Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 423

Castro laughed, loud and ugly. "Are you threatening me? There are more than twenty of us and one of you. How many can you shoot before we tear you apart? Men, charge! Avenge my daughter! Your pay will doubled!"

The men surged forward again, and the bodyguard did not hesitate. He fired once, and the man running at the front, the one closest to me, screamed and went down, clutching his leg, the knife spinning out of his hand and clattering across the asphalt.

The men stopped. Some of them backed away.

And then another shot rang out from above us, and Castro cried out and pitched forward onto the ground, his right leg crumpling under him. I looked up, and there, at the top of the Helix building, a figure was barely visible against the dark sky, a rifle glinting in the floodlights.

More shots came down after that, one after another, each one finding a leg, and men fell like dominoes, crying out, clutching their thighs. The ones still standing broke and ran, some of them leaving their cars behind, some of them dragging their wounded into the remaining vehicles. Sharon was already inside the lead car, I realized, had been since the first shot, and when two men hauled Castro into the back seat and the car tore away, she did not look back once.

When the last car had disappeared, the silence rushed back in, and I realized my hand was shaking around the stun gun. I lowered it, pressed it against my thigh, and turned to the bodyguard who had stayed beside me.

"Who shot all those men? Who was on the roof?"

"That was my partner." He nodded toward the building. "The moment we saw the armed men, he took the sniper rifle from our car and climbed up to the roof of Helix for a vantage point. I stayed down here to make sure nothing got past him."

"I never knew you carried guns."

"We are ex-military, ma'am. Licensed bodyguards, licensed weapons. We have carried them the whole time we have been assigned to you. We simply never had a reason to show them before tonight."

I looked at the empty road, at the knives and sticks scattered across the asphalt, at the dark stains already soaking into the tarmac. "Thank you. I do not know what would have happened if you had not been here."

"It's not your fault, Celeste."

It was, though. Every bit of it was. Castro Adams had not come for Pat. He had come for me, for the debt he believed my family still owed his, and Pat had only been in the way. Dominic had spent the past month solving my problems one after another, shielding me from my past. This one was mine. I held Pat tighter and made myself a promise: I would finish what my family never could. I would put Castro Adams where he belonged.

"I need to go back inside," I said, pulling back. "The cameras around the building must have captured everything. I am going to copy the footage."

"What are you going to do with it?"

I looked at her, and I felt the smile spread across my face, cold and certain. "I am going to send Castro Adams to prison."