Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 275

Chapter 275

SPARROW

After Scarlett left, I did not sleep for a long time.

I lay in the dark of the penthouse with the city glittering beyond the glass like a field of fallen stars, turning her story over in iny mind the way a gambler turns over a marked card. She was good, I would give her that. The tears, the trembling voice, the way she pressed her palms together like a supplicant at an altar, it was a performance worthy of a standing ovation. But I had spent my entire life learning to read the space between a person’s words, and Scarlett had left too many gaps for my liking.

She had conveniently left out that she was a hacker.

My people had unearthed that within minutes of my first call. The girl could crack a systern the way other women cracked eggs, and she had been doing it since she was a child. She had also conveniently left out that the two dead men from her little team were not both dead. One of them, a boy named Carter, was very much alive, and Julian was holding him in a private cell somewhere. Why would she bury that piece of information? What did a living witness threaten?

My investigation had also shown that Scarlett and Lynette had been searching for Tasha for years, long before Scarlett ever set foot in this city. And there was something else, something that made me pause every time I thought about it. Lynette had started Scarlett on hacking lessons when she was barely ten years old. She had also enrolled her in karate classes, and the reports indicated Scarlett was genuinely formidable in a fight. The girl who had knelt at my feet, weeping and helpless, could probably break an ordinary man’s arm in three different ways if she wanted to.

So why the act? Why the tears, the supplication, the carefully rehearsed helplessness?

She was not as helpless as she pretended to be. That much was certain. And if I had not seen the DNA results with my own eyes, the ones that confirmed her relationship to Tasha beyond any shadow of a doubt, I would have sworn the whole story was an elaborate fabrication. There was something Scarlett did not want me to find out, and the thought itched at me like a splinter

under the skin.

That night, when sleep finally came, it dragged me back to the one memory I had spent years burying.

Dominic smiled weakly, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth. “Because you are my brother.”

+15 Bonus

Theu his eyes fluttered shut, and his head lolled against my arm, and I almost lost my mind. I screamed his name until my throat bled, shook him, I begged him to open his eyes, and through it all I could hear the bodyguards shouting, the screech of tires as the car pulled around, and then I was in the back seat with his head in my lap, his blood soaking through my trousers, and the whole world had narrowed to the sound of his breathing.

+15 Bonus