1. Chips and Broken Glass #2
To be wanted by someone like him. To have those dark eyes focused on me not as a dealer, not as an employee, but as a woman. Those hands, large, long-fingered, the glint of a heavy silver ring, on my skin.
The thought is so vivid, so sudden, that heat floods my face.
Stop it. Stop it right now.
I'm nothing. Less than nothing. I'm a mouse surviving on breadcrumbs, and some days not even that.
I work double shifts to cover my brother's debts.
I haven't bought new clothes in two years.
I can't remember the last time someone touched me with anything resembling desire.
I can't even remember the last time I wanted them to.
Men like Sebastian York don't look at women like me. Not really. Not for anything that matters.
And yet.
And yet he's still here, a dark star exerting its own gravity, pulling me into his orbit despite every rational thought screaming to keep my eyes down and my mind blank.
I deal another hand. My player busts. The house wins.
"Efficient."
The word is quiet. Meant for me, not the table. I look up before I can stop myself.
He's studying my hands. The way I handle the cards. Something about his expression, the faint narrowing of his eyes, the slight tilt of his head, makes me feel like I'm being assessed. Measured. Valued.
"Thank you, sir." My voice comes out steadier than it should.
His gaze lifts from my hands to my face. Something flickers in those dark eyes. Too fast to catch, too intense to ignore.
"You're welcome."
And then he's moving. Stepping back from the table. Turning toward the private rooms at the back of the casino, where the real money changes hands and people like me never go.
He doesn't look back.
I stand at my table, cards in hand, and try to remember how to breathe.
The break room is empty when I finally escape. Fifteen minutes of freedom. Fifteen minutes to collapse into a plastic chair and press my cold hands to my face. Fifteen minutes to wonder what the hell just happened out there.
Nothing happened. That's the answer.
Nothing happened because nothing could happen. I'm nobody, and he's Sebastian York. The very idea that he was looking at me with any kind of intention is laughable. Pathetic. The kind of fantasy I read about in dog-eared paperbacks, not the kind of thing that happens in real life.
But my heart is still racing.
I dig my phone out of my locker. No messages. No missed calls. That's good. That means Bennett hasn't gotten himself into anything catastrophic in the last eleven hours. The bar for good news in my life is devastatingly low.
I pull up a blank text to him, start typing, then delete it. He's probably asleep. Or high. Or both. I don't actually want to know which.
Instead, I sit in the plastic chair and let my head fall back against the wall.
The fluorescent light hums overhead, institutional and unkind.
In books, the break rooms of casinos are glamorous.
Velvet couches, champagne fridges, soft lighting that makes everyone look beautiful.
In reality, it's a windowless box with vending machines and a coffee maker that's older than I am.
Sebastian York.
I can't stop thinking about the way he looked at me. The weight of it. The duration. Like he was seeing something that I couldn't see, finding something that I didn't know I had.
I know what the other dealers say about him. The whispers that circulate through the staff like underground rivers, surfacing in break rooms and parking lots, traded over cigarettes and shift changes.
Cold. Ruthless. The kind of man who builds empires on the bones of anyone stupid enough to cross him.
They say he started with nothing, or close to it. That he clawed his way up through the casino business with a combination of brilliant instincts and brutal methods. That the Moreno family used to own this town, and now they're second-tier because Sebastian York decided he wanted to be first.
They say other things too. Quieter things. The kind of rumors that make people glance over their shoulders before they speak.
The Obsidian Club. Private parties. Contracts that last for months, sometimes years. Women who enter his orbit and emerge changed. If they emerge at all.
I don't know what's true. I don't know if any of it is true. But I know the way my body responded when he looked at me, and I know that response should terrify me more than it does.
The door crashes open.
I'm on my feet before I process what I'm seeing, some reflex from years of bracing for impact, and then the shape in the doorway resolves into a face I know better than my own.
Bennett.
No. No, no, no.
He's not supposed to be here. He's never come here. This is the one place that's mine, the one corner of my life he hasn't touched. Now he's standing in the doorway with wild eyes, sweat on his upper lip, and that look. That look. The one that means something is very, very wrong.
"Chloe." My name comes out broken. Cracked down the middle.
"You can't be here." I'm moving toward him, hands up like I'm approaching a spooked animal. "Benny, you can't be here, I'm at work?—"
"I know. I know, I'm sorry, I didn't have anywhere else—" He's shaking. His whole body. And now the rest registers: bloodshot eyes, tremor in his hands, jaw that won't stop moving. He's high. Or coming down. Or both.
"What did you take?"
"Doesn't matter. Chloe, listen to me?—"
"What did you take?"
He grabs my shoulders. Too tight. Fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, frantic energy running through him like electricity.
"I'm dead." His voice drops to something barely above a whisper. "I'm dead. Three days. Maybe less. They're going to kill me."
The words don't land right. They bounce off the surface of my brain, refusing to penetrate. This is a drama. A performance. Bennett is always in crisis, always spiraling, always one bad decision from catastrophe. I've pulled him back from a hundred edges.
"Okay." My voice comes out steady. Calm. The voice I use at the table when a player loses everything and starts to cry. "Okay. Tell me what happened."
"The debt. I thought—I thought I could fix it. I had a system, I swear, I had a system, but the cards didn't fall right and I kept thinking the next hand, the next hand, and then?—"
"How much?"
He doesn't answer. His eyes slide away from mine.
"How much, Bennett?"
"Two-point-three."
The number doesn't register. Thousand? That's bad, but I've dug him out of twenty thousand before. Sold Mom's jewelry, took on extra shifts, lived on rice and beans for six months.
"Million."
The floor tilts.
I grab the edge of the table to keep from falling. Two point three million dollars. The number is so vast it's almost abstract, like talking about the national debt or the distance to the sun. Impossible. Unreal.
"That's not—" My mouth is moving but the words aren't working right. "That's not possible. You don't have access to that kind of?—"
"They extended my line. The Moreno family. They kept extending it, and I kept thinking I could win it back, and?—"
"The Morenos." My blood goes cold. Actually cold, ice water flooding my veins.
The Moreno family doesn't extend credit to small-time gamblers.
The Moreno family plays at levels I can't even conceptualize.
And they don't send collection notices. They send body bags. "Bennett. Bennett. What did you do?"
His hands tighten on my shoulders. The shaking is getting worse.
"I fixed it." The words come out strange. Hollow. "I fixed it. It's okay. It's going to be okay."