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The second man was much more physically imposing, his broad shoulders and bulk taking up a significant amount of space at the table. His face was surprisingly youthful, though. If he hadn’t come in with this man and didn’t have a dangerous air about him, I wouldn’t have been suspicious of him.
“Welcome,” I said, keeping my voice light. “How are you two tonight?”
“Not bad.” Hand Tattoos pushed a single chip into the circle in front of him. “How are you, beautiful?”
“Amazing.” I managed to keep the sarcasm out of my voice and focused on the task at hand. Friendly was my default, but this guy seriously creeped me out. “What about you?”
“Lucky, hopefully,” the big man said with a smirk.
Static gently crackled in my ear. “James is the one with the hand tattoos, and Will is the big one,” Hunter said through the earpiece. “Both were in for armed robbery. Just got released.”
I swallowed. Armed robbery didn’t automatically mean they’dusedthe weapons, did it? Then again, did it really matter? They were both dangerous.
I put on a smile as I dealt the first hand. Neither James nor Will spoke much, besides murmuring about the game itself. My mouth slowly dried out the longer the game went on without much talking. I was fucking this up, and I had to get them talking.
“Oops!” I said, accidentally-on-purpose fumbling with some chips, sending one across the table. “I’m all thumbs this evening.”
I leaned forward to grab it, pulling James’s and Will’s attention back to me. I hoped I sounded ditzy enough for them to disregard me as anything but a pretty dealer. It probably didn’t hurt that the angle brought their attention to my cleavage. They looked, but they didn’t leer too hard.
A few more people came and went, including a few familiar faces from the mug shots that my bosses showed me. As it turned out, I just needed to wait for the full party to get there, because then they started talking.
“Lucky night?” a tall, thin man asked James, clapping his hand on his shoulder.
“Yep.” James shot me a glance and a half smile that was probably charming to someone who wasn’t me. “I have a little good luck charm.”
I smiled, trying to appear as clueless as possible. “Me?”
“Yep.” James rolled up his sleeves.
“You’re not betting it all, are you?” the tall, thin man asked.
“Of course not.”
“Good.” The tall man tucked his hands into his pockets and watched the next hand. “You wouldn’t want to clean yourself out this soon.”
A look I couldn’t quite pinpoint crossed into James’s eyes, followed by a smirk. “Of course not. That would defeat the whole purpose, no?”
The tall man smirked, too, like they were sharing a joke.Wasit a joke? Somehow, I felt like they weren’t the kind of men to just joke around. The words had weight behind them.
The tall, thin man dug into his pocket again and handed James a small box, similar to the size of a deck of cards. James just put it in his pocket without speaking, or even saying goodbye to the tall, thin man.
I tried my hardest not to fiddle around with my pin to make sure it was recording. The weirdness of it made alarm bells go off in my head, but I thought I was being paranoid. But then the men exchanged little objects with people who stopped by the table a few times. I wasn’t imagining things—yeah, it was minor, but it wassomething.
Just as the foot traffic had picked up around nine, it started to go down after midnight. All the adrenaline that had coursed through my veins trying to keep track of everything that was going on slowly faded from my veins. I shut down the table for the evening around one and went to the back, looking over my shoulder as if the men were behind me.
But I was alone. My first night was done. I went upstairs to Lucas’s penthouse, where he and the others were waiting around Lucas’s dining room table. Takeout bags were strewn across the table, along with their laptops and some notepads, like they’d been working away while I was down there.
Seeing them again was like finally coming into a warm, dry house from a raging storm. Lucas’s warm smile, Chase’s relieved concern, and Hunter’s intense gaze enveloped me and made me feel safe. I hadn’t even realized how jittery I was, even though I was off the casino floor.
“You’re okay?” Hunter asked, scanning me as if I’d just gone through battle. “No one hurt you?”
“No. The worst I got was a little bit of creepy staring.” I took out the earpiece. “But I think I got some leads. They were passing around little objects, like gifts, and James mentioned something about everything being cleared out. It sounded important.”
“Well, it’s more than we had before,” Chase said with a shrug. “We can run with it once we go over the footage.”
A sense of satisfaction washed away. Now that my first night was done, I was more confident for the next ones whenever they happened.
CHAPTER8
