Page 121 of Locked and Loaded

Thank you. For finding her. For keeping your promise. For being the one person who didn't let me down.

Dragan gave the small, nearly imperceptible nod. If she hadn't been looking directly at him, she would have missed it.

He understood.

Then, without a word, he turned away. His footsteps were soft on the stone as he walked back toward the hotel, and he didn't look back. He didn't need to. He'd done what he came to do, and now it was her turn.

Lennox pulled Chloe closer, closed her eyes, and let the Mediterranean night wrap around both of them. The sirens had stopped. The shouting had faded. Somewhere inside the hotel, people were cleaning up the wreckage of an operation that had gone off the rails and somehow, impossibly, still ended here. Two sisters on a terrace. One safe. One whole again.

"I've got you," Lennox whispered into her sister's hair. "I've got you, and I'm never letting go."

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

The morning was too bright for a goodbye. Lennox stood at the edge of the villa's courtyard, her duffel bag slung over one shoulder. Chloe was already inside the car, her forehead pressed against the window, her eyes closed. She'd been sleeping in fragments, catching minutes here and there like she was afraid that if she closed her eyes for too long she'd wake up somewhere else. She’d slept in Lennox’s bed, and Lennox hadn’t slept a wink, too busy watching over her baby sister and thanking the heavens that Chloe was safe.

Angelo was loading their bags into the trunk. The same Angelo who had picked them up at the airfield what felt like a lifetime ago, efficient and polite and pretending not to notice that everything had changed.

Dragan stood near the villa's entrance, his shoulder against the stone archway, his hands in his pockets. He'd come down to see them off, which had surprised her. She'd half expected him to stay in the office, watching through the warped old glass like he'd done the night before. But here he was, in the courtyard, in the sunlight, waiting.

She walked toward him because not walking toward him would have been worse.

"Thank you," she said. The words felt inadequate before they'd even left her mouth. She'd been awake half the night trying to find better ones and hadn't. "For everything. For Chloe. For what you did at the gala. For not letting me..."

She stopped. Didn't know how to finish.

"I didn't do it alone," he said. "Fontaine's people. Valardi. Mitch and Alex, Logan and Lacy, Hawk. It took all of us."

"But you promised." She looked up at him, squinting against the morning light. "Back in the desert. You said you'd find her. And you did."

He held her gaze for a long moment. She waited for him to say something, to give her an opening, to make this easier. He didn't.

"Maybe… Maybe I could visit you," she said, and her voice sounded strange to her own ears. Bright and false, like someone making small talk at a party. "In New York. When things settle down. When Chloe's... when things settle down."

"I'm not going back to New York."

The words hit hard. It had never occurred to her that he wouldn’t be where she could find him. "What do you mean?"

"I'm taking some time. Going back to the Sahara for a while." His voice was steady, the same controlled tone he used when he was delivering news he'd already made peace with. “I need some downtime.”

She stared at him. The Sahara. He was going back to Hassan’s encampment, to the place where they'd fought and kissed and fallen into something neither of them had named, and he was going alone.

"You're leaving."

"I'm taking some time."

"That's the same thing."

His jaw tightened. "It's not the same thing."

"Then what is it?" She heard her voice rising and pulled it back, forced it down. Chloe was in the car. Chloe was asleep. Chloe didn't need to wake up to her sister shouting at the man who had saved her life. "You're going to the desert. I'm going back to the States. When exactly are we supposed to..."

She couldn't finish the sentence. She didn't know how to finish it. What were they supposed to? Talk? Figure things out? Find out if whatever had happened between them in the tent was real or just two people clinging to each other in the middle of a storm?

"I don't know," he said.

The honesty of his response hit her harder than a lie would have. He wasn't making promises he couldn't keep. He wasn't giving her a story to make this easier. He was just standing there, waiting for her to decide what she wanted, and she was standing there with her duffel bag and her sleeping sister and a throat so tight she could barely breathe.

She had so much to say.