Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 334

Chapter 334

But occasionally, without meaning to, I would glance at my phone.

The screen stayed dark. No missed calls. No new messages. No I’m sorry, something came up, let me make it up to you. No are you okay? No anything.

I did not have lunch. I had no appetite to eat anything whatsoever, and the granola bar I had stashed in my desk drawer three weeks ago tasted like cardboard and dust when I tried to force it down around three o’clock. I threw it away after two bites and went back to my samples.

By six o’clock, exhaustion settled into my bones like lead. A headache was coming on, the kind that started at the base of my skull and radiated forward until it lodged behind my eyes, and my shoulders ached from hunching over the bench for hours without a break. I peeled off my gloves and sat on the stool in the corner of the lab, staring at nothing, feeling the weight of the day pressing down on me from all sides.

There was no need to go back to Dominic’s mansion. If he was done with me, I would leave with my dignity intac I would not be the woman who showed up at his door pretending everything was fine, hoping he would change his mind, waiting like a fool for a man who had already decided she was no longer useful. I would sleep at Helix tonight. Tomorrow, I would find my own place. I could buy a building. I could buy a city block. I did not need Dominic Ford’s mansion.

I decided to go for a stroll to clear my head before going to bed. The evening air might help with the headache. The movement might loosen the knot in my chest. I walked out of Helix and into the amber glow of the streetlights, my shoes clicking against the pavement. I tried very hard not to think about the fact that this morning I had woken up in Dominic’s arms and now I was walking alone through a city that suddenly felt foreign and hostile and too large.

My heart was filled with a deep sadness, one I had never experienced before. Not when Julian’s affair with Seraphine came to light. Not when my own brother had accused me of kidnapping and threatened me in front of my entire staff. Not even when I had watched Sierra’s blood pool on the marble floor of my lobby and known that an innocent life was ending because of Felix’s obsession.

Those had been sharp, clean, explicable pains, the kind that came from external blows, from the cruelty of others, from circumstances I could name and catalog and file away. This was different. This had seeped into me like poison, spreading through every cell until I could not tell where the sadness ended and I began. This was the pain of having been given everything I had ever wanted and then watching it dissolve in my hands like sugar in water.

I tried my best not to let it show on my face, but I was doing a bad job of it. A man walking a terrier gave me a second glance as he passed. An elderly woman in a pink tracksuit asked me if I was all right and I nodded and said ” fine, thank you, just tired” in a voice that did not sound like my own.

I was strolling quietly, letting my feet carry me wherever they wanted to go, when my phone beeped.

I looked at the screen and my heart stopped. Then it started again, too fast, too loud, a frantic drumbeat against my ribs.

Dominic.

The message was brief, almost curt: Come to The Glass Conservatory at Sterling Gardens. Thirty minutes. I will be waiting.

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