by S. Massery
A man in a suit approaches from Jackson’s back. He parts the crowd. I look away, toward the slot machines. The man looks vaguely familiar, but anyone in his uniform would.
My father never took me to this casino. He never took me around to meet the security officers, either, or let me play cards with the grown-ups. Against my cousins, though, I always won.
Richie was the one who taught me how to count cards. My heart twists at the thought of him. There are two versions of my cousin: the one with a bullet wound in his chest, and the other flipping cards at my kitchen table, telling me each one’s worth.
“Sir,” the man says to Jackson. He glances up at the camera in the ceiling, embedded directly above our heads. “You’ve been invited by the owners to a private game.”
That line is bullshit, but it pays the bills.
Jackson gives him his best crooked smile and jerks his head at me. “Not without my lucky charm, heh, heh!”
The man pauses and presses his hand to the earpiece. “She can come,” he allows.
How generous of them.
We get up. Jackson collects his chips, dumping half of them into my hands, and we follow the man through the maze. “I don’t miss this kind of life,” he mutters to me. He sounds a hell of a lot more sober. The relief that sweeps through me makes me realize that I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. “The chaos. Peace has been nice.”
I glance at him. “You’re suited for it, though.”
He shrugs.
We follow the man to an elevator, which opens with a keycard. He holds the door open with his arm. “Go on in, Mr. Skye,” he says.
We both hesitate. Knowing our names wasn’t part of the deal. And yet, neither of us wants to back down from this fight.
“Thank you,” Jackson says evenly.
The man doesn’t even look at me.
A part of me shrieks, Trap! The other part is eager for what’s about to happen, whether it be bloodshed or trickery.
The elevator drops down at least three floors and comes to a gentle stop. The doors slide open, revealing a foyer with white marble floors and plush red velvet sitting chairs. A man smiles at us. “Welcome, Mr. Skye,” he says. “Right this way.”
He leads us through an arched doorway, to a lone table in the middle of a room that could’ve fit in an old-school gentleman’s club. Rich oak-paneled walls, dark furniture and low lights. Cigarette smoke hangs from the ceiling. There are already two men seated at the table.
The man who greeted us shows Jackson where to sit. He doesn’t give me a seat, but Jackson doesn’t miss a beat. He pulls me onto his lap and hooks his arm behind my back.
“Comfortable?” he says, grinning.
“Of course,” I answer. I would’ve said the same thing without an audience.
I recall the easy way he and his friends communicated by sign language, and I curse myself for not attempting to learn it in his absence. I only know enough to spell out words. The alphabet was the best I got.
While Jackson makes polite conversation with the two other men—it looks like we’re waiting on two other people—I nonchalantly scan the room. No cameras above us. No obvious cameras on the walls. There could be one in the bookshelf directly behind us, so I sigh and rest my head on Jackson’s shoulder. His hand comes up and strokes the back of my neck, eliciting a shiver that runs down my spine.
One woman and one man are brought in separately and shown their chairs. The greeter then takes a seat at the dealer’s chair and smiles at the players.
“Welcome to Paradise Hotel and Casino’s exclusive high roller table. You’ve been carefully selected because of your courageous bidding strategy, and we wanted to offer you the opportunity to win more money than you might think possible.” The dealer smiles. “There is a minimum bid of five thousand dollars. There is no maximum.”
The woman at the end of the horseshoe-shaped table sucks in a breath. Then she smiles. “Wonderful,” she murmurs.
The men nod their agreement. Jackson meets my eyes before grinning and declaring, “By the end of the night, you’ll wish you had my lucky charm.”
He leans in and presses a kiss to my lips.
I can’t help but lean into it. When we break apart, I glare at him, and then my eyes dart to my hand on my lap. He looks down.
E-x-i-t, I sign against the fabric of my dress.
He gives me a subtle shake of his head. He hasn’t spotted an exit besides the elevator, either. There has to be one—it’s just a matter of finding it.
“Any questions?” the dealer asks. We’re all silent. “Great. Let’s begin.”
Right away, I notice two things: the dealer is playing with a pre-shuffled deck, and the woman has no clue what she’s doing. I guess that she was invited here because she was on a lucky streak.
W-a-i-t, I sign to Jackson. I’m frustrated that I can’t speak up, that I can’t sign actual words, but when Jackson meets my eyes, I tilt my head toward the woman. Jackson winks at me and rides the minimum.
Twelve minutes after the game starts, the woman is out of money.
Another man appears from behind the curtained-off elevator room and gestures for her to follow him. “We’ll return you to the casino floor,” he says.
One down, three to go.
The game is smoother after this, but I gnaw on my lip as Jackson’s betting stays… timid.
The deck is hot. He should be betting bigger. I growl under my breath. “Snap out of it.”
He meets my eyes and frowns. But after that, he gets his head back in the game. Another man quits with five hundred dollars left. He’s escorted out.
The pile of chips in front of Jackson starts to grow. At one point, the dealer looks over my shoulder to the bookcase and raises his eyes. A woman walks into the room with a tray of glasses, and after she finishes serving the remaining players, she smiles at me. “Miss, would you like to freshen up?”
I raise my eyebrows. It’s a forward way of pulling me out of the room, but I roll with it. I’d bet that she’ll inadvertently show me the way to the vault. I shrug and stand, smoothing the front of my dress. Jackson doesn’t even look at me as I follow the woman out into the foyer. The only sign he’s even noticed is the tic in his jaw.
There’s a side door that is practically seamless next to the elevator. I curse myself for not noticing it when we came in. She swipes her card and it slides open. Down a short, darkened hallway, she pauses at the first door we come to. The hallway stretches beyond us and curves into shadows. She gestures me to step into a room filled with monitors. There’s a chair facing the screens, but the room is empty. There are live feeds of the casino, the game room Jackson is in, and hallways.
My eyes catch on what looks like a vault when the woman says, “Delia Moretti.”
I spin away from the screens and frown.
“We were surprised to see you here.”
A bad feeling drops like stones into my stomach. “My father never let me come here,” I say. A truth, but not the important one. “I wanted to stretch my wings.”
Her lips pout. The red uniform is garish against her pale skin. “Well you’ve certainly managed to get to the heart of the casino,” she says. “Although Mr. Elvira did say we were to notify him if we saw you.”
I tilt my head to the side. “Oh? Why’s that?”
She shrugs. “Something about your father’s dying wish.”
I snort. “He wasn’t there. How would he know?”
She crosses the room and picks up a phone. “I have a feeling you don’t want him to know you’re here,” she says.
I wait. Her motive is slipping into the open, inch by inch. Motive is the key to everything—a person’s wants, desires, the drive behind their actions. She can only guess at my motive, but in a minute, she’ll show me hers.
Her lips twist. “I hate your family,” she mutters. “All of you stare and let everyone else fill in the silence. It doesn’t work.”
I fold my arms over my chest and try not to p
oint out that it does work—it just did with her. I learned the trick from my father. I ask, “What do you want, then?”
“Money.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. “You’re in a casino. Instead of—well, I don’t know what your plan is. Blackmail? Kidnapping? Why don’t you try gambling?”
Her eyes widen, like she couldn’t have possibly thought of those horrible things.
My smile stretches. “You can go through with your threat, tell James that I’m here, and you’ll get something, I’m sure. A bonus, a pat on the head, who knows? Or you help me, and you can have whatever cash you can carry.”
She squints at me. “I can carry a lot.”
“I figured as much,” I mutter.
“What do you need help with?”
I step past her and sit at the chair in front of the monitors. “Show me this room,” I say. I kill the monitor to the vault as I speak.
She shakes her head. “It’s empty.”
“Bullshit.”
“Even if it wasn’t, Peter’s the only one who can get in.”
We’re going to have to do this the hard way. I sigh. “I need your phone,” I say. “Who else comes in here?”
“Just Peter,” she mumbles, pointing to the dealer on the screen. At the table, Jackson leans forward on his elbows and pushes most of his chips into the center of the table.
The woman slides the phone toward me.
I lift it off the receiver and call the last person I thought I’d ever talk to.
“Jeremy Skye,” the voice says.
“Hi, Spike. This is Delia Moretti. I need your help.”
26
JACKSON
Delia returns looking a little less shaken than when she left. She gives me a smile and kisses my temple. It’s just one other guy and me left, plus the dealer. A fat pile of chips sits in front of me. She sweeps her thumb over the spot she just kissed, erasing the lipstick I’m sure she left on my skin.
I can barely tear my eyes away from her dark red lipstick, the way it makes her lips look tantalizingly full. It reminds me of blood.
“You’re killing it,” she says. “Maybe we should cash out.”
I look at the dealer, who eyes Delia a moment before his eyes return to me. “You heard my lucky charm,” I declare. “I’m out of here.” I wiggle my eyebrows at the other player for good measure, getting a chuckle out of him.
“Peter,” she says.
The dealer’s head jerks up.
I narrow my eyes at her. He never said his name.
“We’re cashing out. Surely you can help us with that?” My voice is hard. I let him see that I’m completely sober. Cold. The jovial person he was entertaining moments ago was an act, one that I easily shrug off.
The dealer’s eyes are the size of dinner plates. A sweat has broken out across his brow.
“They’ll kill me for whatever you’re about to do,” he says to her.
“Maybe,” she agrees. She gestures to my pant leg.
Internally, I groan. I can’t believe she’s about to do this. And yet, I reach down and pull the small handgun from my ankle holster. My finger stays well off the trigger, but the dealer pales further. The other player scrambles back against the wall like I’m pointing the gun at him.
“We’re collecting,” Delia says. She jerks her head back toward the foyer, and we follow Peter. There’s a hidden doorway that opens onto a hallway once Peter swipes a card.
He keeps mumbling about someone killing him. His hands are up in the air, stretched high above him. “Please don’t kill me, please don’t make me do this,” he says, over and over.
I have no plans to kill him. Luckily, he doesn’t know that.
The woman who escorted Delia away bursts out of a room.
“What are you doing?” she yells at Delia.
Delia smiles, grabbing the woman and shoving her into the wall by her throat. “You should know better than to trust a Moretti,” she says. “You want cash so bad? Take the chips on the table.”
When Delia releases her, the woman rushes back the way we came. I raise my eyebrows, but Delia just shrugs.
The dealer stops in front of a steel door. “I can’t—”
“She said you could,” Delia interrupts. “Was she lying?”
“She—”
“Hey,” I murmur. He jerks toward me. “You lie, you get a bullet in your thigh. You get us in there, you get to walk away. Got it?”
“I can open it,” he sighs. I imagine it feels better, to know if he can do this, he’ll be safe—from us, at any rate. There’s no telling what Elvira would do.
The door is equipped with a retinal and thumb scanner. In a matter of seconds, he has it open. Delia pushes past him, into the room, and freezes.
The whole room is empty.
“Figures,” she mutters.
She came in here with a master plan, only to be two steps behind. I know how that feels—it’s happened to me before. But to see the realization hit her… it hurts.
“You’ve been staying with your brother?” she asks, overturning trays and opening cabinets. There’s not a single penny in this room.
“Yeah,” I mutter. “Why?”
She shakes her head. “Get in there,” she says to Peter. He looks at me, until I raise my eyebrows at him.
He obeys, and she slams the door closed. I’m hoping he decides to stay put.
Delia continues, “I realized we needed to bring down the whole security firm. Take away where they clean their money—that’s how we paralyze them. I was hoping that lady was lying about the room being empty.” She jerks her thumb back the way we came. The woman in question is gone.
Still, I pull her to me and kiss her lips. “I’m impressed with your sudden vigilante-ness.”
She winks at me. “Thanks, babe.”
My dick stirs, and I internally roll my eyes at myself. Calm down, body.
“Why were you asking about my brother?” I ask instead.
She smirks. “You gotta love a vice detective,” she murmurs. A light on the alarm box above us starts flashing, illuminating the hall and bouncing off of the polished floor in strobe. “Come on, we’re going to be late.”
“What did you do?” I call as she starts jogging. In heels. “Are you superhuman?”
Her laugh echoes back to me. “Spike helped me shut down the elevators. Well, it was Mason. Same difference.”
“Oh my god.” I pick up my pace. “You talked to my brother?”
“Don’t worry,” she says when I finally catch up to her. She swipes Peter’s keycard—I didn’t even see her grab it—and the door in front of us buzzes. It opens onto a stairwell. “He won’t be able to get out.”
“The dealer is a small fish, though—”
“Don’t be naive, Jackson,” she interrupts. We start going up the stairs. A million stairs. She starts puffing before I do, but she refuses to slow down. “Peter runs the show. He’s also a supervisor in the security firm. Did you see the sweat? He’s going to turn on them faster than—”
An alarm starts shrieking, echoing in the concrete stairwell.
“What the hell is that?” I ask. I have to yell. The alarm reverberates in my skull.
She presses her palms over her ears. “That’d be—”
“Fucking hell, Skye!”
Mason.
“I can’t believe you let her rope you into this,” I yell at him as he rushes down the stairs toward us. Once he gets to us, he starts pushing Delia up the stairs faster.
“Who set the alarm off?” Delia asks Mason.
“I did. But the alarm seals all the exits.”
I scowl at him. “That’s a bit backwards for an alarm, don’t you think?”
“This is a lockdown alarm. We’ve got about three seconds before we get sealed in—”
We get to the top floor and shove the door open. Once it swings closed behind us, it’s like nothing happened. There are no alarms on the casino floor, no confusion or panic. The only flust
ered ones are us. “What the hell?”
Mason rolls his eyes. “The alarms are for personnel only. It’ll be going off upstairs, too, but not on the floor—not unless there was a call to evacuate.”
“The clients’ safety is the casino’s ultimate goal, but keeping them calm and betting is the second highest priority.”
“Makes sense,” I mutter. “No one seems to know…” My words die in my throat as I spot my brother, decked out in a bullet proof vest and a SWAT team behind him, sweeping through the casino. “Seems they didn’t get the memo for keeping people calm.”
Mason shrugs and eyes Delia. “Hate to say it, Delia, but I think your cover is blown.”
She presses her lips together.
“Mason,” I say, “can you erase Delia and my presence here?”
“Already done. Why do you think it took me so long to get here? That’s not going to account for… well, literally everyone in the casino that could talk.”
She grinds her teeth together. “The whole point of this was so I could go home and see the reaction. If some of my family isn’t involved in James’ scheme, then they won’t freak out. Besides, I have stuff at the house that I need to collect.”
We follow Mason out into the cool night. I love that the nights are so different from the scorching days—I can actually breathe in the dark. My anxiety about Delia’s safety, though, is having a different effect on my lungs.
She wraps her arms around me, and some of that worry loosens. “You know what you can do?” she asks.
I look down at her. “What?”
“You can kiss me,” she says.
I pretend to think about it for a minute. I can’t blurt out what I’m thinking: I’d spend a lifetime kissing her if I could.
“I can,” I say, ducking down and pressing a kiss to her cheek.
“Jackson,” she groans, tipping her head all the way back. I admire the smooth column of her throat, illuminated by the flashing lights of the casino we’re leaving behind. “Drive me home?”
“You shouldn’t go home,” Mason tells her. “Come back with us.”
