All In: A Vegas Reverse Harem Romance

by Cassie Cole

  It was a topic I normally tried to avoid because it was so depressing. I didn’t need a spreadsheet to tell me I was dirt poor. I had that fact rubbed in my face every hour of every day. But if I was going to decide whether or not to try robbing a casino I need to have all the information necessary to make an informed decision.

  First I looked at my last couple of paychecks. They varied from week to week depending on my hours and tips, so I took the average over a full month. Not totally accurate but better than nothing.

  Next I went through the less fun part: my expenses. Rent was the big one, even splitting the small apartment with Angela. Utilities were next, electricity and water and trash. We rented our washer and dryer from the apartment complex too, another $25 per month for each of us. Renter’s insurance wasn’t much but I added it to the spreadsheet.

  The other two big expenses were my phone bill and health insurance. I had the cheapest health plan possible but that was still a big chunk out of my wallet each month. At least I wouldn’t go bankrupt if I get really sick, but that didn’t exactly help me now.

  When all those expenses were subtracted from my earnings I was left with $650 per month. But that was for everything else, including food. Sometimes I had the time to sit down and meal prep—I could live off beans, rice, and lentils like the best of them. But that required time, which was a commodity as scarce as money for me. Especially since I didn’t have a car.

  Which brought me to the things I needed to buy. Music lessons with Michel were $50 per session, once or twice per month depending on how much money I had on hand. My shoes were worn through to the point that you could almost see the ball of my foot through the bottom, and the heels I wore for my singing gigs were going to need replacing soon. I’d been wearing the same cocktail dress to each singing gig, a fact which was noticed by the manager of the Golden Goose when I was there this week. I needed another dress to add to my rotation if I was going to appear professional. The laptop I was punching numbers into still ran Windows Vista and was so slow that I was certain it would die any day now.

  I stopped adding numbers to my spreadsheet and leaned back in my chair. I was barely getting by, to say nothing of saving up for the big purchases like a new car or recording an album with Michel.

  $3 million.

  Holy moly, it was tempting. The solution to everything in front of me. With that much money I could quit waitressing and focus on singing full time. I could pay for a publicity company and get some professional marketing. That would help me get the attention of an agent. Then I could really make a run at doing what I loved until the money ran out.

  Shoot. How much did savings accounts pay in interest? Investing wasn’t a strength of mine, but $3 million earning 2% interest was $60,000 per year. I could live off that for the rest of my life, regardless of the result of my singing career.

  But of course there was the danger in it all.

  I’d laughed it off in the diner, but now I made myself envision it. Being grabbed by angry Russian mobsters, dragged into the alley of the casino. Slapped around, beaten, and thrown in the trunk of a black car. The trunk opening and someone throwing me to the ground, my cheek pressed against the hot Nevada sand. Digging my own grave while they laughed and tossed insults.

  This wasn’t a movie. This was real life. This was something that could actually happen to me.

  Was that risk worth the reward?

  Another problem was that I was thinking in black and white. Either we successfully stole the money, or we were caught and killed. But there were shades of grey. Maybe after gathering information we would realize we couldn’t do it. All that risk for nothing. Or maybe we did steal the money but then were on the run for the rest of our lives. I couldn’t pursue my dream career if I had to live in the middle of nowhere, hiding from Russian hitmen.

  I struggled to sleep that night as the thoughts swirled and fought in my head.

  The next afternoon, as I began my shift at the Volga, I watched everything with new eyes. This no longer felt like an upbeat place where people came and drank and maybe left with more money in their pockets than before. It held an ominous gloom, like a delicious meal covered in a film of rancid grease. If what Bryce said was true then this was a criminal enterprise. Money coming in dirty and going out clean.

  On my first break I pulled out my phone and read Vladimir Yegorovich’s Wikipedia page. The section on his corruption in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union was 10 pages long and filled with horrendous crimes. More recently he’d orchestrated the deaths of three journalists in France and Spain, bringing in the hitmen and material to poison them with a radioactive material called polonium. I clicked the link to the attached article and almost vomited—it showed photos of the victims, their skin covered in red burns and blisters from the radiation poisoning. One of them, a journalist for The Guardian, was a girl my age.

  Was my age. She’d been dead for three years.

  Even though I was a tiny part of the workings of the casino, was I complicit in that crime? Was it immoral to keep working here while knowing what was really going on? Should I throw off my uniform and walk away without a second thought?

  I also kept an eye on my potential conspirators. Eddie patrolled the outer walls of the main casino floor, handsome in his security uniform and with his hands clasped in front of him, scanning for trouble. Bryce began his shift a little bit later, and was sent to one of the three card poker tables instead of blackjack. At 8:00pm the stage across the room lit up and Xander wandered out with guitar in hand. He sat on a stool with one leg bent and began playing his country music, the exact same set as the previous night. He was skilled with his fingers on the strings, but his vocals definitely needed some work.

  I went through the motions all evening while keeping an eye on what was happening around me. I watched the security guards pushing metal cash boxes on wheels through the casino, guns on their hip. I eyed the cameras in the ceiling, spaced every 10 feet in a grid that extended in perfect lines, covering everything. And now that Bryce had pointed them out the Russian gamblers themselves were obvious—the mules, he’d called them. They all ordered vodka but hardly drank any, nursing a single glass for hours. Their suits were brand new. They remained quiet and passive while throwing away tens of thousands of dollars on every hand, never making a scene or drawing attention to themselves.

  They weren’t here to have fun. They had the demeanor and attitude of shift workers clocking in, doing their work, and clocking out.

  I don’t know how I never noticed it before.

  “Finally another grunt,” one of the waitresses in the pantry said later that night. There were five of them there including Bryce. The waitress waved the bottle of Jim Beam at me. “We need help with this.”

  I tossed a $5 casino chip into the hat. “With pleasure.”

  I tried to pretend like it was a normal shooting-the-shit night while we passed the bottle around. In reality I was patiently waiting for the others to leave so I could talk to Bryce alone. I didn’t want to ask him to go talk somewhere else because that might raise suspicions. I didn’t want anyone knowing he and I were personally associated.

  It took an hour, but eventually the others drifted away. Bryce leaned out of the pantry door and made sure nobody was around before saying, “Well?”

  “I have some questions,” I said.

  “I figured you might.”

  I lowered my voice. I was distinctly aware that we were discussing our heist inside the casino itself. “What’s the timeline?”

  “There isn’t one,” Bryce said. “As soon as we discover where they’re storing all the money before laundering it we can come up with a plan to steal it. That might take days, and it might be weeks.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Then what happens once we have it? If it’s dirty money that hasn’t been laundered…”

  He nodded his head reassuringly. “We have a contact that can help us launder it for use. It would cost us 10%.”

  “10
%?” I asked, incredulous. “Just to take our money and make it spendable?!?!”

  “That’s actually super cheap,” he said smoothly. “Most guys charge 25 to 30%. Yegorovich probably takes a third of all money he launders.”

  “So my payday would only be two and a half mil?”

  “$2.7 million, to be exact.” Bryce arched a blond eyebrow. “Unless you want to try laundering it yourself.”

  I didn’t know the first thing about any of this, so I ignored the suggestion. “How do you know Xander and Eddie?”

  “What does that matter?”

  “I want to know if we can trust them.”

  He let out an exasperated laugh. “We already trust one another. You’re the outsider.”

  “That doesn’t mean I trust them.”

  “But you trust me?”

  It was a good question. I hardly knew Bryce more than I did the others. But things felt different with him. We’d been intimate together. It may have only been one night, but somehow it made all the difference.

  “You’re avoiding the question,” I said. “Did you come up with the plan and then recruit the others? What if one of them is a mole for the CIA or FBI or something?”

  “We knew each other already, and came up with the plan together.”

  “You still haven’t told me how you know them.”

  “Does it matter?”

  He was hiding something. I could tell. I crossed my arms over my Soviet uniform. “If I’m going to consider being a part of this, I need to know everything.”

  He ran his fingers through his hair, which fell back into place perfectly. “We’re all in the same Fantasy Football league together.”

  I gave a start. “Do what now?”

  “There was a Fantasy Football tournament here in Vegas.” He kept his eyes on the floor, too embarrassed to meet my gaze. “We were in the same league competing with one another. None of us won the grand prize, but we had a good time shit-talking throughout the season. So we got in touch the next year and joined the same league again. That was four years ago.”

  “So these are just random acquaintances you’re risking your life with?”

  “No!” he said. “That’s how it started, but we’re close friends now. Probably the closest friends I have in town. Xander was the one who got me my job here at the Volga. Same for Eddie.”

  I guess that wasn’t too unusual. I hardly had any friends here in Las Vegas. I’d barely known Angela when we started rooming together, and that had started based on a Craigslist ad looking for a roommate.

  “My role would solely be information gathering?”

  “Well, yes and no,” he said. “You’ll be our eyes and ears before and during the heist. First helping us figure out where they’re storing the money prior to laundering. When we come up with the plan to steal it we might utilize you as a lookout on the casino floor. Notifying us when certain guards are on the move, or if the Russians figure out something is going on.” He spread his hands. “But we won’t know exactly what that would involve until we actually have a plan. So that would come later.”

  “What if we gather all the info,” I said carefully, “and it turns out Yegorovich hides the money in an air-tight vault with biometric scanning and lasers that pop out of the ceiling? Stuff like that?”

  Bryce laughed softly. He was beautiful when he laughed, his entire face lighting up with cheer. “I can definitely tell you it’s not that involved. They have extreme security for the money the casino takes in every day—vaults and layered defenses and all sorts of safeguards. But they won’t do that with the money they’re going to launder.”

  I started to argue, but he started ticking off reasons on his fingers.

  “For one thing, they don’t want any attention surrounding this dirty money. They’ll have it fly under the radar throughout the process, in something inconspicuous. Like backpacks casually brought in by kitchen employees and left in a special corner. Anything flashier than that is just begging to be noticed. For another thing, we don’t think the money is being stored for long. It’s coming in and being immediately distributed among the mules. You don’t need a huge vault and lots of security for that.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but my main point surrounds the viability of actually trying to steal it. What if we gather all the information, figure out where the money is coming from and where it’s temporarily stored, and we discover that it’s too risky to try to steal? What do we do then?”

  “Then we walk away,” he said simply. “This isn’t a suicide mission. We’re only going to make an attempt if we think we have a reasonable chance of getting away unnoticed.”

  This clearly wasn’t a hasty plan—he’d considered everything.

  “Two nights ago,” I finally said. The last question. Possibly the most important one. “Did you actually want to sleep with me?”

  “Sage…”

  “Or were you just doing what you had to do to recruit me?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  He shook his head and pursed his lips. “No. I was trying to recruit you that night, absolutely. I was feeling you out, trying to see what you were like. If you were the right person. That’s why I wanted to take you somewhere to get something to eat—so I could get to know you better. Sex wasn’t in the equation at all.”

  “So you jumped my bones purely out of desire?”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “I seem to remember you jumping my bones. But yes, I slept with you in spite of my interest in recruiting you—not because of it. If anything, sleeping together complicates our job.”

  “Hey, sex is easy,” I said. “It’s all the other stuff that goes along with it that can be a problem.”

  “If you say so.”

  Bryce stared at me patiently. He’d answered all my questions. It was tempting, oh so tempting, to say yes. Even just the possibility of that much money falling into my hands was intoxicating. I would risk a lot for that.

  But I was still on the fence. I wasn’t absolutely positive. And if I wasn’t positive about something this risky, this dangerous…

  “I’m sorry, but I have to say no.”

  He wasn’t expecting that response. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “And that’s the problem. You said it yourself at the diner: something like this requires complete dedication. If I’m not sure, then I need to decline.”

  It hurt to say it out loud. Was I missing a once in a lifetime opportunity?

  “I’m disappointed to hear that,” Bryce said. “I understand, but I’m still disappointed.” He upended the bottle of liquor and took three long gulps.

  “I’m sorry,” I said in a small voice as I left the pantry.

  There was a sinking feeling in my stomach as I made my way back through the kitchen. I felt like I was letting him down. It felt like we were breaking up, even though we weren’t in a relationship. I didn’t know what I wanted with Bryce, but I knew I didn’t want it to end just yet.

  Tears blurred my vision. Why was I getting so emotional about this? Was it because of Bryce, or because of the dreams I was possibly giving up by turning down so much money?

  Was I making a huge mistake?

  I rounded a blind corner in the kitchen and ran into a suited man.

  Several things happened all at once.

  I bounced off his chest and he took a cautious step backward. The two men at his side rushed forward to block my path, hands going to the holsters on their hips. Someone in the back shouted a warning, and other guards scanned the kitchen. The guard closest to me pulled a pistol halfway out of its holster, his eyes locked onto mine with murder in mind.

  The man I’d run into stopped the commotion with a single raised hand. Immediately everyone calmed down. He looked even more like a bouncer at a club up close, with a big crooked nose that had been broken several times and cheeks that were flush from years of vodka. His white three-piece suit was flawless and likely cost more than
I made in a year of tips, and he stared at me first with surprise, then with interest.

  “Hello there,” Vladimir Yegorovich said in a thick Russian accent. He did that thing men did with their eyes: scanning from my face, to my chest, then to my lower half. Measuring my value in attractiveness.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, turning back the way I’d come.

  He snatched my forearm with surprising speed, squeezing it so hard it almost hurt. “There is no need to be apologizing. And there is also no need to be leaving now. What is your name?”

  My name was on my name tag. He couldn’t have missed it, especially after spending half a second staring at my chest. I got the feeling he wanted to hear me say it.

  “Sage,” I said.

  He made a groan in the back of his throat. “Sage. Like the spice, yes?” He licked his lips. “Sage is delicious. Tell me, Sage. Are you delicious as well?”

  I didn’t know what to say. The look in his eyes was intense. Frighteningly so. The way a dog looked at a particularly chewable bone. I was terrified of what would happen next.

  Yegorovich let go of my arm and laughed. Everyone laughed along with him, but he laughed in my face the hardest. Spittle flew from his lips as he roared.

  He said something in Russian and then made a right turn, approaching the chef that was standing there waiting. They spoke in Russian and embraced, his interaction with me totally forgotten already.

  Two of his bodyguards were still standing in the doorway, watching me like they were trying to decide whether I was worthy of more cruelty. Rather than try to squeeze by them I turned around and fled back the way I’d come.

  Bryce gave a start when I reappeared in the pantry. “Sage? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said, putting on a determined expression. “I’ve changed my mind about the job. I’m in.”

  10

  Eddie

  Being a security guard at a casino was somewhere between being a rental cop and an actual police officer.