Chapter 9
CINDY
Four days after the salon, Sevastian calls me himself, which he never does, and says exactly one sentence. “Wear something that makes men stupid and come read a card game for me.” Then he hangs up before I can get a word in.
I stand in my kitchen deciding whether to be insulted. I decide to be insulted at the casino.
So that’s how I end up back at Dust to Dust on a slow weeknight, except this time there’s no party.
No chandeliers. No audience in couture. The floor sits half empty, quiet, just the slot banks chiming to themselves, a few insomniacs feeding them their last twenties.
Sevastian is waiting for me at the bottom of the escalator in a charcoal suit with no tie, collar open.
The first thing I think, the very first thing, is filthy enough that I’m glad it can’t be heard.
Here’s the problem with this man. He’s a criminal.
He kills people. He owns me on paper and I hate every inch of that.
None of it does one single thing to stop my body from doing a slow, hot roll the second I see him, because he is, objectively, unfairly, the best-looking thing I’ve laid eyes on in my whole sorry life.
The open collar shows a wedge of inked chest I want to put my mouth on. The suit is cut close enough that I know exactly what’s under it, all that hard muscle, the wide shoulders, the way he moves like every inch of him knows its own weight. I’ve had my hands on that body.
I know what his stomach feels like under my palms, the ridge of the scar, the heat of him.
My thighs press together without asking my permission, my nipples going tight under the dress.
I have to reset my whole face before I reach him so I don’t walk up looking like exactly what I am, which is a woman trying very hard not to think about his cock in a public casino.
“You called me yourself,” I say. “What happened to the cryptic texts?”
“This one’s time-sensitive.” His eyes drag down me slow, snag on the dress, which is black and tight, ending about a decade too high, then climb back up unhurried, like he’s got all night to look. The look goes through me low in the belly and pulls. “You wore the right thing.”
“You gave me a dress code. I followed it.”
“You make exactly one man stupid.” He says it low, just for me, his voice dropping into a register I feel in my teeth and other places. “Try to make him a Macau billionaire tonight instead of me.”
“And if I make you both stupid?”
“Then he loses a fortune, I lose the thread, and only one of us can afford it.” He sets my hand on his arm like punctuation. “Stay close. Look expensive. Read.”
The whale is exactly what you’d expect. Soft, rich, careful, with eyes like a lizard.
Sevastian seats me at his elbow at the baccarat table like an ornament, which is the cover, and under the cover I work the one skill I’ve been quietly good at my whole life without anyone paying me a dime for it. I read him.
I watch the whale’s hands. I watch the little tug at the corner of his mouth when his cards are good, the way his breath goes shallow when he’s bluffing, the half-second his eyes flick to his stack right before he folds.
He drinks baijiu with soda and touches the glass without drinking when his cards are garbage.
His watch could fund a small war, and he checks it when he’s nervous, like the time might save him. By the second shoe I know him better than his wife does, and his wife isn’t here, which I also know, because men tell me everything without saying a word.
Then I feed it all to Sevastian. Not in words.
Just my eyes. A glance, a slow blink, my hand turning a certain way on the felt, a private language the two of us build in real time without ever planning it.
Card by card I hand him the man’s whole soul, and he turns it into money, stack after stack of credit sliding across the table, a building’s worth of markers won on what I can see in another man’s face.
The cards hiss off the shoe. The chips click like bone china.
Money up here doesn’t clink or rustle, it purrs.
The trouble is I keep getting distracted by the dealer, by which I mean by Sevastian, who is not the dealer but might as well be the only other person in the room.
He’s rolled his sleeves up to play, forearms bare, the plain gold ring on his right hand catching the light every time he turns a card, and there is something deeply unfair about how good a man’s forearms can look.
I keep catching the line of his throat where the collar’s open.
The flex of muscle when he reaches for his stack.
The way his mouth goes when he’s about to take a man for everything he has, this small private curve that I have personally felt against my skin and would very much like to feel there again.
Every time he wins he glances at me, just a flick, ours, a secret in a room full of people, and I feel it between my legs every single time.
I’m supposed to be reading the whale. Instead I’m sitting here in a too-short dress getting wet at a card table because the scariest man in Nevada has good arms and keeps looking at me like I’m the prize, like the cards are just his excuse to keep me here.
God help me, it’s the most alive I’ve felt in years.
That’s the part nobody warned me about. That I’d be good at this.
That the thing which died with my knee, the competing, the being excellent at something, the sharp clean joy of winning, would come roaring back over a card table full of dirty money.
I’m winning with my mind. Somewhere in the third hour a pit boss brings the whale a plate of dumplings and me a club soda with lime, which is what I’ve been drinking all night, which nobody asked me about, which means somebody noticed.
It puts a lump in my throat in the middle of a card game, which is nobody’s business but mine.
Across the felt Sevastian catches my eye after a particularly brutal hand, and there’s a flash of something raw in his face that has nothing to do with the money. It makes me clench. I have to look back down at the cards before I do something undignified.
Then the whale ruins it.
He’s down a fortune and feeling chatty about it.
His soft hand comes down over my wrist where it rests on the felt.
It lingers. His thumb strokes once across my pulse, and he says something oily about how a man could forgive a lot of losing with a view like this.
It’s nothing. I’ve handled a thousand worse at the club.
At the Wet Sunset the procedure is a smile, a spin, two steps back before he’s noticed the distance.
Here, it turns out, I don’t get to finish the procedure.
I open my mouth to deal with it, smooth, professional.
I don’t get the chance.
The temperature at the table simply changes.
Sevastian goes still beside me, that specific stillness I’ve learned to fear, and when I look at him his face is doing nothing at all, which is the most dangerous thing it does.
He looks at the soft hand on my wrist. He looks at the whale.
He smiles, and the smile is so cold the man’s hand lifts off me like he touched a hot burner.
“I think you’re done for the night,” Sevastian tells him, pleasant as anything. Suddenly the whale is very interested in being elsewhere, security drifts in from the walls, and the game is over.
Then it’s just us, and the whole charged night, the win, the danger, the wanting, has nowhere left to go.
He doesn’t walk me to the floor exit. He takes my hand, the one the whale touched, and leads me through a door marked staff, then down.
A concrete stairwell drops under the casino, the glamour peeling off with every step.
The gold and the marble give way to bare walls, to buzzing fluorescent light, to a steel door with a keypad he opens without looking, like he could find it blind.
“If you’re taking me somewhere to disappear me, this is a great setup.”
“If I were going to disappear you, I’d feed you first.”
“That’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me, and that’s a true statement about my life.”
The count room is the opposite of everything upstairs.
No chandeliers down here. Just hard white light, a long steel table, money everywhere, banded bricks of it stacked in trays and towers, the beating heart of his whole rotten empire.
The air smells of paper and ink. It’s colder down here, refrigerator-cold, the kind of cold you keep money at.
Under the ink there’s a smell I’ll never get out of my head, dirt, hands, ten thousand wallets, the whole city’s wanting pressed into bricks. It’s the ugliest room I’ve ever been turned on in, and I am extremely turned on, because the second the steel door seals behind us he’s on me.
His mouth crashes down on mine, and the sound I make into it is pure relief, four days of wanting this breaking loose all at once. I shove my hands inside his open collar, push the jacket off his shoulders, desperate to get at that hard inked chest. He lets me strip it off him.
He lets me drag his shirt open, and then I get to look, really look, at what I’ve only had in the dark before.
The stars inked across his collarbones. The cathedral down his sternum.
The slabs of muscle, the scar at his side, the trail of hair vanishing into his waistband.
He is built like something a smart woman would run from, and I have never wanted to make a worse decision in my life.