Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 425

"I am eating." I gestured with my fork. "Talking and chewing is how people choke, Dominic."

"See, this is why I eat alone."

Pat laughed into her glass. "He has a point. You almost took out an entire bakery with that croissant story last week."

"The croissant story is important. It has layers."

"Like you," Dominic said, deadpan, and I threw a piece of bread at him.

He caught it, bit into it, and grinned at me with such unguarded happiness that my chest squeezed. This was the part I could not fake and could not explain, the way he looked at me, like I was the answer to a question he had been asking his whole life.

Every time I saw it I wanted to tell him everything, wanted to crawl into his lap and cry until the poison was out of me. But Dominic had already carried enough of my weight, and this was mine, the debt my family had never been able to collect, and I would collect it alone.

So I smiled and I joked, I fed him strawberries while Pat pretended to be scandalized, I laughed until my cheeks hurt, and when the night finally wound down and Pat yawned her way upstairs, I stood at the kitchen window with my hands in the sink and watched my reflection waver in the dark glass.

"Coming to bed?" Dominic's arms wrapped around me from behind.

Men poured through it, so many of them, sticks and knives in their fists, and they did not look at me. They moved past me like I was furniture, and that was the most frightening part, that I was so small I did not even register as a person to them. Castro walked in behind them like a man arriving at a party, his arms folded across his chest, his wife Annabelle at his side in a fur coat that brushed the floor. Behind them came Sharon, younger than me, with a smile I would spend years learning to recognize, and a boy with their father's cold eyes. Caspian. I knew his name long before I ever knew his face.

My father came out of the kitchen, and he did not get three steps before the first stick came down across his back. He fell. The men closed around him, and I heard the sound, the wet, rhythmic sound of wood meeting flesh, over and over, and I could not move, could not breathe, could only stand against the wall and watch.

My mother came running, eight months pregnant, her hands flying to her mouth, and one of the men shoved her. She went down hard, her cry cutting through everything, and then there was blood, a dark bloom spreading across the pale fabric of her dress, and I ran for her, I was running, I was going to reach her, and then the boy, Caspian, stepped into my path and pushed me. I went down on the tiles, my palms scraping raw, and before I could get up Sharon was standing over me, younger than me, her face twisting into ugly shapes, making faces at me while I cried, laughing while my mother bled.

Felix had slipped out the back, I learned that later, had run barefoot to the neighbors' houses until someone finally listened. But in that moment I did not know it. In that moment all I knew was my mother on the floor and my father on the floor and blood on the tiles and a girl my age laughing at my tears.