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I tear my eyes from the shadows to look at him, but he’s fixated on something else. With a rigid spine, he’s watching a dark-haired woman in a red dress slip through the crowd and join a group conversing behind the seating area.
“Pen, get us some more drinks,” he mutters, not taking his eyes off her.
“But your beer is full and so is my—”
He grabs the flute from my hand and pours both our drinks into a muddy puddle by his feet.
My mouth opens on instinct to snap back at him, but my brain decides against it. Judging by his witless stare, I’d get more information from the thick trunk he’s leaning against, anyway.
I head to the bar, skin buzzing with awareness, ears straining to catch snippets of every conversation I pass. Rory Carter can’t be marrying a Visconti. There’s no fucking way. Her soon-to-be-husband must be one of their favored employees, maybe a manager at one of the clubs or restaurants in Cove or something. Because growing up, I’m pretty sure she was never one of those Devil’s Dip girls, the ones who craned their necks when a blacked-out car rolled over the cobbles of Main Street. I can’t imagine she wrote Dante Visconti’s name inside a heart on her textbooks, or tried to get into one of Tor Visconti’s clubs with a fake ID, hoping to catch sight of the man himself behind a velvet rope.
I reach the bar and wait patiently while the girl behind it figures out how to pop open a bottle of champagne. I’m fidgeting, my gaze wandering with both caution and intrigue, and not just because I’m surrounded by men with more blood on their hands than the entire population of Washington State Penitentiary combined. No, it’s because there are two Viscontis I’m keeping an eye out for. One I only met last night, and the other I’ve known for years.
As if he knew I was thinking about him, a deep, soft voice touches my back.
“Last time I saw that coat, you shook me down for a grand.”
I grip the edge of the bar, and my lids flutter shut. I don’t turn around, not yet. Partly because the emotion creeping up my throat is too thick to hide, and partly because I don’t want to be confronted by how fast time passes.
Nico Visconti was never a liar, but he’s lying about this coat. The last time he saw it was when he dropped me off at the Devil’s Cove bus depot at two a.m., a few weeks after my eighteenth birthday.
That’s the problem with the Coast. My past hides in all of its shadows, threatening to jump out and choke me when I least expect it.
The warmth of his body orbits mine, coming to a stop beside me. I roll my neck to the right and meet storm-gray eyes underlined by a lazy smile. My heart cracks in two and I look away again, pretending to study the whiskey bottles lining the bar.
“Long time no see, Little P.”
His nickname for me lights a match in the darkness beneath my rib cage. I hated it growing up. It felt condescending—made worse by the fact he’s barely older than me. Only a couple years’ difference in age, but we were always destined to be worlds apart.
I’d known Nico for as long as I could remember, but only by sight. He was the quiet, gangly kid that sat in the corner of the Visconti Grand Casino with a Diet Coke and a notepad. I’d learned from my mother that he was Alberto Visconti’s nephew, and his father was the owner of the whiskey company in Devil’s Hollow.
We first spoke in the coat room. I was ten, still growing used to the weight of the new four-leaf clover pendant around my neck. I’d started eating dinner between the racks of expensive coats, because I’d just learned the hard way that the men playing poker in the other room weren’t really my friends.
Nico had crawled in beside me and stared at my reheated lasagna for what felt like minutes. Then he’d asked a quiet question. “Why have you started charging men a dollar to blow on their dice?”
I’d swallowed the real reason and told him what I desperately wanted to believe. “Because I’m lucky.”
He’d held up the notepad that was always glued to his hand and tapped it with a thin finger. “Stupid people rely on chance; smart people know luck can be optimized by skill.”
And then he opened his book and introduced me to the world of advantage gambling. “It’s not cheating the house,” he’d whispered. “It’s using statistical probability and calculated observations to swing the odds of winning in your favor.” He’d glanced toward the door as he spoke, and then leaned a little closer. “But still, you gotta promise not to tell anyone.”
I didn’t. For the next four years, we’d meet in the cloak room three times a week and practice card counting, edge sorting, and shuffle tracking, and I never told a soul.
Our routine was interrupted by the murder of my parents. Once the dust had settled and the police backed off, I grew restless with nights spent staring at the ceilings of guest bedrooms in foster homes, and started sneaking out to the casino. The first night I turned up, Nico asked me another simple question.
“Do you want to talk about it, or do you want to be distracted?”
I chose distraction, and that’s when he taught me how to pick pockets. We graduated to bar tricks and distraction scams, and by the time I turned eighteen, the student was better than the master.
I breathe in a lungful of icy air and finally find the balls to look at Nico properly. Jesus. I knew he would look different, but not this different. His lanky frame has bulked and hardened into an imposing silhouette, and his childish grin has morphed into a handsome smile. He’s transformed from a geek obsessed with numbers to a tattooed warning sign. Everything from his huge stature to the dragon breathing fire up his neck screams danger, danger.
It wasn’t the three years at Stanford that did that to him, that’s for sure.
“It’s good to see you, Nico,” I say with a small smile.
He nods, and then we wait in comfortable silence for the bartender. She looks up and lets the champagne bottle clatter to the counter top. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Visconti. What can I get you?”
“A Smugglers Club and a vodka with lemonade.” He turns to me, brow cocked. “Unless you’re more civilized these days?” I shake my head and he smiles. “Vodka and lemonade it is.”
