Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 370

Then I remembered the two guards I had posted outside the Beaumont hotel, waiting to collect Scarlett and Tasha.

"Dial their numbers," I ordered. "Both of them."

One of my men pulled out his phone and called. It rang and rang and cut to voicemail. He tried the second guard's number. The same hollow ringing, the same dead end. I stood there listening to the silence, and the knot in my stomach pulled tighter with every unanswered ring.

"Nothing, sir."

"Then we go to them."

I left the apartment with every man I had and made calls as I walked, hiring more muscle, cashing in favors. My head pounded with every step, but I did not slow down. By the time we reached the Beaumont hotel, a small army was trailing behind me.

The scene at the entrance stopped me cold. A crowd had gathered, a loose ring of onlookers gawking at the pavement, and in the middle of it lay my two guards, sprawled out like discarded dolls. Unconscious, still breathing, but completely out.

"Someone already called 911," a man in the crowd said as I pushed through.

"What happened to them?" I demanded.

Shrugs. Murmurs. Nobody had seen anything. They had just found the men lying there.

I ordered my men to haul them upright, and as they lifted the first guard, he groaned, his eyes fluttering open. When they focused on me, he went rigid.

"Sir. Sir, it was Scarlett. She attacked us. Both of us, sir. Took us by surprise, stole our car and phone, and drove off."

I stared at him. "Scarlett. Alone?"

I made calls then, every contact I had in the police department, cashing in favors. I gave them the plate number of the stolen car and the serial number of the stolen phone, and I paced the hotel lobby like a man on fire while I waited for something, anything, to come back.

It came. The car had been tracked to a pristine neighborhood on the edge of the city, a place where the houses sat back from the road like they were daring the world to try them. And when I asked who owned the property where the car had stopped, the name that came back made me scream.

"Dominic Ford!"

So that was it. She had colluded with him from the start. She had played me for a fool, and Dominic Ford had bought her with more money than I had ever offered, and she had taken it and run. My hands were shaking. My chest heaved. The rage boiled up behind my eyes until I could barely see.

But then the police gave me more. The car had been abandoned on the roadside, the phone ditched with it. Scarlett had climbed into another vehicle and driven on. They traced that vehicle too, and the address it led to made my blood run cold.

I drove there myself, my men following, following the coordinates from my friend in the force. The city fell away street by street, the lights thinning, until we reached a secluded stretch on the outskirts, and there, rising out of the dark, stood a fortress wearing a mansion's clothes. A towering gate of steel. A high, thick fence crowned with coils of razor wire that caught the moonlight like a necklace of thorns. Armed men patrolling the rooftop, rifles slung across their chests. Floodlights sweeping the grounds in slow, patient arcs.