Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 16

Chapter 016

CELESTE

I stopped on the pavement of Helix and looked at them, all of them, lined up in the early morning light, clapping for me, and something cracked open in my chest in a way I was not prepared for.

I walked down the line. I shook hands. I accepted the hugs. I said thank you, genuinely, to each of them, because they had kept this place alive through years when keeping it alive had seemed like stubbornness rather than strategy.

When I reached Pat she pulled me into a hug so tight I felt it in my spine.

“I don’t know how you did it,” she said, her voice muffled against my shoulder. “I don’t know how, but thank you. Thank you, Celeste.”

I hugged her back. “We did it,” I said. “All of us.”

She pulled back and looked at my face with wet eyes. “Was it Julian? Did he pull strings?”

I laughed. I could not help it. The question was so far from the truth that it came out as a laugh before I could shape it into anything else.

“No,” I said. “It was not Julian.”

“Then how?”

“I promise I will tell you everything. Once everything is in place. The whole story.” I squeezed her hands. ” But not yet.”

She searched my face for a moment. Then she nodded.

I thought about the day Seraphine had left. I had not been there for it properly, had been too caught up in Julian’s world to see how much it had broken Pat, how much she had absorbed the loss of her colleague and just kept going because there was no other option. Pat had held Helix together in the years of my marriage almost single-handedly, had kept the research moving forward on a budget that should have made it impossible, had refused to let the work die.

Seeing her face this morning was worth every single thing I had done that brought me here.

An hour later, the grants and administration coordinator appeared in the doorway of the meeting room where Pat and I were going over preliminary plans.

“It dropped,” she said.

We both looked at her.

The money It just dropped. Into the account.”

Pat made a sound I had never heard her make before. Something between a gasp and a laugh. She

covered her mouth with both hands.

+15 Bonus

I stared across the table.

I had not signed the contract yet. Dominic had told me it was prepared and I could sign whenever, and I had assumed that meant after signing, not before. But the money was there In the account. Five billion dollars sitting in Helix Research Laboratory’s bank account on a regular morning before nine o’clock.

I called a meeting immediately.

The whole team crowded into the conference room that had never felt so small I told them the grant had transferred. I watched their faces do the same thing mine had done, the disbelief, the recalculation, the slow dawning understanding that everything was different now

We talked for over an hour New facility Higher pay Better equipment Research expansion. Hiring The possibility of taking the work further than we had ever been able to take it. The women who would benefit, eventually, from the treatments and therapies that proper funding would finally let us develop

I sat at the head of the table and listened to my team talk about the future and somewhere in the middle of a discussion about laboratory locations I thought about Dominic pressing me against the glass while Julian moved through the crowd outside, searching, and felt the warmth of it move through me like a

second heartbeat.

I pushed the thought away

It came back.

I pushed it away again.

My phone buzzed on the table. I glanced at the screen

Dominic

I excused myself from the meeting.

“Seraphine is in my lobby,” he said when I picked up. “She has been here since this morning and she is refusing to leave Would you like to come and irritate her a little?”

I looked back through the glass panel at my team, still talking, still planning, still flying.

“With all pleasure,” I said

I told Pat I needed to go and review the contract documents with Veil Holdings. She nodded without question I took a cab straight from Helix to Veil Holdings.

I saw Seraphine the moment I walked through the lobby doors

She was in the waiting area, her posture rigid, her jaw tight, the expression of a woman who had been

sitting somewhere too long and was furious about it. She looked tired. She looked, for the first time in all

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