Page 68 of Locked and Loaded

Dragan didn't push. He simply drove, his hands steady on the wheel, while the sun climbed higher over the Moroccan countryside and the road stretched out ahead of them into the heat of the new day.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The road disappeared somewhere around four in the morning.

Dragan had been watching it happen for the last hour. Pavement gave way to gravel, gravel surrendered to hard-packed sand, and now the headlights barely picked out anything except scrub brush and the occasional rock formation. The SUV handled it fine. The SUV was built for worse. But the road was gone, and that meant they were close.

Lennox had been asleep since two. Her head rested against the passenger window at an angle that was sure to hurt her neck when she woke up, her breathing slow and even. She'd stopped shivering about an hour back, when the heater finally won its war against the desert cold. For now, she was still. Peaceful, almost, as if she didn't know what was waiting for her when she opened her eyes.

Dragan knew what was coming.

He'd been carrying it since Armand's call. The cold, certain knowledge that Chloe was probably already dead and that telling Lennox would destroy her. She'd blame herself. She already blamed herself for Katya and Nikolai, and those deaths weren't her fault. This one would be worse. This one would hollow her out.

He wasn't going to tell her. Not yet. Not until he had proof one way or the other. He owed her that much.

The eastern horizon had started to change. He'd been watching that, too. The stars were thinning at the edge, the black giving way to a deep blue that wasn't light yet but wasn't dark either. Dawn was close. He wanted her to see it.

"Lennox."

She stirred but didn't wake.

He reached over and touched her shoulder. "Lennox. Wake up."

She came awake in stages. First her breathing changed. Then her eyes opened, unfocused, still half in whatever dream she'd been having. Then she straightened and winced and pressed her hand to the back of her neck.

"It's cold," she said. Her voice was raspy with sleep.

"Desert. Heat during the day, cold at night. The sand doesn't hold anything."

She looked down at herself. The jeans and white cotton blouse she'd changed into at John's were clean but thin, and she wrapped her arms around herself. She didn't complain. She'd stopped complaining somewhere between the orange truck and John's warehouse, which was almost worse. Lennox complaining meant she still had fight left. Lennox going quiet meant she was running on fumes.

He reached behind his seat and pulled out a jacket. Dark canvas, fleece-lined. John had told him about it before they’d left. He knew that Dragan would head for the desert.

Dragan dropped it in her lap.

"You had a jacket this whole time?"

"You didn't ask."

She pulled it on. It swallowed her. The sleeves covered her hands, and the shoulders drooped past her elbows. She looked small inside it, smaller than she was, and for a second he saw not the woman who'd jumped off a roof and stolen his key and kissed him like it was a challenge, but the woman who'd lost her sister and blamed herself for two deaths that weren't her fault.

"How long was I out?"

"Two hours. Maybe three." He handed her a bottle of water. "Drink."

She drank without arguing. Another bad sign.

"Where are we?"

"About forty kilometers from the Algerian border. About five or so to where we're going."

She stared out the windshield. The headlights cut a narrow path through the dark, and beyond them was nothing but rock and shadow. "Algeria?"

Dragan shook his head. "Not into it. There's a camp just on this side. A man I know."

She didn't ask for details. She just nodded and pulled the jacket tighter around herself.

That wasn't like her. Lennox asked questions. Lennox argued. Lennox pushed back against everything he said until she'd tested it from six different angles and decided for herself whether it held up. This quiet, compliant version of her was wrong, and it worried him more than the men who'd broken into the riad.