Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 655

TASHA

I hit my knees before Agent Frost could take another step, the floor biting into my shins, and the tears came so fast I could feel them cutting channels through the makeup I had caked on my face.

"I'm not a prostitute." My voice broke apart in the middle of the sentence and I had to drag it back together. "Please, you have to listen to me. I was forced into this. I never chose this life, I swear on my mother's grave. Somebody is blackmailing me, somebody dangerous, and if you take me out of this hotel in cuffs, it's no different than killing me. Please. Please, I'm begging you. I'm a victim, not a criminal."

The officer looked down at me with the enthusiasm of a man reading a warranty document. "I've heard you."

"But..."

"Once we get to the station, you can include all of that in your statement." He reached for his belt, adjusting it with the bored precision of someone who'd done this a hundred times, and my stomach dropped through the floor and kept going.

My heart was slamming so hard against my ribs I could hear it in my ears. Think, Tasha. Think.

Was this Big Bryan's scheme? Had he set this whole thing up, fed me to a cop just to watch me get paraded out of a hotel in handcuffs, to drag Sparrow's name through the mud along with mine? A scandal like that would be a knife in Sparrow's back and a headline with my face on it.

No. No, it couldn't be him. Bryan hated the cops more than he hated daylight. Exposing me meant exposing his own operation, and the last thing a man with a bounty on his head wanted was attention, especially Sparrow's attention. Big Bryan was terrified of Sparrow right now, and terrified men hid, they didn't phone journalists.

So this was real. This was a real officer with real cuffs and a real charge, and in about sixty seconds I was going to be dragged out of this room in my bum shorts, bra and a wig, photographed, printed, and ruined.

And once I walked out of here in cuffs, that was it. Finished. I would never be able to look Sparrow in the face again. Or Scarlett. Scarlett, who had burned her whole life down to build me a safe one.

No. I had to stop this. I had to use anything, say anything, do anything, because a prostitution record would burn down every single thing my aunt had built for me.

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