Finally, Nicolai tapped his phone screen a few times, whispered into it, and then frowned, turning to me. “Ueli says the cars will wait for us at the front entrance. He doesn’t like the look of the underground garage.”
Unease soured my stomach. “What does that mean?”
He flexed his shoulders and looked over the headsof the crowd like he was searching for something. “Usually, it means someone else’s security team are being assholes and blocking escape routes. It’s not altogether unusual.” He spoke into his phone. “Don’t send a team. We’ll meet you at the front entrance.”
“I don’t think Ueli’s going to like that.”
“Being led through the casino by a security team parting the crowd like Moses and the Red Sea is more conspicuous than the two of us calmly walking out the main entrance. Anyone with intent would watch for a commotion and a team, not the two of us unobtrusively moving through the crowd.”
His phone in his hand lit up again and again.
Nicolai smiled at me. “It’ll be fine. It’s been a decade since I walked through the main floor of a Las Vegas casino. This should betrashy.”
It was trashy.
Lights strobed over the banks upon banks of slot machines, crowds milling around in their nylon shorts, tee shirts, and baseball caps while rattling plastic cups holding their poker chips.
Nicolai grasped one of my hands and kept his other palm firmly on my back as we paced through the crowd, wending through the tall hedges of noisy slot machines.
People and more people flooded the cavernous space, roiling between the banks of slot machines that broke football field-sized rooms into rabbit-warren mazes. We followed rope-bounded paths marked on the carpeting designed to confuse us, to lead us into other gambling hells instead of the exit, while crowds chattered and cheered and lost their clanking money over the constant jangling, flashing, ringing, blinking, blaring, glaring, honking, strobing, trilling, blazing, screaming slot machines.
Nicolai hurried us through the crowd, both his hands stillon me, watching the people scurrying around us, alert, while I tried to hold my ankles firm lest I fall off my wobbly high heels and sprawl on the ground-down carpet.
We broke out of a slot machine cave into a high-ceilinged main room packed with roulette and craps tables. The fire hose of people crowding from the main aisle splashed against the grid of gambling tables and eddied to trickle through the rows between them.
As Nicolai shepherded me through the crowd of people’s backs turned toward us, as I skimmed past clattering dice and spinning wheels and money flowing toward the dealers and scanned the gamblers and watchers, a too-familiar male face popped out of the crowd as if it were a spring-loaded mask.
Oh, no.
At a craps table, more faces resolved aroundJimmy my-freakin’-ex-fiancé Johnson.
His sisters, his mom, and my previous friends clustered around where he held two dice and leaned over the hopscotch tree marked on the table’s green felt.
Andher.
The flywheels of my brain crashed together.
Acid scoured my throat.
I dragged the toe of my new strappy sandal on the carpeting and nearly flopped to the floor on my face. Only my hand tucked through Nicolai’s elbow saved me from an instant flailing swan dive.
Nicolai caught me around my waist and set me on my feet. The crowd parted and flowed around us, but Nicolai’s strong arms kept me from being bobbled.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” I choked out, but I couldn’t look away fromthem.
I was gaping.
I knew I was gaping like I was being strangled, but my mouth dropped open as I gasped for air.
Nicolai’s voice softened. “Lexi, what’s going on?”
“Nothing.It doesn’t matter.Nothing.Let’sgo.”
He followed my line of sight to where Jimmy stood at the end of a craps table fidgeting with a very short stack of poker chips in his palm, standing withherand surrounded and supported by his whole family, everyone I’d loved.
Jimmy’s plaid cargo shorts matchedherplaid cargo shorts, and their shirts had something to do with a university engineering club.
