Page 40 of Locked and Loaded

Dragan had been awake since before dawn.

The call to prayer had rolled across the medina at first light, distant and melodic, pulling him out of a sleep that had been light to begin with. He'd lain in the dark for a few minutes, staring at the carved ceiling of the upper gallery bedroom, letting his mind sort through the pieces of the night before. Then he'd gotten up, pulled on the same jeans from last night, and gone downstairs.

Now he sat in the office with a cup of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago. Through the open door, he noted that the courtyard was beginning to catch the morning light. The first pale rays touched the tops of the palm fronds, filtering down past the upper gallery to scatter across the mosaic floor. The pool at the center reflected the sky like a sheet of turquoise glass, perfectly still, not a ripple. The air still carried the faint ghost of night-blooming jasmine, already losing ground to the dry heat that would settle in by midday.

The riad was silent except for the occasional creak of old wood settling and the distant, muffled sounds of the medina waking up beyond the walls. Dragan liked the quiet. The thick terracotta walls blocked most of the street noises: donkeys braying, shopkeepers opening their shutters, the first tour groups stumbling through the maze. Inside the riad, it could have been any century.

He turned his attention back to the laptop screen.

Facial recognition wasn't fast. Not when you were running it against the kind of databases Mick had access to. The software crawled through faces like a man walking through waist-deep water, slow and methodical and completely indifferent to how badly you wanted answers.

Dragan didn't mind waiting. Waiting was half the job. The other half was knowing what to do when the waiting ended. Besides, it had given him time to read the file Lennox had given him. It was an interesting read. Just bits and pieces, but enough to make it seem like a trail. One that led directly to the Lock and Key Society’s door. This was everything that Armand Fontaine had been worried about and more. But try as he might, he couldn’t find a hint of who might be behind it.

He leaned back in the desk chair and let his mind drift to Lennox.

Specifically… to that kiss.

She'd caught him off guard. That was the thing he kept coming back to. Not the kiss itself, though that had been memorable enough on its own merits. It was the fact that she'd initiated it. One hand braced on the arm of his chair, the other sliding up to his shoulder, and then her mouth on his like she'd been thinking about it for hours and had finally decided to stop thinking.

He'd kissed her back. Of course he'd kissed her back. He wasn't made of stone. But even in the moment, some part of his brain had been running the angles. Women like Lennox didn't kiss men like him without a reason. She was scared. She was alone. She was out of her depth, whether she'd admit it or not. A kiss could be a lot of things. Gratitude. Desperation. A play for time.

Or it could be cover for fishing a key out of his pocket.

Her fingers were already at his waist before his head had fully caught up. The touch light, careful, the kind of stealth that most men wouldn't notice when their brain was otherwise occupied with the taste of a beautiful woman.

Dragan was not most men. He’d been down too many roads with too many women who wanted too many things to ever fully relax. He'd caught her wrist without breaking the kiss. Held it. Finished what she'd started, because he wasn't a barbarian, and then pulled back just far enough to meet her eyes.

"Nice try," he'd said.

She hadn't flinched. Hadn't stammered or blushed or done any of the things a woman was supposed to do when she got caught with her hand in someone else's pocket. She'd just looked at him with those sharp blue eyes and acted innocently confused. And then, incredibly, she'd looked indignant. Like he was the one who'd done something unexpected.

Dragan found himself smiling now, alone in the office with a cup of cold coffee and the crawling progress bar. The woman had moxie. He'd give her that. Most people, when they got caught, at least had the decency to look embarrassed. Lennox had looked at him like she was weighing whether to try again.

Wily. That was the word. She was wily and smart and desperate in a way that made her dangerous to herself and to anyone who got between her and whatever she was after.

He stopped smiling.

That was the problem. The desperation. She thought she was playing a game she could win. She thought if she could just get the key, the old iron one with the palm-tree handle, the one she'd watched him tuck into his front pocket, she could get out of the riad, find her sister on her own. She didn't understand what was actually waiting for her beyond these walls.

The men at the restaurant had been professionals. Not local talent. Not hired muscle from some back-alley fixer who owed someone a favor. They'd moved like people who'd been trained, and people who'd been trained didn't work cheap. Whoever wanted Lennox dead had resources.

If Dragan let her go, she'd be dead inside a week. Of course, she didn't believe that. She'd been running on her own for months, surviving on instinct and luck and whatever skills she'd picked up in a career that had apparently prepared her for more than she'd expected. She'd made it this far. In her mind, that meant she could keep going.

What she didn't understand was that her luck had run out the moment those men found her in Marrakech. She'd been on borrowed time since Portugal. Now the meter was empty.

He'd told her some of it. Enough to get her to stop running for one night. But he could see the calculation still turning behind her eyes, the way it had been turning since the moment he'd unlocked the cuffs. She was still trying to figure out how to escape.

He'd watched her do it. All through dinner, the lamb tagine, the mint tea, the flat-bread she'd torn into while pretending she wasn't starving, she'd been cataloging everything. The courtyard. The upper gallery. The carved wooden doors lining the ground floor. The pool at the center of the mosaic floor, its turquoise tiles shimmering in the lantern light. She'd asked about the riad like she was making conversation, but he'd seen her eyes moving, marking the details.

There was only one exit, and the key was in his pocket.

She'd figured that out, too. That was what the kiss had been about.

He pulled the key out now and set it on the desk. Iron. Long-barreled. The handle was shaped like a palm tree, an odd flourish for an otherwise functional piece of metal. It looked like it could open a storage unit or a shed or any one of a thousand unremarkable doors. The door it actually opened was the one at the end of the entry passage, the heavy carved door that was the only way in or out of the riad. And beyond that door was the maze of the medina, and beyond the market were men who wanted Lennox dead.

He wasn't going to tell her everything. Not yet. She needed to believe there was a reason to stay put. It kept her close.

The screen flickered. Eighty-nine percent.