Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 541

"Did you hear me?" the woman in the cream dress called out, louder now, playing to the others. "I said the dog should be grateful. Most strays get put down, not kept on a leash."

That one landed somewhere behind my ribs, and I had to press my tongue to the roof of my mouth to keep from telling her to be quiet.

I reached down and closed my fingers around the chain.

Scarlett's head snapped up the instant the clasp gave.

"Give that back, Tasha." Her voice came out low and flat, and under it was something, a warning laid down like a hand on a table. "You know that is very important to me."

"Who gave you the right to speak?"

She did not answer. She only stared at me with her jaw set and her eyes burning, and for one second the girl kneeling at my feet was not my aunt at all but a stranger who could have stood up and taken the whole pool deck apart with her bare hands.

I raised my hand.

It was a bluff. My palm was open and my arm was moving and I had no plan to bring it down, but Scarlett did not know that. She flinched, the smallest movement, her shoulders drawing in, and her eyes dropped to the floor again.

"There it is," the woman in the cream dress said once again. "The dog finally knows its place."

My hand came down and hung useless at my side.

Lucia leaned in and set her fingers over the pendant, and before I could pull it away she had popped the little latch open with her thumbnail. She held it up to the light and laughed, a bright, careless sound that skipped out across the water.

I turned. The four of them were watching me, waiting. I raised my chin the way I had watched Scarlett raise hers a hundred times, and I walked toward the woman.

"Stop right there," I called, and she was still ten steps away. "Who the hell do you think you are, walking in here uninvited?"

She did not look at me. Her eyes went straight past my shoulder to the girl kneeling on the floor behind me, and something crossed her face, quick and unreadable, like a cloud crossing glass. Then she looked at me.

"What exactly is going on here?"

"I am the one asking questions," I snapped. "And you do not want to mess with me, trust me. My husband is the most feared man in this city. With a snap of my finger I can make you regret the day you were born."