Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 302

Chapter 302

SCARLETT

I had been mapping a building in my head, every time Julian’s men escorted me back. I knew where the cameras were positioned and where their blind spots began, knew the rotation of the night shift guards and which ones smoked at two in the morning.

Julian thought he was keeping me prisoner, but the truth was simpler and considerably more insulting to his ego: I had been casing his operation from the inside, and he had been too busy staring at my tits to notice.

The cab dropped me two blocks from the building, far enough that none of Julian’s men would see me approaching, close enough that I could cover the distance on foot without arriving looking like I had just run a marathon.

I paid the driver in cash, slipped out of the back seat, and began walking with the unhurried stride of a woman who had every right to be on this particular street at this particular hour.

The evening air was cool against my bare arms, still carrying the faint chemical sweetness of the hotel shampoo Sparrow kept in his penthouse bathroom, and I wondered briefly whether the universe had a sense of humor broad enough to appreciate a woman who went directly from one man’s bed to another man’s apartment to commit what was probably going to be several felonies before sunrise.

My heels made soft clicking sounds on the pavement, the only noise in a street that was otherwise holding its breath. I had changed out of the dress I’d worn to Sparrow’s and into something darker, something that wouldn’t catch the light if I had to move quickly through poorly lit corridors. Black jeans, black shirt, my hair pulled back tight against my skull so no one could grab it in a fight. I looked like a cat burglar’s understudy, which was not far from the truth, except that I was not stealing anything. Tonight, I was taking back what was already mine.

The service entrance was exactly where I had noted it on my mental blueprint: a nondescript gray door tucked into an alcove between two dumpsters that smelled like they had not been emptied since the previous administration. No camera on this side, because Julian’s security team had apparently never met a woman who wasn’t afraid of garbage, and the lock was the same cheap deadbolt they had been using since I first arrived, the kind you could pop with a credit card if you knew what you were doing. I knew what I was doing.

The door swung open with a soft click, and I slipped inside, my eyes adjusting to the dim fluorescent lighting of the service corridor while my ears paid attention to the soft shuffle of a guard’s footsteps not too far away.

I had spent years learning how to move in spaces where I was not supposed to be. And I’d learned this: invisibility was not about hiding. It was about being so unremarkable that no one bothered to remember you were there.

I applied the principle now, moving through the service corridor with the quiet confidence of someone who belonged exactly where she was, my footsteps light and even, my breathing slow and controlled. The first guard was stationed at the junction where the service corridor met the main hallway, a large man with a neck thicker than my thigh and the kind of dead-eyed stare that suggested he had been standing in the same spot for so long his brain had entered a low-power conservation mode.

He did not hear me coming. I had learned the death strike from a former special forces operative who ran a self defense class out of a strip mall dojo in the bad part of town, the kind of place where the mats smelled like feet and the instructor’s knuckles were permanently swollen from demonstrating techniques on volunteers who had not volunteered quickly enough.

The strike itself was simple: a precise blow to the brachial plexus, the bundle of nerves that ran along the side of the neck, delivered with enough force to disrupt the nerve signals traveling between the brain and the rest of the body. It did not kill, despite what the name suggested. It simply turned off the target’s consciousness like flipping

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• 16 Bonus

a light switch, and when it was done correctly, which it almost always was when I did it, the target collapsed in a heap with no more sound than a sack of potatoes hitting the floor.

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15 A