11. Ana
11
ANA
“ Carte ,” I murmured, my eyes on the cards, rapidly counting in my head. The dealer raised an eyebrow—at eighteen, asking for another hit at Blackjack wasn’t a sound strategy. Unless I was trying to lose.
“ Vingt-quatre ,” the dealer said after laying a six face up in front of me. Twenty-four. Thank fucking god.
I shifted in my chair, hoping my nerves looked like disappointment. My focus on the count wavered for a moment when I met the dealer’s amused eyes. His gaze dropped to the swell of my breasts, and I waited for him to look up before licking my lips and winking.
“ Encore .” I caressed the diminishing stack of chips in front of me, trailing a finger over the plastic and the table, knowing all the men at the table imagined my perfectly manicured nails scraping against their dicks.
All the men except one. Jean-Marc, the ringleader of our con, sat two seats down, handsome and confident, also counting cards, but with far less dexterity. Card counting wasn’t the play here, though. His quick fingers were, adding chips to the table when his cards were good and when the dealer was looking at me. And the pit boss. And any surveillance, hopefully.
Light shimmered over a sequined dress that had cost me every penny I’d earned from running small cons in southern France over the past three weeks. I looked like a million bucks. Gorgeous, expensive, and like I had money to burn—like my old self, the person I’d abandoned when I’d dashed off that luxury yacht with the clothes on my back and stolen jewelry stuffed into a purse, desperate to escape the abuse I’d suffered at sea.
I signaled for a glass of champagne and smiled at the table.
“Blow on my chips for luck?” the man beside me asked.
“I don’t seem to be having much of it myself,” I murmured.
“Maybe both of our luck will change with this,” he said with a wink, holding a thousand-euro chip to my lips. Instead of blowing on it, I leaned forward and kissed it.
He dropped it in front of me, then held up another chip, for five thousand euros. “Give daddy another kiss, ma chérie .”
Fucking gross. I did it anyway, giggling and playing the game. The pit boss watched me with cold eyes but didn’t say a word. Fine. It was fine. I was a dumb American tourist playing at scamming a casino. Clumsy and inelegant at my attempts to count cards. I wanted them to think it was cute . Worth letting me continue so they could continue to watch my breasts above my low-cut dress, threatening to spill out with each enthusiastic exclamation, every time I leaned over the table.
Exhilaration rushed through my veins as we played, my pile of chips remaining steady. The dealer could have shuffled, but I kissed a hundred-euro chip and tossed it at him, winking.
Could I be any more obvious?
Should I be more obvious?
I ignored Jean-Marc and turned my focus back to the dealer. Twelve. Hmmm. The cards left in the deck were low. Or should have been.
The dealer laid down another card in front of me. Sixteen.
“ Carte ,” I said again.
To my delight, it was a five.
“ Vingt-et-un ,” the dealer said. I waited patiently for the other players to finish, and then the handsome dealer pushed my chips at me.
I tipped him again, and he grinned, revealing straight white teeth and a pretty smile I might have let persuade me into bed in another life. Not this one, though.
No clocks. No way of telling time. Just the endless shuffle of cards, the dim light of the casino that turned us all more beautiful than we were in real life, and the clack of plastic chips hitting one another.
We played hand after hand. Triumph rose in my chest as Jean-Marc’s winnings grew and mine remained even, and I allowed myself a moment to daydream of freedom.
And then he lost. Big. Not enough to cut into his winnings, but enough to sour the mood at the table.
That was my signal. I collected my chips and slid them into the empty rack beside me.
“I’d like to close out,” I said, pushing the rack at the dealer. Rapidly, he exchanged my chips, leaving me with nine chips of a hundred euros, and a handful of smaller chips, then passed a card across the table to me with a wink.
His number.
I smiled, shoved another chip at him, then swept the rest into my purse, my hands trembling. We were done. Almost done. All I needed to do was cash out and walk my pretty ass out of the casino, and then I’d be home free.
“ Mademoiselle ,” a gravelly voice said as I pushed back from the table.
“ Oui? ”
The two men standing behind me were huge, thugs forced into suits so they wouldn’t look like the criminals they were in a fancy casino like this one.
The man beside me flinched, but I was born and raised in the American mafia. It’d take a lot more than a tattooed thug in a suit to scare me.
“ Le patron aimerait vous parler .” The boss wanted to speak with me. Shit shit shit shit shit.
I stood, allowing the short, sequined hem of my dress to drape high over my thighs rather than tug on it and reveal my nerves. The men handling Jean-Marc lifted him by his arms as he struggled. Idiot. Act the innocent , I thought at him, willing him to understand the right play here.
I might be relatively new to small cons, but my scumbag father had taught me all about how to cheat and lie.
The two goons sandwiched me, one in front and one behind, leading me through the maze of high-stakes tables and into a nondescript hallway.
“ Ne faites pas le con ,” one of them cautioned when they noticed me looking for an escape. Don’t be an idiot.
“I won’t,” I said in English, loath to reveal I spoke French fluently.
“ Très bien ,” the other answered before unlocking a door with his thumbprint. “ Le patron n’a pas de patience pour la pagaille ,” he said, when the door opened. Too bad I was made of trouble these days.
The door opened with a loud ka-chunk , revealing a long concrete hallway lit with flickering fluorescent lighting and nondescript doors on either side. The men led me into a room and shoved me into a chair.
“We don’t appreciate cheats here,” one of them said. “Especially ones working with criminals like Jean-Marc St. Etienne.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I protested as they tied my legs to the legs of the chair, spreading my knees obscenely. One of them peeked between my legs and made an appreciative noise before attaching my arms behind me.
The reality of my situation caught up to me as I realized how much trouble I was in. “Let me go!”
The two thugs laughed. “Fucking American tourists who think we’re less sophisticated than Vegas because we’re not American. You’re wrong, you stupid little girl. And now you’re going to pay for it.”
A third man entered the room. He was tall, imposing, and wore a suit that cost more than I’d made today, that was for damn certain. Handsome, or would have been if my eyes hadn’t caught on the brass knuckles wrapped around his tattooed fingers. My heart pounded a mile a minute as I ran through my options. If they figured out who I was, they might not touch me, but then I’d be on the first flight back to Yorkfield.
Or Angelo would hand me right back to Grégoire Tchérnov, and I’d find myself back on that yacht, drugged so he could rape me yet again, or worse, force me into marriage like my father had intended. No thank you.
I opened my eyes wide and relaxed my knees, so my skirt rode further up my thighs. He tilted my chin up with one gloved finger. “I see you spreading your legs for me like the stupid American pute you are. That won’t save you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I insisted.
The thug in the suit sneered at me. “You’re a filthy cheat, and you’re going to get what filthy cheats deserve.”
“How could I be cheating? I didn’t win anything!”
I hadn’t. I’d closed out with almost exactly as much as I came in with.
“Jean-Marc did,” the thug said. “You’re lucky the stakes were low today, little thief.” His blue eyes sliced through me, cold and deadly. “And you’re lucky you’re pretty enough that I regret what I’m going to do next.”
Who the fuck is this man?
My mind raced through my knowledge of French organized crime and came up empty. He backed up and backhanded me hard enough to snap my head to the side. Blood filled my mouth.
Shit.
I resisted the urge to harden, to show this putain du merde exactly who he was dealing with. Instead, I whined and let my eyes fill up with tears.
He chuckled. “Regretting your life choices now?”
A fourth man entered the room. “ Patron? L’autre dit que c’est elle la responsable. Qu’elle a organisé l’équipe pour ganger gros .”
Shit. Jean-Marc was ratting me out, lying to save his own miserable ass.
“ C’est faux ,” I snapped, keeping my accent terrible in an effort to further hide my antecedents. They didn’t need to know I’d been raised in expensive private schools and spoke several European languages fluently. “ C’est Jean-Marc le cerveau. ”
“Stupid fucking Americans,” the main thug mused. “I don’t actually give a fuck who was in charge. Both of you will get the same lesson.”
He punched me in the stomach, and this time, the groan came naturally.
The man worked me over methodically, boredom written on his face—quick blows to my sides, and then one more on my chin that left me reeling.
He nodded to the two thugs remaining in the room, who each hit my ribs and my face, leaving me moaning in pain. They were good. I didn’t think anything was broken, just bruised and bloody.
The man in a suit surveyed me, exhausted, in pain, tears streaming down my face, as I slumped in the chair. In my previous life, I never would have permitted myself the weakness of crying. But in this one? Anything to convince these assholes to let me go.
The door opened again. “ Patron? ” Boss?
“ Pas maintenant ,” he snapped. Not now.
“C’est important .” The man in the suit turned to face the new interlocutor. “ Elle, c’est une Costa, la nièce de Angelo Costa .” Shit.
“ Et alors? ” So what?
“ Le partenaire de Valentin Rochefort. ” Valentin Rochefort was my uncle’s longtime partner.
“ Merde. ”
My sentiments exactly.
They’d found me.