Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 322

Chapter 322

“Do you mean it? Do you really mean it, Felix?”

“With all my heart. With everything I have. I will never leave you again. I will never hurt you again. I will be the man you deserve, Sierra. I swear it.”

Sierra reached out and touched his face, her fingers tracing the line of his jaw, wiping away a tear. “I love you, Felix. I have always loved you. Even when you ignored me. Even when you chose her over me. Even now.”

“I know.” He pressed her hand to his lips. “I know, and I do not deserve it. But I will. I will spend the rest of my life becoming the man who deserves your love.”

I stood in the doorway, watching this tableau of mutual delusion, and the anger that had been simmering in my chest since the moment Felix shoved Sierra finally, irrevocably, boiled over.

Not the hot, explosive anger that made people scream and throw things. Something colder. Something harder. Something that crystallized in my chest like ice forming on a winter pond, layer by layer, until it was solid enough to walk on.

He had just killed his own child. He had pushed a pregnant woman to the ground because she interrupted his tantrum, and now he was on his knees promising marriage and replacement babies as though children were interchangeable parts. And Sierra, poor broken Sierra, was eating it up with a spoon because she had nothing else

left.

I turned around and walked out of the room.

In the corridor, I pulled out my phone. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Somewhere down the hall, a patient coughed in the deep, rattling way that suggested lungs full of fluid. I scrolled through my contacts until I found the number for the city police department, and I dialed it with fingers that did not tremble.

The call connected on the second ring. A woman’s voice, professional and brisk.

“My name is Celeste Fisher.” I said calmly. “I would like to report a crime.”

The dispatcher asked questions. I answered them. Location, time, details of the incident. My voice did not waver. My hands did not shake. I felt as though I had been hollowed out and filled with something cold and clear and utterly without mercy.

When the call ended, I leaned against the corridor wall and waited.

The police arrived twenty-two minutes later. Three officers, two men and one woman, their uniforms crisp and expressions professionally neutral. I met them at the hospital entrance and led them through the corridors toward Sierra’s room, my heels clicking with the steady rhythm of a metronome. The female officer, her nameplate reading OFFICER RIVERA, walked beside me and asked follow-up questions, her voice low and even.

Inside Sierra’s room, the tableau had shifted. Sierra was sitting up, propped against a mountain of pillows, and Felix was on the edge of the bed, his arms wrapped around her, her head resting on his shoulder. They looked, for all the world, like a couple grieving together rather than what they actually were: a perpetrator and his victim, tangled up in each other because neither of them knew how to exist any other way.

I could not be bothered with their stupid display. I pointed at Felix. “Officers, that is the man.”

The three officers moved forward. Officer Rivera stepped toward the bed while the two male officers flanked her, hands resting on their belts. Felix looked up, his eyes widening, his arms loosening around Sierra.

“Sir, you are under arrest for aggravated assault resulting in…”

1/2

“No.”

+15 @phus

The word came from Sierra. She got off the bed and began walking toward me, moving slowly, painfully, her bare feet making soft sounds against floor, her hospital gown hanging loose on her diminished frame. The IV line had been pulled from her arm, a small spot of blood marking the crook of her elbow.

I was about to tell her it wasn’t safe for her to be out of her bed, when she stopped in front of me, raised her hand- and swung it toward my face.

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