Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 422

"And Vivian?"

"I thought she was going to choke on her own cake."

I laughed again, and for a moment the afternoon felt like it had never happened, like Sharon Adams was nothing but a bad dream.

"You were the one who told him everything, weren't you?" She narrowed her eyes at me.

I raised a hand. "I only nudged him in the right direction. Everything else was all him."

"Thank you for always having my back."

"That's what friends are for. True friends."

She said she still had work in the lab and told me to rest, but I refused, and we went down together and worked until the light outside turned amber and then grey, until the parking lot emptied and the evening went dark. We were still smiling when we walked out of Helix, Pat's car pulling out behind mine, both of us heading for Dominic's place.

We had barely reached the road when they showed up.

Recognition hit me like a wave of ice water. Castro Adams. Sharon's father. The man who had tried to tear my family apart.

He was older now, heavier, but the eyes were the same, and they were fixed on me with that old cold amusement, the certainty of a man who had never paid for anything he had done. He and his family of supporters had gotten away with it back then, and now he stood in front of me using that history as a point of reference, as a promise of what he could do again. I had underestimated their disregard for the law. I would not make that mistake twice. In that moment, I understood there was no one alive I hated more.

"Stay behind me," I said, low and quiet. "The moment I move, you run. Do not look back."

"Celeste..."

The men were closing in, and I braced myself, and then a gunshot ripped through the night, fired into the air, and every man froze.

I turned, and one of my bodyguards was standing twenty feet away, arms outstretched, a gun in his hands that I had never seen before. I had watched those men shadow me for weeks, and in all that time I had never once seen them carry a weapon. I stared at the gun like it had appeared from thin air, because as far as I had known, it had.

"If you do not disappear right now," the bodyguard said, his voice flat and calm, "the next bullet I release will be embedded in one of your bodies."