Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 25

Chapter 025

DOMINIC

I drove back to the hotel, lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling.

The room was quiet. The city outside was quiet. There was no reason for me to still be awake.

I was still awake.

She kept coming back. Not in the way that annoyed me, not the way a problem returns when you have not solved it. She came back the way a song does, the way a smell does, without warning and without permission and with a completeness that made everything else feel slightly less real.

The office. The table. The way she had looked at me afterward, still catching her breath, her eyes asking a question she had not put into words yet.

The car.

I laughed quietly at the ceiling. That woman was going to be the end of me.

But it was not only that. It was not even mostly that. It was the way she had talked to me in the closet when I told her about my parents, the way she had not filled the silence with sympathy I did not ask for. It was the way she had fed me dinner with a straight face and pretended it meant nothing. It was the way she had stood on that stage in the red dress and looked at me across the whole shocked room like I was the only fixed point in it.

She excited me in a way I did not believe was possible.

I had spent years believing that what I felt for most things, the low-grade interest, the mild satisfaction, the controlled appreciation, was simply what feeling things felt like for a man like me. Seraphine had not changed that. The women before Seraphine had not changed it either.

Celeste had.

I turned my head and looked at my arm. The dressing she had applied was still intact. I needed a doctor to look at it, just to be safe. Infection was a real risk and I was not interested in being taken out by something as undignified as an untreated graze wound.

I thought about her face when she had stayed beside me in that room. The way her hands had moved, careful and focused. The way she had tried not to let me see that she was frightened.

I had been frightened too.

Not for myself. I had been in dangerous situations before. My body knew how to respond to danger and it had responded without asking my permission.

I had been frightened for her.

The thought of her being hurt had done something to me that I was not prepared for. I had not wanted to show it. If she sensed too much from me, if she felt the weight of what I was starting to feel, she might pull back. For her this was a game. A revenge. A delicious, satisfying reversal of everything that had been done to her. I was a tool she had chosen well and was using effectively.

I was fine with being the tool.

I just needed to make sure the tool did not develop feelings that complicated the arrangement.

I sat up and swung my legs off the bed.

What was happening at her house right now?

My sources had confirmed Julian was home. Seraphine had been there too, which I had not planned for but which was, honestly, better than anything I could have arranged. Two people with guilty consciences and one wife who knew exactly what they had done and was choosing her moment.

Celeste could handle herself. When I had done my research on her, I had found that she had taken self- defense classes as a teenager. Years ago, yes, but those things did not entirely leave the body.

Still.

What if Julian decided to use his hands instead of his words?

What if he hurt her?

I reached for my phone before I finished the thought. Then I stopped.

What if my call came at exactly the wrong moment? What if she was in the middle of something and her phone rang and Julian saw my name?

I set the phone back down.

Then I remembered she had given me her old phone. She had turned it off before handing it over and told me she had gotten a new one. I had asked why and she had laughed and said she did it for the fun of it, for the thrill of having a second phone that Julian did not know existed, for the pleasure of operating on a frequency he could not tune into. 1

I picked up her old phone and turned it on.

Then I turned it off again.

It was not right. Whatever was on that phone was hers. Her messages. Her history. Her private life before all of this. I had no business going through it regardless of how much I wanted to know she was safe.

I put it down.

Stood up

Walked to the balcony and stood in the night air and looked out at the city and thought about Julian.

Specifically, I thought about Julian looking at Celeste in that black dress.

She had come out of the wardrobe and she had been wearing it and I had felt the entire functioning of my brain temporarily suspend. And she had gone home in it. Walking through that front door in it, with her heels clicking and her hips doing what they did, and Julian was going to see her.

Julian, who still believed she was his.

The rage that moved through me was disproportionate and I knew it was disproportionate and I stood on the balcony and breathed through it.

I had barely blinked when Seraphine started sleeping with Julian. I had been hurt, yes. I had been angry. But not like this. Not this particular heat that had no good name for itself and did not respond to reason.

I went back inside.

I lay down.

I told myself that worrying accomplished nothing. That Celeste was a grown woman who had survived two years in a marriage to a man like Julian and had come out of it not broken but sharpened. That she knew what she was doing. That she had a plan and she was executing it and she did not need me pacing hotel rooms on her behalf.

I closed my eyes.

Then I sat up again.

One to two weeks away from her.

That had been my assessment of the situation and I stood by it as a tactical decision. But I had made the assessment before I had properly considered something.

Celeste, before all of this, had been a woman who dressed the way her husband told her to and went where her husband told her to and wanted what her husband approved of wanting. That woman had a particular kind of containment built into her, a lid on everything.

That lid was off now.

I had helped take it off.

And now I was proposing to leave her alone in a house with Julian for two weeks. Julian, who had presumably noticed that something had shifted in his wife. Julian, who was not a stupid man. Julian, who would do whatever it took to keep what he believed was his.

If he turned that attention toward her. If he found the right moment. If Celeste, who had been in love with this man for years, found herself weakening in a moment of vulnerability or exhaustion or loneliness.

I got off the bed, picked up my phone, and called Sparrow.

He answered on the second ring. “Boss.”

“Where are we on the attack?” I asked.

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