after she'd been caught sneaking out. On a thousand ordinary days in a life Lennox had thought was over forever.

"Hi, Lenny."