“Who do you work for?”
Cold splices up through my belly and wraps around my heart. “No one. I swear. I'm not working for anyone."
His scent is everywhere. I can taste it at the back of my throat and it's doing things to my concentration that I am managing through willpower alone, which is a finite resource and I can feel it depleting.
"He’s not going to give them up," Viktor says from the door. First time he's spoken. His voice is flat and disinterested in a way that is more frightening than anger would be. Anger is emotional. This is professional. "Not without an incentive."
The cold spreads out, fear swallowing my body whole and turning my skin to ice. Card counters are a nuisance, but we’re mostly solo operators. If I’m working for someone, that makes me a lot more than a nuisance.
“I’m not working for anyone,” I say and it comes out as a whisper. “I swear.”
“Your word doesn’t mean much,” Novikov says.
Part of me finds my spine. “And I haven’t done anything illegal. Counting cards isn’t illegal. You have no grounds to keep me here.”
Technically, I'm right. Card counting isn't fraud. It's just arithmetic, keeping track of the game and adjusting my bets accordingly.
Just a brain doing what brains do, which is recognize patterns. Casinos don't like it because it shifts the house edge from their side of the table to mine. They’re allowed to ban people like me because they have the right to refuse service. But that’s it.
I know my rights. The problem is that I doubt either of these men care.
"Card counting isn't illegal," the alpha agrees. His voice is almost pleasant. It almost purrs the way it goes through me. "Collusion is. So which part of the operation are you? Spotter or big player?"
The words land and my stomach drops.
"Because we've been pulling counters off this floor for weeks," he says. "And every one of them has sat in that chair and told me the same thing you're telling me. Independent. Working alone. Just a guy with a good memory." He tilts his head slightly. "Meanwhile, someone is running false shuffles through my dealers and coordinating plays across my tables, and the people doing the counting look exactly like you."
I’m an idiot. This is my own fault. I’d noticed they’d seemed to have heightened security and I’d sat down and played. I should have turned around and walked away.
The security wasn’t for me. It was for a ring. Someone is targeting this casino and I’ve been caught in the net.
And the thing that turns my stomach cold is that I can see how it looks. From the outside, I am indistinguishable from a ring spotter.
My brain races. I don’t know how to prove I’m not. Proving the absence of something is much harder than proving its existence.
He stands. Slowly, the way someone moves when they want you to understand that speed is available to them and they're choosing not to use it. He comes around the table and I lose the barrier of four feet of wood and metal between us and his scent quadruples in intensity.
Against every instruction my brain is sending, my chin tilts up to follow him.
It’s pure instinct, and it's happening anyway because he is right there, close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off him, close enough that if I leaned forward six inches—
I don't lean forward. I keep my hands steady and I stay completely still.
"Next you're going to tell me you don't know who I am," he says. He's looking down at me now and the angle does something to the power balance that my body understands even if my brain is still scrambling to catch up. He is above me. I am below. Every omega nerve ending I possess lights up with the wrongness and the rightness of it simultaneously.
"I know you own the casino," I say. My voice is thin. I hate how thin it is.
"Dominic Novikov," he says, confirming it. And then, quieter, leaning closer: "And you're Theo Holland. Are you really telling me, that you of all people being here is a coincidence?"
I can't speak. My mind is screaming at me to run and there is nowhere to run.
He steps back. The distance returns and I can breathe again, barely, and my hands are shaking now and I can't stop them so I pull them under the table and lay them flat under my thighs where he can't see.
“I didn’t know,” I whisper, and he’s not going to believe me. I wouldn’t.
Novikov doesn't respond. He's watching me. His expression is unreadable and his scent has shifted. I can smell it. It’s asubtle darkening: that whiskey note deepening into something that could be anger or arousal or both.
"He’s not going to give them up,” Viktor says again. He's moved from the door while I wasn't paying attention. He's beside the table now, close enough that I can see the scar tissue across his knuckles when he pulls out the chair next to Novikov and sits down heavily.
