Table revenue for the main floor is down eleven percent over the last four months. The high-roller room is down eight.
Overall house take is off by enough that the discrepancy stopped being a statistical fluctuation weeks ago and became a pattern. Patterns in a casino mean one of two things: either your dealers have forgotten how to deal, or someone is cheating you.
My dealers have not forgotten how to deal.
I push back from the desk and stand. Twenty-three floors below, the city does what the city always does at ten o'clock on a Friday night. It glitters and hums. From up here the streets look clean. Everything looks clean from a sufficient height.
The office is large and expensively appointed and I hate it. I have always hated it. The leather chairs, the walnut desk, the original art on the walls.
None of it is mine, not really. This room belonged to my father before he moved his base of operations to the house upstate, and I inherited this place along with everything else: the casinos, the organization, the reputation.
The door opens without a knock. Only one person in the organization does that.
"You look terrible," Viktor says.
"Thank you."
He comes in and drops into the chair across from my desk with the ease of a man who has been sitting in that chair for fifteen years.
Viktor Petrov is fifty-four years old, built like a shipping container, and possesses a face that has never once in its entire existence attempted to be charming.
He is my underboss, my oldest ally, and the only person alive who can walk into my office unannounced and tell me I look terrible without risking a very bad day.
"Your father’s been calling you," he says.
"I know."
"He's worried about the numbers."
"I know that too." I don’t point out that it literally isn’t my father’s business anymore. We both know that.
Nikolai Novikov built this empire from a single back-room poker game in a rented warehouse. He ran it for thirty years with a combination of intelligence, brutality, and an absolute refusal to let anything — law, sentiment, other people's objections — get between him and a business objective.
Five years ago, he stepped back and handed the day-to-day to me.
Handed is a generous word.Handedimplies a clean transfer. What actually happened was a slow, grinding negotiation conducted over months, during which my father tested every decision I made, questioned every instinct I had, and made it clear through a thousand small humiliations that the empire was still his. What he doesn’t realize is that the world has changed since he built his empire. I have to make different choices. The old ways don’t always work as well.
But he still interferes. He still wants reports. He still makes it known, through Viktor and through others, that his expectations have not lowered.
Viktor picks up one of the reports from my desk, scans it, puts it down. "How bad?"
"Bad enough. Someone's running a game on us and it's not amateur hour. The losses are too consistent. It's coordinated."
"Card counters?"
I shrug. "We’ve had three this month. None of them are the source. Small-timers, all of them. The kind who wins a few hundred and think they've beaten the house." I sit back down. "This is something else. There's a ring. Has to be. Someone with inside access, coordinating with players on the floor."
Viktor absorbs this with the expression of a man who has heard worse and probably has. "Dealers?"
"Maybe. Probably. I've pulled performance data on everyone working the affected tables but the analyst team are struggling. Whoever's doing this is smart enough to spread it around."
"The Castellanos?"
I look at him. It's the same thought I've had, sitting in this office for the past week, turning it over and over. The Castellano family has been making moves for months. Or at least Luca Castellano has been.
Just like I inherited this place from my old man, Luca has inherited his territory from his. Luca is the third of four Castellano brothers and the one with the most ruthless reputation.
The Castellanos and the Novikovs have had a mostly relaxed mutually beneficial agreement for decades. We don’t tread on each others’ turf. I’m not convinced Luca wants to keep that agreement.
