He reaches into his jacket and takes out a phone. He sets it on his knee, screen up, not offering it yet.
"I don't need a hostage," he says. "What I need is intelligence. Someone who knows the inside of the Novikov operation."
"You want me to spy for you."
"I want you to have a home. Not to a concrete room. A proper home. Medical care, comfort, safety. You're carrying a child, Theo. You should be in a bed, not on a mattress." He nods at the room, at the stained padding under me. "This was temporary. A precaution. I'm sorry about it. Truly."
He's not sorry. He doesn't experience sorry. I'm looking at the smoothest, most charming psychopath I've ever met and he doesn't know that I can see it because he thinks the charm is working.
"I need to think about it," I say.
"Of course." He picks up the phone from his knee and turns it over in his fingers. "Take your time. I'm not in a rush."
"How do I know you'd actually let me go? If I agreed. How do I know I don't just trade one locked room for another?"
"You don't." He says this simply, as if the honesty is a gift. "Trust is earned. I'd start by improving your conditions. A proper room. A window. Medical appointments for the pregnancy. We'd build from there."
"And if I say no?"
"Then you stay here and we revisit the conversation later. I'm a patient man, Theo." He stands. He folds the chair and leans it against the wall. "I'll leave the chair. You could probably use somewhere to sit that isn't the floor."
He moves to the door. One of his men opens it from outside.
"He won't find you, by the way," Luca says. He turns back and his face is still pleasant, still open, still the face of a man you'd trust with your wallet at a dinner party. "Dominic has been looking. I know because I've been watching him look. He's running out of places to search and he's running out of time and resources. He's going to come to me eventually. They always do."
He gives the room a last look. Me on the mattress. The scratched lines on the wall. The bump under my T-shirt.
"Think about which side of that conversation you'd like to be on," he says.
The door closes. I sit on the mattress and I think about what just happened and I take it apart the way I'd take apart a deck.
Luca Castellano knows I'm Dom's omega. He knows about the ankle monitor, the locked doors, the captivity. He's built his pitch around it: the wronged omega, imprisoned by a controlling alpha, offered freedom by a better class of captor.
But he doesn't know it's a prime match.
He thinks Dom kept me because I was useful and convenient. An omega who fell into his lap and who Dom decided to hang onto because that's what alphas do.
He doesn't know that the scent match is so deep it rewired my nervous system the moment Dom walked into that security room.
If he knew, he wouldn't be trying to turn me. You can't turn a prime match. The biology doesn't allow it. The bond is in the blood and it doesn't care about locked rooms or ankle monitors or charming psychopaths with folding chairs.
He thinks I can be bought. I press my hand against my stomach. The baby shifts. A small, rolling movement under my palm, the first one I've felt that was unmistakably a kick and not just digestion or nerves.
"Okay," I say. To the baby. To the room. To the fact that I now know something Luca Castellano doesn't and I'm going to use it.
20. Dom
The casino opens at ten. It used to open at eight.
We lost eleven staff in the purge and another nine in the weeks after, people who saw the firings and decided the Claremont Grand was not where they wanted to be when things got worse. I don't blame them. Things got worse.
Viktor hired replacements from a temp agency for the floor staff and promoted two senior dealers to cover the pit boss positions.
Cath's section is being managed by a man called Henderson who is competent and humorless and has no idea that he's a placeholder. The high-roller room is closed indefinitely. The main floor runs at sixty percent capacity on a good night.
The quarterly numbers are catastrophic. My father reads them without comment, which is worse than anything he could say.
I don't care about the numbers. I care about finding Theo.
