Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 409

I spent the night in my study, going over the layout of Bryan's base, every door, every window, every guard post, and I shared the plan with my trusted men in pieces, so that no single one of them held the whole picture. By the time I left the study, it was almost morning. Scarlett was asleep on the bed, her face soft in the dim light, and I lay down beside her without looking at her body, and I drifted off.

In the morning, before I left, I stood at the foot of the bed while she sat up, rubbing sleep out of her eyes.

"I might return late," I said. "Or the next day."

She just nodded. She did not ask where I was going. She did not ask why. She did not pry, and I did not offer, and there was something in that, the courtesy of it, or maybe the trust of it, that sat differently in my chest than I expected.

I left with a large bag of ammunition and half the men who guarded the fortress. We ate a quick breakfast outside, and then we went by air to Big Bryan's city.

The safe house was a two-room apartment above a closed bakery, and we stayed there through the afternoon, cleaning weapons, checking the map, waiting for the dark. In the afternoon, the doctor in charge of the girls called.

"They are all settled, sir," he said. "I gave them the antidote an hour ago."

"Good work," I told him, and I meant it.

I had picked up most of the antidote myself before making the trip, and I had brought it with me. It was not my business. It was not my character. I was Sparrow, and I did not rescue people for free, and yet here I was, carrying enough medicine to save a small army of strangers, because I could, and because I had decided that the helpless were not my problem, except when they were.

I located Bryan's room in the main building, a private suite at the back, and I slipped inside alone.

He was on the bed, on top of a girl who could not have been eighteen, her face wet with tears, her wrists pinned under one of his hands while he fucked her, and she was crying for help in a small, broken voice that stopped my heart for half a second.

Bryan reacted fast once I got in. He pulled out of the girl, shoved himself off the bed, and I fired, aiming for his heart. The shot took him in the shoulder, a few inches wide, and he ran, naked, out of the room and into the dark of the compound.

I chased him. I tracked him by the blood, a trail of dark drops across concrete and gravel, but the trail stopped at a drainage grate, and then there was nothing. He was gone.