Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 267

Chapter 267

SPARROW

After Kingsley Duke left, I pulled up his file. Celeste had asked this of me, and Celeste was everything to Dominic, which meant she mattered to me by extension. I did not take such requests lightly. I owed Dominic more fran I could ever repay, and if the woman he loved cared about this Kingsley fellow, then I would dig until I found every buried bone in his family’s closet.

I was still going through his background, tracing the collapse of his father’s empire, the mistress, the uncle who had swallowed everything whole, when my phone rang. I picked it up without looking and saw the name on the screen.

Granny.

I blinked. The old hag rarely called me. When I had first been brought into the Ford family, she had been kind to me, warmer than anyone had a right to be toward a boy dragged in from the streets. But after that incident, when we were young, the night Dominic almost died because of me, she had stopped looking at me entirely. Whatever she felt toward me now could generously be called indifference. I still kept her number saved under Granny, because she was the only blood family Dominic had left, even if she had never once called me on it.

So why was she calling now?

I answered. And the sound that came through the speaker made my chest tighten.

She was crying.

“Granny,” I said carefully. “Why are you crying? What happened?”

“Please, Xander,” she sobbed. “Come and see me. I need you here. I have no one else to turn to.”

I drove to her location without asking another question. Granny had her faults, and I knew them better than most, but I could not ignore her tears. Not when she had once been the only person in that house who looked at me like I belonged there.

When I walked in, she was seated in the living room, her face blotched and red, a handkerchief twisted between her fingers. She looked smaller than I remembered, frailer, and for a moment I felt something close to pity.

“Dominic has abandoned me,” she said, her voice cracking. “My own grandson. The only blood family I have left. He has left me, Xander. He packed his bags and walked out of this house without looking back.”

I sat across from her, keeping my voice even. “What happened? What did you do?”

She told me. She told me about the drug, about how she had drugged him because he had rejected Imelda, and chosen a married woman called Celeste. She told me how she had planned to force his hand, to make him take Imelda to bed while he was not in his right mind, and how it had all collapsed around her.

She leaned forward, her eyes suddenly bright and calculating despite the tears. “Imelda is a good girl. I promised her family that she would be married into the Ford family. And you and Dominic are the only two eligible bachelors in this family.”

The alarm bells began ringing in my head, loud and unmistakable. Was this old woman trying to guilt me, or blackmail me, into marrying the girl Dominic had rejected? She began to try again, louder this time, her voice rising into a wail.

“At my age, how can I bear to break my promise to such amazing people? How can I look them in the eye and tell them my grandson refused their daughter? It would destroy me, Xander. It would destroy me.”

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