Page 36 of Locked and Loaded

“Because you were throwing the name of the Society around and linking it to human trafficking. Someone out there seems to want to place the blame for all this on the Lock and Key Society. My employer at the Society wants to know who is behind it and why. He hoped that tracking you down would provide some answers.”

Lennox contemplated her next move. Did she turn over the paperwork or not? Honestly, she couldn’t see the upside of not turning it over. Could she blackmail him into letting her go? She gives him the paperwork, and, in return, he grants her freedom?

“I will not let you go out there by yourself, Lennox. You’ll be dead by morning.”

Lennox wanted to argue. She wanted to rage at him. How had he known what she was thinking? “I want answers about my sister. What else do you know?”

"Not tonight. You need sleep more than you need information." Dragan stood, picking up his plate. "There's a room made up on the first floor. Third door on the left. The bed's clean, the windows don't open to the street, and nobody knows you're here. Get some sleep. We'll talk in the morning."

He carried the dishes to the counter and turned back. For a moment, he just looked at her.

"You're safe here, Lennox. I know you don't believe that yet. But you are." He quietly wished her goodnight. Then he walked out of the kitchen, and she was alone again.

Lennox sat at the low table and listened to his footsteps cross the courtyard and fade into the upper gallery. The lights flickered. The tagine was still warm on the trivet, the olives half-eaten in their dish, the tea cooling in her glass.

She was angry. She wanted answers. But she was also full of good food, and she was sitting in a place where nobody was trying to kill her, and the man who had brought her here, the man she'd intended to hate for the foreseeable future, had handcuffed her, fed her, refused to touch her again, and then quietly wished her good night. He’d also given her more information than she’d had previously about her sister and the Lock and Key Society and hadn’t demanded anything in return. He’d asked, but he hadn’t demanded.

That was not nothing. She'd learned, over the years, to recognize when someone wanted something from her. Dragan wanted something. Had to be something to do with the Society. She was sure of that. But whatever it was, it wasn't the thing men usually wanted. And she was too exhausted to fight with him now. She’d lose.

Lennox finished her tea then stood. She walked through the courtyard, past the pool, past the palm fronds hanging still in the night air, and up the stairs to the first floor.

She opened the third door on the left. The bed was wide and low, covered in white linen, with a carved wooden headboard and a single light burning on the nightstand. A window looked out onto the interior courtyard. No view of the street. No way out.

She should check the walls. She should test the window. She should do a dozen things that the part of her that had kept her alive this long was screaming at her to do. Instead, she grabbed her bag and dug out the file. She went back downstairs and caught Dragan as he was walking across the courtyard.

“Here.” She handed him the thick file. “There’s a name and number in there of a reporter I was supposed to talk to. He supposedly would be interested in my sister’s story.”

“You don’t believe that?” Dragan asked as he took the file.

“Let’s just say, I’m not big on being told what to do and how to do it.”

Dragan flashed a grin. “You don’t say.”

Lennox smiled back, a bit shocked she was capable of it. Then she turned and went back up to her room and lay down on the bed, staring at the ceiling. He was being nice. It was safe here. But for all of that, she was no closer to finding her sister.

Dragan had tucked the key into his front pocket. She'd watched him do it. And tomorrow, when she figured out how to get it, she would decide whether she was going to use it.

Tonight, she was going to sleep.

And if a small, traitorous part of her felt safer here than she'd felt in months, well that was nobody's business but her own.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Sleep didn't come. The bed was comfortable. The linens were clean. The riad was quiet. None of it helped.

She kicked the covers away. This wasn’t the dry, manageable heat of the streets after sunset, but the close, trapped heat of a room with no air conditioning, no fan, and no cross breeze. The window over the bed looked out onto the interior courtyard, and the courtyard held the day's warmth like a bowl held water. The air in the room was still and thick, and every time Lennox closed her eyes, she felt the weight of it pressing down on her.

She lay there for maybe an hour, staring at the carved ceiling, listening to the silence. Then she gave up.

The tile was cool under her bare feet as she stepped out onto the upper gallery. The courtyard opened below her, dark except for a single light burning on the ground floor near the fountain. The palm fronds hung motionless. The stars overhead looked close enough to touch, blurred slightly by the heat still rising from the walls.

She'd slept in places that made this look like a palace when she had been on different assignments for her current employer. The back of a tuk-tuk in India. A cubicle floor in Vienna. Hotel Hell just down the street where the mattress had been older than she was. But those places hadn't felt like this. They hadn't felt like something she could get used to.

She moved along the gallery to the stairs and went down, one hand on the worn stone banister. The courtyard was cooler than her room, and a breeze picked up a bit, moving just enough to stir the leaves. She was wearing the dress she’d had on earlier, and it was starting to feel like a second skin she needed to shed.

A light shone in one of the street-level rooms she hadn't explored earlier. A door she'd assumed led to a closet or a storage space. It was open a few inches, and through the gap, she saw the blue-white glow of a laptop screen.

She pushed the door open.