Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 319

Chapter 319

“Now get him out of my sight.” I waved at the security men and returned to my seat.

They dragged him out, but Felix found his voice again halfway down the corridor, his threats ricocheting off the walls with the kind of unhinged fervor that made you question the building’s structural integrity.

“You’ll pay for this, Celeste! You think showing me some doctored footage changes anything? I will tear this company apart brick by brick until you produce Seraphine alive and unharmed!”

I stood behind my desk, one hand resting on the toppled photograph. The threats didn’t bother me. It was the look in his eyes when security grabbed him. That had not been ordinary rage. That had been something closer to the blank, flickering stare of a man whose internal wiring had been yanked out and reconnected in the wrong order by someone who had never read the instruction manual.

Felix had always been stupid about Seraphine, granted, but this was a different species of stupid. This was clinical -grade, laboratory-certified, frame-it-and-hang-it-in-the-Louvre stupid. Could there be something actually wrong with him? Neurologically? Chemically? Something that would explain how a reasonably intelligent man had transformed, in the space of a few weeks, into a person who refused to believe video evidence streaming live into his own two eyeballs?

I heard his voice again. Still screaming. All the way from the lobby.

I stepped out of my office and walked to the mezzanine railing overlooking the ground floor. Below, Felix was making a spectacle of himself that would have embarrassed a reality television producer.

The security guards were still dragging him out. His face had taken on the color of an overripe tomato, bellowing at a volume that suggested he believed the people on the ground floor might have missed his earlier performance.

“She kidnapped an innocent woman! Celeste Fisher is holding Seraphine against her will, and every single one of you who works in this building is complicit! How do you sleep at night knowing your paycheck comes from a criminal?”

The receptionist pressed herself flat against the back wall of her cubicle. A cluster of lab technicians froze near the security turnstiles, mouths hanging open in identical expressions of bewildered fascination.

I leaned against the railing and sighed. This was not the kind of scene I had envisioned when we founded Helix Laboratory. First Seraphine, then Julian, and now Felix performing a one-man opera about kidnapping in my lobby. At what point did I simply change the name from Helix Laboratory to Drama Laboratory and start selling tickets?

The automatic lobby doors slid open, and Sierra walked in.

She looked like a woman who had been in a slow-motion car crash for several weeks. Dark circles sat beneath her eyes like bruises that had decided to take up permanent residence. She stopped dead the moment she registered the chaos before her.

“Felix?”

Her voice was barely above a whisper, but it sliced through the chaos cleanly. Felix’s head snapped toward her. For one suspended moment, the entire lobby held its breath.

Then Sierra ran.

Her flat shoes slapped against polished marble, her dress billowing behind her, the envelope in her fist crumpling as she crossed the distance with the desperate urgency of a woman who had been holding herself together with

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nothing but hope and dental floss. The security guards stepped back automatically, letting go of Felix as she threw herself into Felix’s arms with enough momentum to make him stagger.

“Felix, oh my God, Felix, I have been looking for you everywhere, I called you a hundred times, I thought something terrible had happened, I thought..”

Her words dissolved into sobs, great heaving cries that shook her entire body. She buried her face in his chest, her- fingers clutching fistfuls of his jacket, and Felix stood there with his arms wrapped around her, his face frozen halfway between shock and something that might, in a different man, have been guilt.

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