Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 454

SPARROW

I stood under the water with my forehead resting against the tile and let the spray hammer the back of my skull until the skin went numb, but no amount of heat could reach the place where the afternoon had gone cold.

I closed my eyes and there she was at the crown of that hill, arms flung wide like a child daring the sky, face turned up to a wind that lifted her hair off her shoulders, and then the crack of the rifle rolled down the slope and she was gone, folding at the knees and tumbling into the long grass. The voices of the three men had followed me all the way home, but it was only one phrase that kept repeating, patient as a second heartbeat. 'The woman you love.' 'The woman you love.'

The journey had begun with a helicopter and a lie. Scarlett had spent the first twenty minutes of the flight with her face pressed to the window and her mouth running, asking where exactly I was dragging her.

"It is a business meeting," I told her over the rotor noise.

"In the middle of nowhere?"

"Discretion is a currency, Scarlett. I am spending it."

She had snorted and gone back to watching the coast slide past below us. My whole adult life I had walked into rooms like the one waiting for us flanked by men with rifles and faces like closed doors. Today I walked in with a woman in black jeans and a blue shirt and no one else, and I wanted to see what three men who owed me eight hundred million would do when they thought nothing stood between them and keeping it.

The helicopter set us down on a cracked concrete pad behind an abandoned phosphate works outside a town called Mirele, a place the maps had given up on years ago. The sea air carried the rot of salt and rust, and the buildings stood in rows with their windows knocked out like missing teeth. Farr's people met us at the gate, and I counted four rifles in the shadows before I stopped counting.

The three of them waited inside a warehouse that smelled of oil and old fish. Commodore Farr was the silver-haired one in the middle, the one who had once done business like a gentleman and now did it like a man who had forgotten the difference. The second guy was thin and young and wore sunglasses indoors, which should have told me everything about his judgment. The third one never sat down and never spoke, and his hands hung at his sides like they were waiting for permission to start.

Scarlett looked up at that and smiled at Remy with all her teeth. Then she excused herself and told me she needed to get some air. I nodded in approval and watched her until she disappeared from my sight.

The third guy did not react, but Remy's ears went red. They had been staring at Scarlett since we landed, all three of them, and it was not because she was easy to look at, although she was. It was because they had never seen me walk into a room without my walls of guns, and they were trying to decide what it meant. A man who brings only a woman to a meeting like this is either a fool or a trap, and they were working very hard to convince themselves I was the first.

"So," I said, walking to the table and running a hand over the nearest crate. "You have the goods. I believe there is a balance outstanding. Eight hundred million, if my arithmetic has not rotted."

Farr folded his hands on the table. "That was the number when we shook on it, yes. But the market has moved since then, Sparrow. These rifles are not worth what they were last quarter."