Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 231

Chapter 231

Dominic’s eyebrows rose. “Staring at your phone?”

“Every time I set it down, I caught her looking at it. Not glancing. Not checking the tinte Looking. Like she was trying to figure out the combination to a safe. I did not know what she wanted with it but I decided to give her the opportunity to take whatever she needed.”

“You deliberately left your phone with her.”

“I pretended to go to the restroom. I left it on her table, face up, unlocked. And I watched secretly as she picked it up and started scrolling through it.”

“That is a gamble,” he said. “She could have been checking your messages.”

“Pat would never do that. I knew whatever she was looking for, she had a reason for it. I just did not know the reason was Seraphine’s videos.”

“And you did not confront her about it?”

“I was going to. I planned to ask her about it when I came back to Helix after visiting my mother. I never suspected she would take the videos. Pat has always been disgusted by Seraphine’s actions. She thought Seraphine was vile for sleeping with Julian. I did not think she would touch those videos, let alone release them to the entire internet.”

I stood up, smoothing down my dress.

I leaned down and kissed him, my lips brushing against his forehead, his cheek, the corner of his mouth. He caught my chin with his fingers and pulled me into a proper kiss, soft and slow, his tongue tracing the seam of my lips before he let me go.

“Be careful,” he said.

I nodded, grabbed my bag and walked out of the hospital room, my mind already racing ahead to Helix, to Pat, to the

conversation I knew I needed to have.

I spent every second of the drive running through scenarios in my head, trying to figure out what could have pushed Pat to this point, what Seraphine could have said or done to turn the gentlest person I knew into a weapon aimed at someone else.

Helix was still humming with activity when I arrived, and the moment I stepped through the glass doors, I felt the shift in the air. Conversations stopped mid-sentence. Eyes tracked my movements. People whispered behind their hands and looked away when I caught them staring.

face pressing into my shoulder, and she cried. Not the polite quiet crying of someone trying to hold it together. The ugly kind, the kind that came from somewhere deep, with heaving breaths and wet sounds and the occasional wordless sob that made my chest ache.

“I have got you,” I said, my hand Smoothing down her hair. “I have got you. It is okay.”

“It is not okay. I… I…”

“Pat. Breathe.”

She pulled back, her face blotchy and streaked with tears, and I guided her to sit down on the small couch against the wall. I sat beside her, my hand still on her back, rubbing slow circles between her shoulder blades.

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