Alien Devil’s Pride (Vinduthi Captured Mates #3)

Chapter 1 Varrick

VARRICK

The Lyrikan hit the table so hard the chips jumped.

“Where's my payout?” His pale face flushed with rage, eyes shifting from silver to angry red. “Ninety-three to one. I saw it. Everyone saw it!”

“Sir, the system is recalculating.”

“The system showed me WINNING!”

From my vantage point across the casino floor, I tracked the security team's convergence on the scene.

The Lyrikan's rage made sense. The odds matrix had promised one payout, delivered a fraction of it, then crashed entirely.

Three other players at the same table were already shouting, demanding their credits back.

The cocktail of recycled air and industrial cleaning fluid hit my nose as I stepped fully into the station. Casino hubs all smelled the same. Desperation and bleach. But this one carried an extra note. Decay.

The probability matrix above the failing table finally stabilized on a number that satisfied no one. The Lyrikan grabbed his remaining chips and stormed off, still cursing. Security dispersed. The dealer slumped in her chair, exhausted.

I'd seen that exact failure pattern before. In beta testing. Seven years ago, when I'd first written the mathematics that governed every game in this place. Seven years without updates, without adaptation, and the code was finally collapsing under its own obsolescence.

The main casino floor sprawled before me, three stories of neon and noise. Hundreds of tables, thousands of players, all of them trusting in probabilities I'd designed. I moved deeper, cataloging what I saw.

At Gravity Well, the projected odds kept resetting mid-game. Players bet on red, the ball landed on red, but the payout calculated for black. Then it corrected. Then overcorrected.

A card game called Collapse paid out triple on a guaranteed loss. The Nerath player collecting the credits looked confused by his luck. The house looked murderous.

Star Fall, the dice game in the corner, couldn't maintain consistent probability matrices for more than six rolls. The display above it showed odds that jumped between mathematically sound and complete chaos.

My code. My mathematics. All of it dying.

My jaw ached. I forced myself to unclench it.

I didn’t have the time to care. I was here for something else.

The high-stakes mezzanine hung above the main floor, suspended on pillars of black glass and criminal wealth. Real gold fixtures caught the light. A current of genuine risk flowed between the tables. This was where the serious players came. The ones with credits to burn and everything to lose.

I climbed the stairs.

The dealers up here moved differently. More polish, less fear. Still indentured, still trapped, but they'd learned to survive through skill rather than just endurance. You could see it in how they held themselves. Spines straight, eyes carefully neutral, trained to be invisible.

Then I saw her.

A human female, standing at the premier table, dealing Flux to a collection of wealthy degenerates who'd never notice what she was doing. But I did.

Her hands moved in perfect rhythm, sorting and dealing without conscious thought. Muscle memory so deep it freed her mind for other work.

She tracked everything.

The Mondian in seat three touched his throat before every bluff. She'd already cataloged it, adjusted her shuffle to compensate. The Orlian in seat five had a betting pattern that revealed her internal count. The dealer had restructured the deck flow to neutralize it.

Behavioral analysis. Real-time probability adjustment. Pattern recognition that would have taken any algorithms fifty hands to achieve, and she was doing it in five.

Without augments. Without camera. Just her mind and those dark eyes that missed nothing.

She glanced up, scanning the mezzanine for new players. Her gaze swept over me, cataloging and assessing the same way it moved over everyone else.

For barely a second, our eyes met.

My pulse jumped. Heat spread through my chest, my blood singing in a way that had nothing to do with mathematics and everything to do with recognition. Not destiny. Not fate. Just genuine, physical interest in someone whose mind clearly matched mine in ways I hadn't calculated for.

Then her attention returned to her table. No flicker of interest. No acknowledgment. Maybe she’d be useful. Maybe she’d have information.

She was worth investigating, at the very least.

I made myself move, taking the empty seat as another player collected his chips and left.

“Buy-in is ten thousand minimum.” Her voice was neutral, smooth as the felt stretched across the table. “House rules on the display, standard Flux variants apply.”

I placed fifty thousand in chips on the table. Not to impress her, that wouldn't work. To establish that I had resources, that I belonged here, that I was worth her time.

She converted my chips to playing stacks. Those elegant fingers sorted them into denominations without looking. When she dealt my first hand, our fingers might have brushed. Might not have. Her expression gave me nothing either way.

The other players barely registered my presence. I played three hands straight, deliberately losing each one. But not randomly. The loss pattern was specific.

A Ter'gathi variant, modified to say something. A sequence with a message embedded. She’d either spot it or she wouldn’t.

She dealt the next hand without a single change in rhythm. No acknowledgment. No response.

“Rough luck,” the ambassador muttered, his gaze following the dealer's rake as it claimed my chips. “This table's been cold all night.”

“Luck is irrelevant.” I kept my eyes on the dealer. “It's all mathematics.”

Nothing. Not even a micro-expression. She collected the chips, her movements flowing into the next deal as if I'd commented on the weather.

The Nexian matriarch went all-in on a terrible hand. Lost everything. One of the Poraki at the next seat stood as she stormed off. “Thanks, Sabine,” he muttered, collecting his modest winnings.

She nodded without looking up.

The other Poraki tried to run their scam on me. I let them start, just to see how she'd handle it.

She shut them down without saying a word. Just dealt the cards in a sequence that made their system impossible to execute. They didn't even realize she'd done it. Just looked at each other, confused, and quit while they were ahead.

Careful. Controlled.

And giving me absolutely nothing.

I leaned forward to place another bet, close enough that she'd have to either back away or hold her ground.

She held, but only because backing away would have interrupted her deal.

When I asked for a card and deliberately brushed her fingers, she pulled her hand back to exactly the distance required. No closer. No farther.

Maybe I caught her breathing change once. A slightly shorter inhale when I shifted and my shadow fell across her hands. But it could have been anything. Concentration. Annoyance. Nothing.

After losing thirty thousand credits in my carefully coded pattern, I gathered my remaining chips.

“I think I'll call it a night.” I stood, making the announcement to the table at large.

“Thank you for playing, sir.” The same words she'd said to every other player who'd left. The same tone. A practiced curve of her lips that never reached her eyes.

I left the table and headed for the exit.

But as I walked away, I found myself thinking about that one moment when our eyes first met. The way she'd cataloged me with that same cold assessment she used on everyone. Except my body had responded like she'd touched me.

Interest. Attraction. Something primal that didn't care about her ice-wall attitude or my objectives.

I could do this job alone. But it would be easier to have someone on the inside. Someone smart. Someone curious. And humans were always desperate.

Besides…

No. That’s all it was. Do the job. Retrieve the piece of the Regalia. Get back to the Penumbra.

She didn’t matter to me any more than that, and neither did my past.