Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 306

Chapter 306

“Scarlett?”

My name. The last thing he said before the darkness took him. I stood over his unconscious body and felt something that was halfway between satisfaction and disgust. For some reason, this victory tasted surprisingly similar to ash.

I could kill him. The thought surfaced in my mind with the clarity of a bell ringing in still air, and I did not push It away. I had never directly committed murder before, had always found a way to accomplish my goals without crossing that particular line, but standing over Julian Fisher’s prone body with the knowledge of everything he had done to Maya and Jasmine and me and probably dozens of other women I did not even know about, I felt the urge rise up in my chest like a physical thing, hot and sharp and almost impossible to resist.

He had forced himself on Jasmine yesterday. Not just used her, not just taken what he wanted in the way that men like him always did, but actually, deliberately raped her out of jealousy and possessiveness and the kind of twisted entitlement that made my stomach turn.

I lifted my leg and brought my foot down on his chest, hard, the impact jarring through my ankle and up into my hip. He did not move. He did not flinch. He just lay there, unconscious and helpless, and I realized with a strange mixture of relief and shame that I could not do it. I could not kill a man in cold blood, no matter how much he deserved it. I was not a murderer. I was a survivor, and sometimes those two things looked the same, but they were not, and the distinction mattered more than I had ever allowed myself to admit.

I turned my back on Julian Fisher and walked back to the bedroom where Maya and Jasmine were waiting, their faces pale with fear and anticipation, their bags clutched against their chests like shields.

“Come on,” I said, my voice steady despite the trembling in my hands. “Let’s go.”

We moved through the apartment in silence, stepping over Julian’s unconscious body on our way to the door, and neither of them asked what had happened to him. Perhaps they could see the answer in my face. Perhaps they simply did not want to know. We slipped out, past the guards I had left crumpled on the floor.

I could feel the adrenaline beginning to fade, replaced by a bone-deep exhaustion that I had been holding at bay through sheer force of will, and by the time we emerged into the alley behind the building, my legs were shaking and my hands were numb and I was fairly certain that if I stopped moving for more than thirty seconds, I would collapse and not get up again for a week.

We walked two blocks before I felt safe enough to hail a cab, and when one finally pulled up to the curb, a dented yellow sedan with a driver who looked like he had seen enough strange things in his career that three women emerging from an alley at this hour did not even register on his list of concerns, I herded Maya and Jasmine into the back seat and gave him the address of the Beaumont Hotel.

The cab pulled away from the curb, and we sat in silence for the first several blocks, the city lights sliding past the windows in long amber streaks. Maya was staring out the window with the glassy-eyed expression of someone who had not yet processed that she was free. Jasmine was staring at me.

“Why did you do that to me?”

The question came out flat and hard, the voice of a woman who had been holding it in for hours and was finally giving it permission to escape. I turned to face her, and the look in her eyes was not anger exactly. It was something more complicated, something that had been simmering beneath the surface since the moment I told her to stuff her underwear with tampons and pretend to be menstruating.

“I couldn’t speak before because we were in the house,” Jasmine continued, her voice low and controlled. “But I

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know that everything you did was to protect Tasha. Isn’t it?”

The cab driver glanced at us in the rearview mirror and then very deliberately returned his attention to the road. He had almost certainly heard stranger conversations in his cab, and he had almost certainly learned that the safest response was to pretend he had not heard anything at all.

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