Page 85 of Locked and Loaded

It was a given, then. She'd been taken months ago. The chances of him killing her immediately would've been slim. It seemed more likely he played with his acquired toy until she wasn't amusing anymore, and then he killed her. Probably sometime in the last few weeks, once he knew another auction was coming, and he didn't have to be so careful.

At least, that was Dragan's thinking. He couldn't be sure. He didn't know the man. That was something he needed to get Mick to look into as well. He needed to know everything about the man so that he could be ready. Knowing his foe in minute detail helped assure success.

Lennox Crow had become very special to him. As much as he hated to admit it, he'd made a serious error and let her get close. And worse, he'd let himself care. Now all of that was going to go up in smoke, because she'd hate the messenger.

No question.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Lennox sat cross-legged on a cushion, a glass of mint tea cooling between her hands. Hassan had left a few minutes ago, off to check on the camels or the drivers or whatever needed checking on out here, and the tent had gone quiet in a way that felt heavier than it should have.

Dragan came in and sat across from her without a word, wearing a worried expression. She knew that face. She'd learned it over the last few…was it really only days? It was like one learned the weather, by watching for the small signs before the storm actually hit. His jaw was set. He wouldn't meet her eyes.

She set the tea down. "What is it?"

He opened his mouth. Whatever he'd come in to say, it took him a second to find the shape of it, and in that second his phone buzzed on the low table between them.

He looked at the screen, and although his expression didn't change, something in his shoulders did, like he'd been handed a reprieve he hadn't asked for and didn't quite want.

"Mick," he informed her as he answered the call and put it on speaker.

"Getting nowhere, mate." Mick's voice came through flat and tired. "I have three people on this, and none of us can crack it. Whatever's here, it's buried deep."

Dragan glanced at Lennox. It wasn't a long look, but his expression was set in decisive lines.

He set the phone on the table between them. "Tell her all of it."

A beat of silence on Mick's end. "You want me to⁠—”

"All of it," Dragan prompted again.

Mick recovered fast. "Right. So we pulled the metadata off the photo of your sister from Ibiza."

Lennox sat forward. "The last photo she sent me?"

"That's the one. Lennox, you didn't recognize two of the faces in the background, but Dragan did. Katya Ivanova and Nikolai Rostov. Which matters, because if they were there, we know exactly which night that photo was taken. It lines up with the night your sister went missing."

The words landed and settled somewhere cold in her chest. She made herself breathe. “Oh my God, I missed it. I totally missed it. I didn’t know the exact date and everyone I spoke to said there were lots of parties and refused to tell me exactly what day.” She pulled the picture out of her pocket. “Shit, they’re right there. I should have seen them. If Katya is already with Rostov, then that means the auction was already going on when the picture was taken.” The cruelty of the whole thing took her breath away. Here was Chloe, excited and happy at a party that was set up to sell her to the highest bidder.

Lennox swallowed hard. Suddenly her lunch wasn’t sitting so well in her stomach.

Dragan reached across the table and squeezed her arm. “You didn’t know what Katya looked like until just a couple of days ago. The picture is slightly out of focus. No one can blame you for not seeing it.”

“But you saw it—you saw them immediately.” It wasn’t a question. It was an accusation, and she knew it was stupid. It wasn’t his fault she didn’t see it and he did. It just made her feel stupid and as if, somehow, she’d let her sister down.

Mick cleared his throat. "So, ah, now we know when, and where, more or less. The metadata gave us GPS coordinates baked into the file, and they put that dock at a private estate outside Ibiza Town. A big one. The kind of place that doesn't show up on any tourist map."

"And the boat?" Dragan asked. He nodded at the picture. "There's a boat in the frame, just the bow of it, cut off at the edge of the shot. We got a partial name off the hull before the crop line. Three letters. M-A-R."

"That's it? Three letters?" Lennox immediately studied the photograph. They were not wrong. It was hard to see but she could just make out the three letters.

"That's it,” Mick confirmed. “Could be Maria, Marlin, Maren, could be a hundred boats registered in a dozen countries. I've been trying to run it against harbor registries for the region, and I keep hitting walls. Whoever owns that estate doesn't want to be found, and they've built a fair bit of paper around themselves to make sure of it."

Lennox looked at Dragan. He was watching her, as if waiting to see what she'd do with this.

She thought about Chloe. Wherever her sister was, whatever had happened to her, it had started at that estate, on that dock, in front of that boat. And somewhere, buried in shell companies and registries and dead-end paperwork, was a name. A real one.

"Let me look," she said.