Page 47 of Locked and Loaded

"The men from the restaurant," she said. "You got names?"

Something flickered in his eyes. Surprise, maybe, that she'd shifted gears so fast. Or respect. She wasn't sure.

"Kozlov. Petrov. Virtanen." He ticked them off. "Russian, Russian, Finn. All of them former military or ex-intelligence. All of them working as private contractors now."

"Wait,” she said frowning, “I thought there were only two. Where did the third one come from?”

“There were two more actually. One watching the door and one smoking at a side door.”

He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to; the implication was clear. If she’d been on her own and had managed to outrun the two goons inside, there had been two more waiting outside for her.

But she had gotten away, she reminded herself. She’d gotten them clear. She met Dragan’s gaze. Or had she? They had ended up not far from here when he’d finally stopped moving and had to slap the cuffs on her so she didn’t leave. Had he been herding her where he wanted her to go without her realizing it?

The food in her stomach turned to lead.

There was a distinct possibility that she hadn’t been the one that got them out of there, that Dragan had been guiding her without her realizing it. That thought made her ill.

“And the fourth?" she finally asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

He paused. Just a beat. Just long enough for her to notice.

"Unknown," he said. "He's running the team. No name. No file. Nothing in any database."

"Where was he?"

“Side door,” Dragan supplied.

"Then how do you know he is involved? How do you know he had anything to do with the other men?"

"Because the other three checked in with him on their way in while he was waiting outside."

Lennox absorbed that. Four men. Three killers and a ghost running the operation. All of them in Marrakech for her. She should have been terrified. Some part of her was terrified. But a larger part, the part that had been running for months and was sick of running, felt something else entirely.

She made them nervous. Scared enough to send a team of professionals. Scared enough to burn real resources. Which meant she was getting close to something. Maybe it was her sister or maybe it was something else, but she was definitely getting close to something someone didn’t want her near.

“How do you know it’s not someone inside the Society that’s doing all this?” she asked.

“It’s a valid question.” He selected another olive and popped it into his mouth. “The Society has a rule book. They follow it strictly. The rule book explicitly forbids anything that could bring law enforcement to the door."

"Like human trafficking," she responded.

He nodded, "Doing something like that inside the Society would not only create many, many powerful enemies; it would most likely get you dead. Which is why we know someone else is trying to frame them for it. Take down the Society, and you take down a lot of very powerful people. It's a good plan."

Lennox eyed Dragan. "But it's not the Society."

"No. We went over this yesterday. You know it’s not them.”

He wasn’t wrong. She did know, but she wanted it to be them. She was exhausted and out of ideas. The Society gave her something to target, something to aim for, a direction to go. Without them as the enemy, she didn’t have…well, anything to go on.

Dragan met her gaze. “If it were the Society, they wouldn't have sent me to find you. They'd have sent someone to make you disappear."

That landed with a cold, solid thunk in the pit of her stomach. She believed him. She wasn't sure why she believed him, but she did. Maybe because he'd had plenty of opportunities to hurt her and he hadn't. Maybe because he'd fed her and kept her safe.

"Okay," she said. "If the Society didn't take my sister, who did?"

Dragan popped another olive in his mouth and then spit out the pit. "That's what I'm trying to find out."

"Let me help," she demanded.