Page 89 of Lethal Game

“What the fuck is her problem?” Len asked.

Con didn’t see the point in hiding the answer. “You are.”

“What did I do?”

“You weren’t very nice when you accused us of enjoying ourselves, and she isn’t much of a people-person in the first place, so...”

“So...?”

“So.” Con shrugged. “Don’t be an ass.”

Len grinned at him. “You’re doing her, aren’t you?”

Not as much as I want to.Fuck, he couldn’t say that. “Do I look stupid to you?”

Len glanced over his shoulder at Sophia as she unpacked her stuff. “So, if I apologize really nice, I’ve still got a chance?”

“Not a chance in hell.”

“But—”

He meant to sayshe’s my responsibility. What came out was a quiet, certain, “She’s mine.”

“I thought you said you weren’t sleeping with her?”

“Only a moron sleeps with the body he’s guarding while in a dangerous situation.”Yep, he was a moron.

“You’re waiting until this little mission is over?” Len watched him for a moment, glanced at Sophia again, then shrugged and nodded. “Don’t blame you, Con. She’s something else to look at.”

If that’s all Len saw, he was an idiot. “She’s got more going for herinsideher head.”

“I hope you’re right, because the shit that’s going on in this camp is fucking scary.”

Interesting.Con angled his head at Sophia and Len followed him into their lab’s tent.

“Dr. Perry, Len isn’t a doctor, but he is a good observer. I thought you might want to hear his take on what’s been happening here the last few days.”

She put down the gadget she was unpacking and grabbed a notepad and pen out of a pocket. “When did you notice the first problems? Were you here before the outbreak started?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ve been shadowing Dr. Blairmore since he and his group arrived about four weeks ago. We’ve had a steady stream of refugees coming in from Syria, but nothing surprising until about four days ago.”

“What kinds of things were being treated prior to four days ago?”

“Bullet wounds, cuts, sunburn, broken bones, we had a couple of babies delivered here. All the normal things, I guess.”

She wrote a few things down in the notebook. “And after that?”

“We had seven or eight kids brought in with high fevers. Then a couple of hours later, a few more. That night, the ones that came in earlier in the day got worse. The doctors gave a bunch of them fluids, but it didn’t seem to do much good. They started dying the next day. Then it wasn’t just kids, it was men, women, kids, old people. Everybody.”

Len stopped to swallow hard and take a breath, but Con had seen Len strung out on stress before and that guy was as silent and cold as a glacier. This guy, he was milking his story for everything he could get out of it. Even though Con had already told him Sophia wasn’t available.

Fucking asshole.

“They ran out of IVs yesterday,” Len continued. “Which means the sick started dying faster. Some of them seemed to go crazy. They thrashed around, some had seizures, quite a few choked on their tongues. I helped dig the first burial pit and it almost killed me to see all those little bodies going into the ground.” Len turned away and wiped his eyes.

Holy shit, he was laying it on thick.

“I didn’t mean to get snippy with you earlier, Dr. Perry. I’m really,reallytired of taking dead bodies out of that tent over there.”