Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 369

JULIAN

A voice kept calling my name, dragging me up from the bottom of a black pool, and when I finally forced my eyes open, I found myself staring up at a ring of familiar faces.

"Mr. Fisher! Mr. Fisher! The words echoed off the walls of the living room, and my head was pounding so hard I could feel every heartbeat in my skull like a fist against the inside of my brain.

I blinked, trying to make sense of the world, and slowly the room swam into focus. The apartment for Scarlett and the girls. The guards I had hired, all standing over me with the same dazed, battered look I probably wore myself.

"What happened?" I croaked. "What the hell happened here?"

A pair of hands hooked under my arms and hauled me upright from the floor where I had passed out, and someone guided me into the armchair before my legs could weigh in on the matter.

The moment I sank into the cushion, the memories came rushing back like water through a broken dam. The sounds from the hallway. Me opening the door. My guards sprawled across the floor, out cold. Me running for my room, my heart slamming, my mind already screaming that something was terribly wrong. And then the blow, the burst of white-hot pain at the back of my neck, and the last face I saw before the darkness swallowed me whole.

Scarlett.

"Who attacked you?" My voice came out scraped raw. "All of you. What did you see?"

And yet she had. The guards had seen her face. I had seen her face. All of us could not be dreaming the same nightmare.

I shoved myself out of the chair, swaying on my feet, and staggered down the hallway to the girls' room. The door hung open. The beds were stripped, the sheets thrown back, the few possessions they had brought with them gone from the shelves. Jasmine and Maya had vanished, and with them every trace that they had ever been mine.

"Where are they?" The words tore out of my throat. "Find them! Maya! Jasmine! Find them!"

My men scattered through the apartment, and I stood in the middle of the empty room, pacing, my mind churning like a storm. I had been so close. The footage of Dominic Ford, the weapon I needed to destroy him and win Celeste back, was sitting in his penthouse, and Scarlett was the only one who could retrieve it. If she had turned against me, if she had sold me out to him, then the plan was dead, and I had lost my only trump card.