When I gaped at her, she laughed.
“An early Christmas present,” she said. “From Mr. Wagner.”
I grinned as I picked up a thousand-dollar chip. “Do you know, I’ve never held so much money in my hands before?”
She grinned at me, knocking me in the shoulder in sisterly solidarity. “Enjoy it while it lasts. You know, the house usually wins.”
I knew that even though I wasn’t a gambler (I’d never had any money to spare to risk it on anything). But Inga didn’t know what I did.
If this house was Tiernan’s, technically, it was my house too.
So, when I settled in to play, I did it channeling my scarred guardian’s cool arrogance. I found it wasn’t difficult. I’d always vacillated between a potential career in art or one in environmental business, so math was a proficiency of mine. Before I knew it, I’d forgotten my original intention in seeking out Tiernan and there was a group at our table watching our game.
I’d just won seven hundred dollars when a dark-haired man switched out for a woman beside me at the table. I didn’t look at him, at first, but the hair on the nape of my neck stood on end as the air was filled with static.
“You play well for a beginner,” a low, smoky voice practically purred. “It must be luck.”
I grinned as I stared at my cards, a pair of pocket Queens. “Whatever it is, I’ll take it.”
“Or perhaps you’re just distracting everyone else at the table with your beauty,” he suggested, but the words weren’t an effort at seduction.
They were sharp-edged as knives.
A threat more than a compliment.
I tossed my chips in to call then carefully put my cards down so I could face the newcomer.
The moment I did, my heart stopped.
He was older, maybe early or mid-thirties, but his age only heightened the planes of his symmetrical perfection, roughening the beauty in a way that was utterly masculine. Swarthy, with the olive tinged skin I shared due to my Italian ancestry, and five o’clock shadow as dark as spilled ink across his jawline, he was both striking and vaguely menacing, like something out of an old school mafia film.
But his beauty wasn’t what stole my breath away and left icy panic in its wake.
It was the fact that I knew him.
Remembered him.
How could I ever forget who abducted me as a girl?
He stared at me calmly, almost impassively, but his entire body was turned to me, attuned to me, and when he saw the panic in my face, his lips twitched with triumph.
“Hello Bianca,” he said.
And a second later, I screamed.
10
TIERNAN
“Tiernan? Do you have a moment?”
I looked up from my computer to see Beckett Fairchild lurking in the doorway to my office. He was a handsome older man who carried himself the way any man born into an American legacy of money and power carried himself. As if he expected people to bow when he entered a room.
I didn’t bow.
In fact, I didn’t give him more than a cursory glance before I went back to searching for business opportunities we could lay like bait in a trap for Bryant.
“I do not,” I said.
Still, he lingered.
When I watched the monitors or walked through Inequity’s casino floor, Beckett struck me as a self-possessed man with a quiet, smug kind of grace, but whenever he sought me out, there was a nervous energy he couldn’t quite hide in his hands.
I wondered with dark pleasure if my reputation frightened him, or if it was just that he had a long association with the Constantine family and I was a Morelli. I didn’t give a crap who he associated with as long as he kept frequenting my illicit businesses.
“Only, I wanted to talk to you about something rather important,” he continued, as if I hadn’t effectively dismissed him.
“I highly doubt there is anything you could tell me that I’m dying to hear,” I said, honestly, without sparing him a look. “I’m a very busy man, Beckett.”
There was a thread of humor in his tone that set my teeth on edge when he said, “You’re very like your father sometimes.”
“If you knew anything about Bryant, you’d know better than to say that to my face,” I said softly, the threat buried in my low voice.
He held up his hands in surrender. “I meant nothing by it, I apologise. I came to talk about something very pressing, Tiernan. I’m going to have to insist you give me a moment of your time. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for weeks, now.”
I knew that, of course. But there was something about Beckett that put me on edge. It could have been his close relationship with the Constantine family, but it was something deeper than that. There was something in his pale gaze that unsettled me and the feeling had never faded, not even when he as he became one of the biggest patrons of Inequity over the years. I avoided him as often as possible and pawned him off on Henrik.
Only Henrik wasn’t in tonight because he, Ezra, and Walcott were taking Brando to see the new Marvel film at the cinema. The kid had begged me to go too, but there was no way I was going to sit on my ass when Bryant Morelli was no doubt racing to take me down as soon as he could.
Instead, I’d given Brandon a hundred bucks to gorge himself on sweets at the theatre and promised him fucking pancakes tomorrow morning as well. Brando had seemed to find my reluctance to indulge in the holiday spirit amusing and he’d somberly dubbed me ‘Grinch’ with a three-foot-long candy cane Ezra had bought him earlier.
My lips twitched as I thought about it, but then I remembered Beckett was staring at me with that acute gaze and I schooled my features into a scowl.
“Well, what is?”
He seemed surprised then hesitant, rubbing a hand over his dark brown stubble in an obvious nervous gesture.
“Well, out with it, man!”
Beckett finally opened his mouth to speak when a scream tore through the casino, filtering through the door Beckett hadn’t fully closed behind him. Icy fear clutched me by the throat.
No one screamed in my casino.
Not ever.
I was on my feet, the gun pulled from the holster under my injured arm in an instant.
“Wait here,” I barked to Beckett, who’d frozen, as I jogged around the desk and yanked the door open. “Lock this behind me. Only open it for six staccato knocks.”
Before he could answer, I was out in the chaos. Patrons scurried for the exits guided by my calm employees. Even though the casino seemed like one long uninterrupted space without windows or exits, there were secret passage and doors faded seamlessly into walls throughout for exactly this reason.
I followed the calamity to the far right of the casino space, keeping an eye on the lockdown procedures as I went.
“Sir, get back to your office,” Gerard shouted over the constant murmur of shouts and cries from scared gamblers.
I ignored him and surged forward.
A ring of employees, guards with bullet proof vests worked into their uniforms, blocked the scene around a Black Jack table. They had their guns trained on a dark head barely visible through the tight security.
When I pushed between two men, they parted instantly.
I hadn’t been expecting anything. My mind was a cold, empty chamber just waiting for whatever moronic asshole had thought to hold up my casino to stumble into my cruel keeping. I’d show him ruthlessly why no one else had ever dared to fuck with Inequity and in doing so, I’d send a clear message carved into that man’s flesh why no one should ever dare to fuck with it again.