Page 120 of Locked and Loaded

"Oh my God!"

Everything inside her shattered. She ran. She didn't remember crossing the terrace. One second, they were twenty feet apart, and the next she had Chloe crushed against her chest, her arms locked around her sister's back, her face buried in the tangled mess of blonde hair that smelled like salt water and diesel fuel and something underneath that was still, impossibly, Chloe.

Her voice broke. She couldn't hold it together. She'd been holding it together for three months, for three months of dead ends and false leads and the slow erosion of hope, and now it was all coming apart at once.

"Oh my God. Chloe? Chloe!"

"I'm sorry." Chloe's voice was muffled against her shoulder. Her arms had come up around Lennox's back, tentative at first, like she wasn't sure she was allowed to touch anyone anymore. "I'm so sorry."

"No." Lennox pulled back just enough to cup her sister's face in both hands. The cheekbones were too sharp. The skin was too pale. But the eyes, the gray-green eyes that had looked up at her from a crib and across a dinner table and through a thousand arguments about borrowed clothes and missed curfews, those eyes were Chloe's. "Don't you dare apologize. Don't you dare."

"But I⁠—”

"Don't."

Tears ran down Lennox’s face. She didn't know when they'd started. She didn't care. She ran her thumbs across Chloe's cheekbones, wiping at the grime and the salt and the evidence of things she wasn't ready to think about yet.

"I thought you were dead," she said. "I thought... For weeks I thought..."

"I know." Chloe's voice was barely a whisper.

"You idiot." A laugh escaped between the sobs, wet and ragged and completely involuntary. "You absolute idiot."

"I know."

"I looked everywhere. Everywhere. I never stopped. I never..."

"I know."

"I thought I'd never see you again."

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

Lennox pulled her back in. Harder this time. She wrapped her arms around Chloe's shoulders and held on like her sister was a life preserver, and she'd been drowning for weeks. She could feel Chloe's ribs through the borrowed shirt, every one of them, and the knowledge of what those bones meant made her want to find this Helen person and hurt her until she understood what it felt like to have something taken from her.

But that could wait. Right now, there was only Chloe. Chloe's heartbeat against her chest. Chloe's breath on her neck. Chloe's fingers clutching the back of her dress like she was terrified Lennox would disappear if she let go.

Over Chloe's shoulder, Lennox's eyes found Dragan.

He hadn't moved. He was still standing a few yards back, his hands loose at his sides. Hawk and Ryker had melted away at some point. Marco too. It was just Dragan now, alone at the edge of the terrace, watching the reunion with an expression she'd never seen on his face before.

Not satisfaction. He wasn't congratulating himself.

Relief. Quiet, bone-deep relief, the kind that came from carrying a weight for so long you'd forgotten what it felt like to stand up straight. His brown eyes were soft in a way she hadn't known they could be, and his jaw was slightly unclenched, and he was looking at her and Chloe like they were the answer to a question he'd stopped letting himself ask.

He'd done it.

He'd kept his promise.

We'll find Chloe.

And he had. He'd walked into a room full of monsters and come out the other side with her sister. He'd done the impossible, and he'd done it without fanfare, without claiming credit, without making it about him. He'd simply handed Chloe back and stepped away so she could have the moment.

She held his gaze across the terrace. She couldn't speak. Couldn't even begin to find words big enough for what she was feeling. Gratitude wasn't the right word. Relief wasn't either. It was something bigger than both of those, something she'd been too scared to name even when she'd felt it taking root in her chest.

So she did the only thing she could.

She smiled through her tears. Not a polite smile. Not even a happy one, not yet. It was raw and wet and completely unguarded, and it said everything she couldn't put into words.