Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 358

Chapter 358

SERAPHINE

I stared at my reflection in the mirror and could not find a single thing wrong with what I saw. The face that looked back at me was the same one that had always been my weapon and my shield, the same full lips, the same eyes that could turn soft as silk or sharp as a blade depending on what the moment required.

My body was still a masterpiece, waist nipped in, hips curved out, skin glowing like I had been dipped in honey. I was beautiful. I was sexy. I had made twenty billion dollars in a single day, and I had done it on my back, on my knees, in ways that would have made some women weep with shame. So what the hell was the problem?

The problem was that it had been over a week, and I was still stuck at twenty.

I had followed Emerson Gath and his friend Shane across the world like a well-dressed shadow. Cities had come and gone, hotel suites and private jets and dinners where I sat pretty and said nothing, and in all that time they

had not touched me once.

Not a hand on my waist, not a look that lingered, not even a single solitary night of the kind of work I had been hired to do. They took me along everywhere, yes. They put me in the finest rooms, dressed me in clothes that cost more than most people’s cars, let me order whatever I wanted from room service. But they spent their time talking to each other, drinking whiskey, laughing at jokes I was not invited into, and treating me like a piece of furniture that happened to be very expensive and very quiet.

Twenty billion in one day. I had done the math a hundred times, sitting on balconies in foreign cities while the sun set on money I could not yet touch in the way I wanted. At this rate, by now I should have been sitting on over a hundred. A hundred billion would have been enough to buy armies, enough to build an empire tall enough to look down on Dominic Ford and everything he owned, enough to grind Celeste into dust and watch the wind carry her away. Instead I was still counting the same nine zeros I had counted the morning I signed that contract, and every day that passed without a new deposit felt like a door closing in my face.

And now he had brought me here. An island. A vast stretch of green and white rising out of a blue so deep it looked black at the edges, ringed by water that sparkled like crushed glass under the morning sun.

The mansions that dotted the coastline were white and serene, sprawling things with terraces that hung over the sea and gardens that must have cost a fortune to keep alive in the salt air. Emerson had told me, in that offhand way of his, that all the men here were big shots. That was it. That was the entire explanation, delivered with the same enthusiasm he might have given a weather report, and then he had walked away to do whatever it was he did with his hours.

I had no idea what I was doing on this island. I had no idea what he wanted from me, or why he had paid me twenty billion and then stopped paying. But I knew what I was doing in his life, even if he had forgotten. I was here to become so rich that Celeste would choke on her own happiness when I finally came for her. I was here to amass a hundred billion and then take a break, just long enough to come home and begin the plans I had been building in my head since the night I signed my name to that contract, the plans that ended with Dominic on his knees and Celeste erased from the face of the earth.

I turned back to the mirror and ran a hand down the curve of my hip, checking, cataloging, making sure the goods were still intact. Perfect face. Perfect figure. Still hot enough to stop traffic in three countries. So if my beauty was not the problem, then the problem had to be timing, and timing was something I could fix.

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