Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 290

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Chapter 290

JULIAN

I stepped out of my front door, my eyes sweeping the street in both directions like a man expecting a sniper on every rooftop. Nothing moved except a neighbor’s sprinkler three houses down, its rhythmic chk-chk, chk the only sound in the otherwise silent cul-de-sac.

No reporters. No cameras. No vans with tinted windows idling at the curb. I exhaled, a breath I hadn’t realized ‘d been holding, and made my way to the car with my collar turned up and my head down just in case,

Yesterday had been a masterclass in humiliation. Those videos, my face, my cock, Seraphine’s legs wrapped around my waist like she was trying to climb inside my skin, they had spread across every platform faster than a forest fire in a drought.

I had spent hours on the phone with every contact I had, called in every favor, asked every tech-savvy acquaintance to scrub the internet clean of my sins, and none of it had made a dent. Someone was holding the strings, someone with deeper pockets and sharper teeth, and that someone wore Dominic Ford’s face in my mind with a smug little smile I could picture in vivid, infuriating detail.

I had turned off my phone when the calls started coming, shareholders and journalists and distant relatives who suddenly remembered I existed, all of them wanting a piece of the scandal while it was still hot enough to burn.

But this morning. This morning, when I’d finally worked up the courage to check, every last video was gone. Vanished. Scrubbed so clean you’d think the whole sordid affair had been a fever dream brought on by bad seafood. I didn’t know who had done it or why, and I didn’t particularly care.

Seraphine, maybe, pulling strings from wherever she was. Or perhaps the platform moderators had finally done their jobs, though that seemed about as likely as Dominic Ford donating his fortune to a monastery. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that the evidence of my indiscretion was no longer the first thing people saw when they typed my name into a search bar.

That didn’t mean I was in the clear, of course. The damage had been done. My company’s stock was still hemorrhaging value like a severed artery, and I couldn’t show my face at the office without attracting a circus.

I hadn’t even been able to visit my mother and Riley at the hospital, though I’d called twice to check on them, my mother’s voice still carrying that raw, wounded edge that made something in my chest twist every time I heard it.

She had asked when I was coming, and I had told her soon, and we both knew I was lying. Reporters were probably camped out in the hospital lobby, waiting for me to show up with flowers and a guilty expression so they could snap their photos and run their headlines. Julian Fisher: Cheating Husband, Neglectful Son, All-Around Disaster. Not today. I would deal with my mother’s revenge fantasies after I had dealt with the more pressing matter of my wife.

I had returned home late last night, slipping through the back entrance like a burglar in my own house, and I had remained indoors all day with the curtains drawn and the lights low. I called my assistant and arranged for two dresses to be delivered to the apartment, one for Scarlett and one for Jasmine, the kind of dresses that were designed to be peeled off slowly by a man who thought he was the one in control.

The irony of funding Dominic Ford’s fantasy while plotting his destruction was not lost on me, but I had long since made peace with the fact that revenge was an expensive business, and I was willing to pay whatever price the universe demanded.

The drive to the apartment took twenty minutes, and I took the back roads the entire way, avoiding the main thoroughfares where a stray reporter might recognize my license plate. By the time I pulled into the parking

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garage, the knot of anticipation in my stomach had tightened into something almost pleasurable.

Tonight was the night. Tonight, Dominic Ford would perform for my cameras like a trained monkey, and by tomorrow morning I would have enough footage to bury him so deep even his money wouldn’t be able to dig him

out.

When I stepped into the apartment, I was greeted by the familiar scent of perfume and anticipation, and then the scene in the living room stopped me dead in my tracks.

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