Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 77

Chapter 77

DOMINIC

I watched the press conference from my office.

My assistant had set up a live feed on the monitor beside my desk and I sat there with my coffee going cold and watched my almost-ex-wife tell a room full of journalists about the best moment of her life.

“We met in a bar,” Seraphine said into the microphone, her voice warm and practiced, her smile doing exactly what it had been trained to do. “And it was love at first sight.”

I scoffed so hard I nearly choked on my own breath.

Love at first sight.

I watched her smile at the cameras.

She was good at this. I had to give her that. She looked like exactly what she was claiming to be. The devoted wife of a powerful man, finally stepping into her rightful place beside him.

The devoted wife who had been sleeping with Julian for six months while I was busy running the largest company in the country and trying not to get assassinated.

Then the shot rang out.

I was on my feet before I knew I had stood up. The feed dissolved into chaos, screaming, cameras dropping, journalists diving under chairs. I watched one of my men move before the bullet did, throwing himself at Seraphine, taking her down hard onto the floor of the stage.

The glass behind her exploded.

I turned the feed off.

My phone was already ringing a few minutes later. Sparrow.

“She is fine,” he said before I could ask. “Minor bruising from the fall. Shooter has been secured.”

“Where is he?”

“Secure location. My team has him.”

“Question him,” I told him. “I want the name of whoever sent him.”

“Understood, boss.”

There was a pause that contained a great deal of professional enthusiasm. “Understood completely.”

The call ended.

I sat back down and looked at the blank monitor and thought about what had just happened.

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My enemy had made his move. He had seen the press conference, assumed I would be there or that I cared enough about Seraphine to be hurt by her death, and sent a shooter. He had been wrong on both counts, but the fact that he had moved at all told me something useful.

He was impatient.

Impatient men made mistakes.

A few hours later, Sparrow sent me the footage.

The shooter was in a bare room, two of Sparrow’s men standing behind him, and he was not talking. His jaw was set. His eyes were flat. He had the look of a man who had been told what would happen to him if he gave up a name and had decided that whatever Sparrow’s men would do to him was preferable.

He had clearly never met Sparrow’s men.

I called Sparrow immediately.

“I watched the footage,” I told him.

“He is stubborn,” Sparrow replied. “But everyone breaks eventually.”

“I am giving you full authority,” I said. “Get the name by any means necessary. I’ll take responsibility for whatever happens. Even if you have to remove his fingers one by one, get that name for me.”

“No matter how strong he is,” Sparrow said finally, “I will make him break within three days.”

“Then, you have three days,” I confirmed.

“Understood, boss.”

I opened my laptop a few hours later and watched the internet do what the internet did, which was immediately form approximately a thousand different opinions about a situation it had no actual information about. The trending conversations were magnificent in their wrongness.

Where is Dominic Ford? His wife was almost killed and he hasn’t said a word.

Mr. Ford hasn’t even visited the hospital. What kind of husband is this?

I feel so sorry for Mrs. Seraphine. She clearly loves him and he doesn’t even care.

I felt disgusted in a way that had nothing to do with the comments and everything to do with what they were responding to. Seraphine had sat in front of cameras and constructed a love story out of nothing, and now the entire country was invested in a marriage that existed only in a signed document she had

not even read.

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