Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 143

Chapter 13

CELESTE

I watched Seraphine clutch her cheek, her hand pressed against the red mark that was already blooming across her skin like a rose unfurling in fast forward, and I felt a strange cocktail of satisfaction swirl in my chest.

Her eyes were glassy, her lips trembling, her entire body shaking with the force of the humiliation that had just been dumped on her head like a bucket of ice water, and I knew, I knew with absolute certainty, that she had not seen this coming. She had walked into Helix thinking she was the predator, thinking she held all the cards, thinking she could destroy me with her righteous fury. She had walked in here ready to watch me burn and instead she was the one standing in the ashes.

The staff did not hold back. The whispers started low, a murmur that rippled through the crowd like wind through wheat, but they grew louder and more venomous with every passing second, each voice adding fuel to the fire that was consuming Seraphine’s reputation right before our eyes.

“Slut,” someone hissed from the left, a woman I recognized as one of the junior researchers, her face twisted with disgust. “She slept with her best friend’s husband and then had the audacity to come here and play the victim.”

“What kind of woman does that?” another voice added, this one male, sharp and incredulous. “Fucking your friend’s husband and then showing up at her workplace to accuse her of being a whore? The audacity is astronomical.”

“Devil,” an older technician muttered, shaking his head slowly. “That is what she is. A devil in expensive clothes.”

“No wonder Mr. Ford denied knowing her,” a voice piped up from somewhere in the back, loud enough for everyone to hear.” What husband would want to stay married to a woman who spreads her legs for her best friend’s husband in hotel rooms and bars like a common streetwalker?”

“I heard she used to sleep with multiple men back in college too,” another woman added, her voice dripping with scorn. “Some people never change. You can take the whore out of the streets but you cannot take the streets out of the whore.”

“Homewrecker,” someone else spat. “She probably targeted Mrs. Celeste’s husband from the very beginning. Some women cannot stand to see their friends happy so they have to destroy everything good in their lives.”

“And she tried to twist it around? Shameless. Absolutely shameless.”

“Look at her standing there with her hand on her cheek like she is the one who has been wronged. If I were her, I would crawl into a hole and never show my face in public again.”

“Her reputation is finished. No respectable man will ever want to touch her after this. Everyone in this city is going to know what she did.”

“She deserves everything coming to her.”

“Trash. Absolute trash.”

The words hit Seraphine like physical blows, each one driving her further into the ground, and I watched as her composure finally cracked, the tears spilling over her eyelids and streaming down her cheeks in thick, mascara stained rivers that lett dark tracks on her skin. Her shoulders shook with silent sobs, her chest heaved, and she looked around the room at the faces that were staring at her with contempt and disgust and hatred, and she saw no sympathy anywhere, no kindness, no mercy.

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