Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 363

"Okay, that does it." I let the smile go.

The first guard looked up from his phone, and by the time his brain registered that I had moved, my palm was already driving into the side of his neck, with every ounce of force I had spent years learning to put behind a single strike. His eyes went wide and then empty, and he crumpled like a puppet with its strings cut, the phone spinning out of his hand and clattering across the pavement.

The second guard reacted a beat too late. He pushed off the fender and charged, a big man with rage finally breaking through his dead-eyed calm, and I stepped sideways out of his path, pivoting on my heel as he thundered past me, and I drove my foot into the small of his back with everything I had. He hit the ground face first with a sound that cracked through the night, and he stayed down.

I stood over them both for a second, breathing hard, listening to the night for any sign that we had been seen. Nothing moved. I scooped up the phone, checked that it had no lock screen, and crouched beside the second man to pull the keys from his pocket.

The engine turned over with a smooth purr, and I rolled the sedan up to the hotel entrance with my heart slamming against my ribs, and I pressed the horn three times, short and sharp. The hotel's security man came hustling out of the lobby, one hand raised, mouth already open to tell me to move along, and behind him the glass doors swung open and Jasmine and Maya came running out, hair flying, eyes fixed on the car like it was the last boat leaving a sinking ship. I reached back and shoved the rear door open, they piled in, and I hit the accelerator before the security man could get within ten feet of my window.

We flew through the city for ten blocks before I allowed myself to slow, and when I finally pulled into a shadowed corner of an empty parking lot, I killed the engine and let my head fall back against the headrest. My hands were shaking. Maya and Jasmine were staring at me in the rearview mirror with an expression I could not quite name.

"What happened back there?" Jasmine asked. "What did you do to them?"

"They're sleeping." I held up the phone I had taken. "And they gave us a ride. Now shut up and let me work."

The phone was a recent model, and when I woke the screen, I almost laughed.

No password.

Men like Julian's guards never expected anyone to take their phones from them. They were too accustomed to being the ones holding the threat.

I opened the browser and went straight to the Beaumont's security portal. The hotel's system was nothing impressive. Expensive equipment, mediocre protection. I had learnt enough over the years to know where systems usually left their doors unlocked, and the Beaumont had left several.

It took me less than two minutes to get into the camera feeds.

I pulled up the footage from the hotel's main entrance and scrolled backward.

There.

I pulled up the traffic-camera feeds I knew how to access and began working forward.

One camera caught the car three minutes after it left the hotel.

Another picked it up several streets later.

Then another.

I kept matching the timestamps with the plate number, discarding every camera that showed a different vehicle and saving the ones that gave me a clean view of Sparrow's car.

It was slow work.

The city did not have one giant surveillance system I could simply log into and follow like a live map. The cameras belonged to different companies, different buildings, different security networks. Some feeds were accessible. Others were not. Some had gaps of several minutes.