Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 364

So I filled the gaps the old-fashioned way.

I followed the road.

I followed the timestamps.

And every time I found the car again, I added another piece to the trail.

Twenty minutes later, I had a route.

The trail ended at an upscale shopping district on the other side of the city, the kind of place where the mannequins cost more than a month of rent.

I pulled up the private security feeds around the area and searched the timestamps.

I watched Sparrow walk in with Tasha at his side, and I watched him walk out with a woman who made my stomach drop. The white dress hugged her curves, long and clean and pure, accentuating every line of her figure, and her face had been wiped clean of every trace of the careful makeup she had worn into that hotel, and she looked like a bride from a magazine spread, beautiful and untouched and completely out of place in the hands of a man like Sparrow.

Nothing about that look was an accident. The way she walked, the way she kept her eyes downcast, the way the dress moved around her like water, it was all deliberate, all staged, and I had no idea whether he was dressing her up like a lamb to shear or to slaughter. What was Sparrow up to?

I parked a little way off and walked to the front door with Jasmine and Maya trailing behind me like shadows. I stood there for a few seconds with my ear close to the door, listening, and heard nothing but the distant hum of the city and the beating of my own heart.

I took a breath, hoping against everything I had learned about men that my fears were unnecessary, that Sparrow was exactly what he had promised, the one man in this city who could put Big Bryan in the ground and my niece back in my arms. Then I rang the bell. Nothing. I waited, counting the seconds, and rang again.

The door swung open, and Sparrow stood in the light, and for the first time since I had met him, he looked genuinely surprised. His eyes went wide for a fraction of a second before the mask came down, and behind me I heard one of the girls suck in a sharp breath, and I ignored her, because all I could see was the man who had walked out of that hotel with my niece, and all I could feel was the fear I had been carrying in my chest like a live wire since the moment I watched his car pull away.

"Where is my Tasha?"