6

Scarlett's POV 

I sat in the back of the car, then stared out the window and felt the weight of the evening pressing down on me like a nail on my chest.

Our bedroom was cold as usual. Luca kept the heating low on his side and I had stopped fighting about it six months into our marriage, which perhaps briefed you everything you needed to know about how our marriage went. 

I changed out of the dress and sat on the edge of the bed in the darkness, running to the VIP lounge over and over again in my head like a recording on my playlist. 

His voice came around like a pinch. A whisper of domination.

"You're not this clumsy."

"Stop seducing me."

"Whatever foolish mission you think you're on."

I stood still and speechless. 

Mission? 

He had used that word once before I dropped the glass, when I first walked in and he looked at me. "Why does my daughter-in-law suddenly look like she is here on another mission?" 

And then he used it again at the end. Two times in one conversation, and I had been so curious  that I had not stopped to sit with what that word actually meant.

Another mission?

I stood up from the bed.

My heart had started beating with the sticks of violence in my chest. I pressed my hand flat against my sternum and stood in the dark of the bedroom, then tried to breathe through what my brain was working out.

"Another" implies a previous one. "Another" implied he had seen me do this before. "Another mission" was not the language of a man who had just met a clumsy woman. It was the language of a man who had watched this happen once already and was watching it happen again.

From the moment I walked through that door with a tray in my hands and called him Daddy, he had known exactly what I was doing.

I wasn't his suspect, he actually knew, the way I recognised it. 

I sat back down on the bed and slowly. My legs were not working properly.

If Dominic Vance already knew I was on a mission, and if he had walked into that VIP lounge with that consciousness, already armed and already three moves ahead of me, then every second I had spent thinking I was playing him had actually been him playing me

And if that was true or real.

Then why was he still alive?

In my previous life, the moment he suspected betrayal, he moved. He was not a man who waited politely for his enemies to strike first. He was the man who struck first and explained himself later on, usually over the body of whoever had made the mistake of underestimating him.

So why had he dismissed me, poured himself a drink and let me walk out of that room with my heartbeat and my secrets intact?

What was he waiting for?

I lay back on the cold sheets and stared at the ceiling in the darkness, and the question sat on my chest like a corpse. 

What game was he playing?

I was still staring at the ceiling two hours later when my phone buzzed on the bedside table. I grabbed it without thinking twice. 

The number on screen was unknown, and left me one message.

Not a text message though. 

Just a photograph.

The picture carries a view of me in the VIP lounge corridor, taken from behind, from a camera I had never had knowledge of, the timestamp reading four minutes after I walked out of the Alpha's door. My back against the wall, fist pressed to my chest, head bowed.

Someone had been watching that corridor the entire time.

And whoever sent me this photograph wanted me to know it.