Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 542

The words were barely out of my mouth when her hand came up and crossed my face.

The slap rang off the water and came back at me half a second later. My head turned with it, my cheek lit up hot and stinging, and I stood there with my palm pressed to my own face, staring at her, trying to understand what I had just watched. Nobody touched Sparrow's wife. Nobody. Not in this city.

Behind me, Scarlett got to her feet.

She walked toward us, four steps and put herself between me and the woman, one arm back as though she could hold me behind it, her voice low and even.

"I apologize on her behalf, ma'am. Please do not hit her again."

"Who asked you to get up?" Lucia barked.

Scarlett did not answer her. She kept her eyes on the woman, and her breathing was slow and careful, the way a person breathes when they are holding something down.

It came to me then, standing there with my cheek burning, that Lucia was right. I had not told Scarlett to stand. And still she had, and now she was standing there playing the saint for an audience of strangers.

"Go back and kneel," I said. "I have not asked you to get up."

Scarlett turned her head and looked at me. There was no anger in it, which somehow made it worse. There was only that same steady, patient thing she had used the first she saw me, and I hated it, and I hated that I could not look away from it.

She walked back and lowered herself down.

The other woman watched the whole thing, and it was her face that changed the most, not mine and not Scarlett's. She shook her head slowly, the way you would at a dog that had rolled in something.

"I do not have time for this nonsense."

Lucia caught me from behind, both arms locking around my waist, and hauled me back from the edge.

"What are you trying to do?"

"Let me go!" I twisted against her, my heels scraping the floor. "Scarlett cannot swim. I have to get her."

"She is fine," Lucia said. "Watch."

I stopped fighting her. I looked.

Scarlett's head broke the surface ten feet out from the edge, hair streaming down her back, and she was not drowning. She was swimming. Long, clean strokes, steady and unhurried, the way a person swims who has done it a thousand times and could do it in her sleep. She went under once more, came up with her fist closed around a length of wet gold chain, and turned for the edge without a single wasted movement.