Chapter 2 Dom
The reports don't lie. That's the thing about numbers. You can ignore them, you can bury them under justifications and maybes, but they sit there on the page and they say what they say. What these are saying is that someone is robbing me.
I spread the quarterly summaries across my desk and stare at them, as if looking harder will change what's there.
Table revenue for the main floor is down eleven percent over the last four months. The high-roller room is down eight.
Overall house take is off by enough that the discrepancy stopped being a statistical fluctuation weeks ago and became a pattern. Patterns in a casino mean one of two things: either your dealers have forgotten how to deal, or someone is cheating you.
My dealers have not forgotten how to deal.
I push back from the desk and stand. Twenty-three floors below, the city does what the city always does at ten o'clock on a Friday night. It glitters and hums. From up here the streets look clean. Everything looks clean from a sufficient height.
The office is large and expensively appointed and I hate it. I have always hated it. The leather chairs, the walnut desk, the original art on the walls.
None of it is mine, not really. This room belonged to my father before he moved his base of operations to the house upstate, and I inherited this place along with everything else: the casinos, the organization, the reputation.
The door opens without a knock. Only one person in the organization does that.
"You look terrible," Viktor says.
"Thank you."
He comes in and drops into the chair across from my desk with the ease of a man who has been sitting in that chair for fifteen years.
Viktor Petrov is fifty-four years old, built like a shipping container, and possesses a face that has never once in its entire existence attempted to be charming.
He is my underboss, my oldest ally, and the only person alive who can walk into my office unannounced and tell me I look terrible without risking a very bad day.
"Your father’s been calling you," he says.
"I know."
"He's worried about the numbers."
"I know that too." I don’t point out that it literally isn’t my father’s business anymore. We both know that.
Nikolai Novikov built this empire from a single back-room poker game in a rented warehouse. He ran it for thirty years with a combination of intelligence, brutality, and an absolute refusal to let anything — law, sentiment, other people's objections — get between him and a business objective.
Five years ago, he stepped back and handed the day-to-day to me.
Handed is a generous word. Handed implies a clean transfer.
What actually happened was a slow, grinding negotiation conducted over months, during which my father tested every decision I made, questioned every instinct I had, and made it clear through a thousand small humiliations that the empire was still his.
What he doesn’t realize is that the world has changed since he built his empire.
I have to make different choices. The old ways don’t always work as well.
But he still interferes. He still wants reports. He still makes it known, through Viktor and through others, that his expectations have not lowered.
Viktor picks up one of the reports from my desk, scans it, puts it down. "How bad?"
"Bad enough. Someone's running a game on us and it's not amateur hour. The losses are too consistent. It's coordinated."
"Card counters?"
I shrug. "We’ve had three this month. None of them are the source.
Small-timers, all of them. The kind who wins a few hundred and think they've beaten the house.
" I sit back down. "This is something else.
There's a ring. Has to be. Someone with inside access, coordinating with players on the floor. "
Viktor absorbs this with the expression of a man who has heard worse and probably has. "Dealers?"
"Maybe. Probably. I've pulled performance data on everyone working the affected tables but the analyst team are struggling. Whoever's doing this is smart enough to spread it around."
"The Castellanos?"
I look at him. It's the same thought I've had, sitting in this office for the past week, turning it over and over. The Castellano family has been making moves for months. Or at least Luca Castellano has been.
Just like I inherited this place from my old man, Luca has inherited his territory from his. Luca is the third of four Castellano brothers and the one with the most ruthless reputation.
The Castellanos and the Novikovs have had a mostly relaxed mutually beneficial agreement for decades. We don’t tread on each others’ turf. I’m not convinced Luca wants to keep that agreement.
"I don't know," I say, which is the truth and I don't like it. Not knowing is a luxury I can't afford. "Could be. The timing fits. Luca has been asking for a sit-down. Friendly terms. He says he wants to confirm territory boundaries."
"Confirm or change?" Viktor asks. It’s not really a question. We both know Luca is up to something.
My phone rings. The internal line this time — casino floor.
"Sir." It's one of the shift managers. "We've got a counter on table fourteen. Security's pulled him."
I pinch the bridge of my nose. Another one. "Profile?"
"Male, mid-twenties maybe. Name on it says Theodore Garnett. He won about two grand before the pit boss flagged him. He's good, sir. Took us longer than usual to spot him."
"Process him. Standard protocol. Get his photo for the database and walk him out."
"Already in hand, sir. But given the current... situation... I thought you'd want to know."
He's right to flag it, even if the odds are that this is just another small-timer with a good memory and a bad sense of self-preservation.
I should tell the shift manager to handle it. That's what floor staff are for. That's the hierarchy.
"I'll come down," I hear myself say. "Hold him in the security room. I want to talk to him myself."
There's a pause. The shift manager is smart enough not to question it but surprised enough that the silence lasts a beat too long. "Yes, sir."
I hang up. Viktor is looking at me.
"A card counter," he says.
"Could be connected."
"Could be a kid who read a book about blackjack and got lucky."
"Then it'll be a short conversation." He’s probably no one, but we’re being robbed.
I’m not going to catch the people who are doing it by ignoring the people doing it right in front of me.
Viktor stands when I stand, which is habit for him. He goes where I go, has done for years. We take the elevator down without speaking. The security room is on the second floor, tucked behind the main surveillance office.
It's a plain room: table, chairs, no windows. Functional. The kind of room designed to make people uncomfortable without being overtly threatening, though the distinction is mostly academic.
When you're sitting in a room in the basement of a casino owned by the Novikov family, the absence of overt threats is not particularly reassuring.
I reach the door. The shift manager is waiting outside. He gives me a nod and steps aside.
I open the door and walk in.
The smell hits me and the world stops.
Omega. Mine.
It’s so sharp and clean and so vivid that for a fraction of a second I can actually taste it on the back of my tongue. It bypasses every rational process in my brain and goes straight into my blood.
I stop in the doorway. My hand is on the frame. I am gripping the door frame because if I don't grip the door frame my legs are going to make a decision that the rest of me is not prepared for.
My vision has gone strange at the edges. The room is suddenly very small and very bright and there is an omega sitting at the table and he is the only thing in it.
He’s maybe mid-twenties. Slight build. Dirty blond hair that doesn't quite match his coloring, which means it's dyed, which means the disguise extends beyond the fake ID and the clear-lens glasses sitting slightly crooked on his face.
He's wearing a shirt that's too big for him and his hands are flat on the table and he's sitting very, very still.
I know what I'm smelling. I know what this is. The knowledge slams into me with a deeply primal surety. Mine.
This omega is mine.
Eight years ago, I got a Bureau notification. Prime match. Ninety-seven-point four percent. I never got to meet him. The omega vanished. The Bureau assigned a caseworker who couldn't find him, and eventually a woman with a tired voice called to say they were closing the file.
The omega’s name was Theo Holland and right now his scent is still filling the room. I don’t have proof that it’s him, but it has to be. No one else could stop me in my tracks like this.
I am still holding the door frame. Behind me, Viktor has gone very quiet, which means he's noticed the fact that I haven't moved or spoken in what is now an unreasonable amount of time.
I look at this omega — my omega — sitting at my table in my casino with my chips in his pocket and a fake name on his ID, and the fury arrives right behind the want.
He ran and now he's here. In my building. Stealing from me.
Whether that's coincidence or the worst decision he's ever made is a question I'll deal with later.
Right now, I need to do something about the fact that I am standing in a doorway like a man who's forgotten how to walk.
I let go of the frame. I make myself let go. The effort it takes is absurd. My fingers don't want to release. My body has decided that the only safe option is to remain anchored to something solid.
I step inside.
The omega at the table looks up at me and I watch his pupils dilate. It's involuntary. He can't help it any more than I can help the fact that my heart rate has doubled. Every nerve I own is oriented directly toward him.
"Everyone out," I say. My voice is level. I am unreasonably proud of this. "Viktor stays."
The two security men leave. The door closes.
Mine. I can feel it in every nerve I have. My entire body is orientated toward him.
I pull out the chair across from him and sit down, and the distance between us shrinks to four feet of table and a silence so dense I can hear him breathing.
His hands are flat on the table. Steady.
His chin is up, though, and there's something in the set of his jaw that isn't fear.
Defiance. My omega, sitting in my security room, looking at me like he's calculating whether he can get past me to the door.
He can't. But the fact that he's thinking about it does something to me I wasn't expecting.
I pick up his ID and turn it over. The photo doesn't do him justice.
I set it down and look at him. He's watching me carefully, but I can smell the way his body has responded to me. He knows who I am, just as I know who he is, but I can see that there is still hope in his eyes that I don’t know everything.
Maybe he’s hoping I’m a different alpha. That maybe it’s just a scent match and not the prime match that we both know we are.
"Nice to meet you, Theo Holland," I say. Not Garnett. I use his real name, the one on a Bureau file I read eight years ago in an office that used to belong to my father.
His face goes deadly pale, confirming that I am right.