Page 19 of Locked and Loaded

“I imagine Miss Ivanova requires a great deal of attention.”

“She is used to it.”

“And Mr. Rostov?”

The maid opened the front door. “Enjoy the rest of your day, Mr. Maric.”

It was a lovely non-answer, polished smooth enough to pass in a hotel where everyone was trained never to say anything directly. But something had shifted. Not much. Not enough to accuse. Enough to confirm.

She was here for some other reason than to pour the champagne, and she did not like anyone who came asking questions. Dragan might just have put another target on his back.

What the hell was Lennox Crowe involved in?

CHAPTER SEVEN

The golf cart returned him to the main building, and for several minutes Dragan walked as if he had every intention of leaving the property. He crossed the reception area, passed under the archway that led toward the main exit, then veered down one of the garden paths as if he had decided to admire the grounds. No one stopped him. No one visibly followed him either, which meant the people watching were better than that or less interested in him than he suspected.

The gardens were quieter away from the main entrance. Narrow tiled paths curved between orange trees and high walls heavy with flowering vines. Water moved somewhere nearby, the faint trickle of a fountain blending with the soft hush of leaves in the heat. The air smelled of roses, wet stone, and sunbaked earth. The beauty of the setting scraped at his nerves because it was exactly the sort of place where people forgot they were not safe.

Dragan stopped near a tiled fountain and took out his phone. He did not use it. He simply stood there, thumb moving over the screen as if reading a message, while he watched reflections in the water and listened to the garden around him. Ten minutes passed. Then twelve. He was beginning to think Katya either could not get away or had lost her nerve when a woman’s voice drifted from behind him.

“You are difficult to get alone.”

He did not turn right away. “I was about to say the same thing.”

Katya stepped forward from a narrow path, still partly concealed by palms. She had exchanged the champagne glass for oversized sunglasses and had belted the silk robe tighter around her torso, but she still looked like a woman who had fled without quite admitting she was running. Her lips were painted. Her hair was perfect. Her eyes, when she pushed the glasses onto her head, were not.

“We walk,” she said.

Dragan fell into step beside her, keeping enough distance between them that anyone watching from a window would not immediately assume intimacy. “Your husband thinks you’re having an affair.”

“My husband thinks everything that happens without his permission is an insult.” Katya glanced over her shoulder, then turned down a side path bordered by neatly clipped hedges. “He is not a good man, but he is not what you are looking for.”

“I know.”

That made her look at him. “You know?”

Dragan nodded. “He’s controlling, possessive, and dangerous in the way rich men often are when they think buying something gives them the right to own it. But he didn’t recognize Lennox’s name and has no idea why she came to visit you. He doesn’t suspect that she’s a threat, but somehow I think she is, whether she meant to be or not.”

Katya’s expression tightened. “No, he would not. Nikolai thinks he can control the world as if he’s invincible.” She shook her head. “He’s naive, the kind of naiveté that comes from having too much money for too long. Reality doesn’t enter his world unless it’s through business.” She let out a long sigh. “Nikolai bought me. He liked me, so they sold me to him. Romantic, yes?”

There was no good answer to that, so Dragan didn’t give one. “Who are they? And how did they come to have you to sell?”

“I was living on a beach in Ibiza when it happened. I don’t know who they are exactly, but I knew what my life was to become.”

She continued walking, her hands clasped tightly in front of her. “The woman, Lennox, she came to find out about her sister, Chloe. I told her some things, but not everything because at first I did not know who she was and then because I was afraid.”

“Of Nikolai?”

“Of everyone,” she huffed.

That was fair, even while he couldn’t fathom living with that kind of dread. They passed beneath an archway where shadows pooled cool and deep along the tile. Katya stopped there, half hidden by a climbing vine, and Dragan positioned himself so he could see both ends of the path without making it obvious.

“What did you tell Lennox?”

Katya drew in a breath. “I told her I remembered Chloe. She was pretty. Young. Softer than the rest of us. She cried too much, and they hated that because men who do these things like frightened women only when the fear is pretty. They don’t like messy fear.”

Dragan felt a familiar coldness settle in his chest, the one that came when violence stopped being abstract and took the shape of a girl with a name.