He chuckled, perfectly casual, smiling as she stepped around him with her empty glass. Her pulse was hammering, but she kept her bland expression fixed on her face.
“Take care,” she told him, already edging away from the area.
“Thanks.” He slipped a hundred-dollar bill into the machine and tapped the maximum bet button. “You too.”
She turned her back to him, hands fisted loosely at her sides as she began walking.
And then she prayed like hell that they weren’t making a colossal mistake.
CHAPTER 9
A woman’s scream rang out somewhere in the casino.
Asher froze where he stood. He’d nearly completed his search of the roulette wheel tables and several pits of slot machines in the massive game area with no sign of Naomi. That high-pitched shriek sent a surge of adrenaline—and cold dread—coursing into his veins.
Holy fuck.
Don’t let it be her.
But then another shout went up, followed by dozens more and the sudden cacophony of cheering voices, bells and sirens, and applause. Over in another section of the slots near the casino’s main throughway, a ridiculously tall machine with a digital sign flashing an equally ridiculous name had evidently just paid out a mega-jackpot totaling more than a million dollars.
Nearly everyone in the place paused to look toward the area where a crowd was swiftly gathering around the winner. Asher headed that way, too, craning to see who was at the center of the excited throng. He fully expected it to be Naomi—or her disguised likeness—as he neared the periphery of the cheering spectators.
But it wasn’t her seated in front of the machine.
As Moda management and security officers moved in to greet the night’s big winner, Asher realized it was a man. Sandy hair and a friendly, round face that lit with surprise and stammering elation as he pivoted around in his wheelchair to accept everyone’s congratulations.
“I can’t believe it!” he exclaimed, looking every bit the shocked and beaming new millionaire. “This is incredible! I won!”
Son of a bitch.
Michael Carson.
Naomi’s friend hadn’t just lucked into the biggest jackpot payout in the place. He had help. The kind of help only Naomi could provide.
Which meant she had to be close.
In one, single mental snapshot, Asher took it all in. Michael seeming on the verge of actual tears in his wheelchair. The one-point-three-million-dollar jackpot sign flashing. The casino employee rushing forward with a wide smile and a pile of papers for the winner to sign.
And there, at the periphery of the expanding crowd, an angel’s face crowned in glossy black hair. No longer garbed as a crone, Naomi had shed all of her disguise and was now observing the chaos with a bemused smile on her face as she stepped back to make room for more people who pushed in. And she kept stepping back, slowly melting away like a shadow.
Not so fast, Asher thought, staring right at her.
She glimpsed him in that same moment, her sherry-colored gaze colliding with his amber-flecked furious one.
Her mouth dropped open in sudden, silent dread.
Then she pivoted and slipped out of sight, her petite size hiding her among the tight herds of casino patrons.
Asher dove into the crowd, cutting through with single-minded purpose. In the distance, he saw her round the corner up near the glass shaft of the soaring, central private elevator. For an instant, he lost sight of her.
“Fuck,” he snarled under his breath.
Using the full speed of his Breed genetics, he flashed across the casino floor, nothing but cool air breezing through the clusters of slow-moving, mostly inebriated casino patrons on his way toward the elevator. None of the humans’ senses were keen enough to track him, but there was one pair of eyes that found him and locked on with laser intensity.
A big Breed male wearing a dark suit, a wireless earpiece, and a Moda security badge on his hip stepped out of the elevator at the same moment Asher was rushing after Naomi at preternatural speed.
Icy silver eyes narrowed beneath the thick espresso-brown slashes of the male’s brows. Asher knew him—or, rather, he used to know him. Back when they both were nameless boys, yoked and collared under Dragos’s brutal Hunter program.
