Page 54 of Locked and Loaded

She had no idea what to do about Konstantinos Georgiou. She was going to call her boss. He'd offered help, and she was going to need it. She'd felt bad calling on him before, because he was sick, but this was a different level of need. She was going to pull in every contact she had. Make every call. She wasn't going to sit around waiting for Dragan to decide when they moved.

Her hands wouldn't stop shaking. She noticed it when she reached for the water glass on the desk, and it rattled against her teeth before she got a sip down. She set it back and looked at her hand as if it belonged to someone else.

She'd been on the run for months, chasing her sister across half of Europe, and now she knew exactly where she was and exactly who had her, and none of it helped. Knowing didn't free Chloe.

Lennox made it to the bathroom just in time and threw up everything she'd eaten in the last day. When she finished, she sat on the floor with her back against the wall and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes until she saw spots.

None of it bore thinking about. The kidnapping. The shooting. The desperate attempt to escape harm. There was nothing she could do about any of it sitting here. If she were honest, her sister had made some choices that got her into this. Careless ones. Most people could get away with being careless. Chloe didn’t seem to have the luck of most people.

Lennox got up before that thought could go any further. She brushed her teeth, splashed water on her face, and made herself look in the mirror. The circles under her eyes had gone purple. There was a new line at the corner of her mouth that hadn't been there a month ago. She had the look of someone who was losing.

Up until now she hadn't really believed the cost of this search could be her life. She'd been shot at and followed, and she'd walked away from both, and somewhere in there she'd started acting like that meant something.

Like she was immune.

She wasn't.

The odds that she'd get her sister back and remain standing at the end of it were bad, and she knew it now in a way she hadn't a week ago.

She was going to try anyway. If it cost her, it cost her. The sigh she heaved swirled up from the soles of her feet and burst out of her mouth, defeated.

No! Squaring her shoulders, she chose not to be defeated. She needed to move. Standing in this room with her own thoughts for one more minute was going to break something in her that she wasn't sure she could mend.

She pushed open the door and walked the gallery above the courtyard. The pool sat still below her, a square of pale sky reflected on the surface. Heat pressed down from the roofline and came back up off the tile, and even the palms weren't moving.

She went back to the front hall and dug through the backpack Dragan had left her. A black one-piece bathing suit lay folded at the bottom, tag still on it. She hadn't planned on needing it. She hadn't planned on being here this long.

She changed in the bathroom off the courtyard and twisted her hair up out of the way. When she stepped outside, the heat hit her bare shoulders, and for one second, just one, she felt something that wasn't dread. She sat on the edge of the pool and slid in.

The water was cool, not cold. She pushed off the wall and floated on her back, staring up at that square of sky, and her heart rate calmed for the first time in hours.

She flipped over and started swimming. The pool wasn't built for laps, three strokes and she hit the far wall, turned, went back. She did it again. And again. It wasn't enough. She wanted her arms to give out. She wanted her body too tired to think.

"You're going to wear a hole in the tile."

She stopped and looked up.

Dragan stood at the edge of the pool, barefoot, in a pair of loose cotton pants that sat low on his hips. The light cut across his chest, and she noted a scar along his ribs she hadn't noticed before, and another below his collarbone. His hair was damp at the temples. He'd been working. He was always working.

"It's too small for laps," she said, and hated how out of breath she sounded. That was the swimming. Nothing else.

"It’s meant for relaxation but..." He crouched at the far end and popped a panel loose in the tile that she hadn't clocked before. A switch clicked. The water started to hum, and a second later the surface began to move against her. A current pushed at her legs, then her hips, steady and strong.

She grabbed the edge. "What is that?"

"Current generator. Turns it into an endless lap pool." He stood and looked down at her. "Now it's big enough."

She let go and swam into the current. It fought her the whole way, and she pushed back into it with everything she had left. Her arms burned. Her legs drove against the resistance. She went nowhere, and it was exactly what she needed.

He didn't leave. He sat on one of the low cushions near the edge, forearms on his knees, and watched her. Not the flat, assessing look he used when he was working a problem. Something else.

She kept swimming. He kept watching. She should have minded that. Some part of her did mind it, and a different part of her, the part that hadn't had a single minute all week where she wasn't Chloe's sister first and a person second, didn't mind it at all. That part wanted him to keep looking. Wanted to be, for five minutes, a woman in a pool and nothing more complicated than that.

She stopped and stood in the chest-deep water, breathing hard, muscles trembling. The current still pushed at her back.

"The key stays in my pocket," he said.

She wiped water off her face. "What?"