“Her own father,” he said, loud enough for the room. “Sold her for three thousand pounds and a cleared bar tab.” He looked at the balcony. He looked at me. “That’s what you’re worth, hen. A cleared tab.”
Three thousand. Not ten – the Ledger debt was Lachlan’s, the £10,000 that had brought me to Crag Manor. McInnis had bought Duncan separately, cheaply, the way you buy a man whose price has already been set by desperation. Three thousand and a bar tab. My father had been auctioning me to multiple bidders and hadn’t even managed to get the same price twice.
Below the balcony, Niamh passed with her tray. She touched the gold pen at her hip. She did not look up. She didn’t need to.
I looked at McInnis. I looked at Lachlan. I looked at the stairs where Al stood like a cliff face that had been given instructions.
I descended the balcony stairs.
CHAPTER 29
The Choice
MORVEN
The heels were loud on the marble. I counted eight steps to the card table. Every head in the room turned.
I was en pointe inside the shoes. Nobody knew this. Nobody could see it – the heels were high enough to mask the rise, the dress was long enough to hide my feet, and the controlled balance of a trained dancer walking on her toes inside a pair of evening shoes was invisible to every person in this room. But I knew. My body knew. And the knowing changed the way I moved – not taller, not prouder, not the performed confidence of a woman who had been dressed for display. The structural authority of a body doing what it was built to do.
The floor was smooth beneath me. The casino smelled of champagne and cologne and the electric smell of money being risked. The chandelier light fell across the green felt of the main table and made it glow –gold-green, the colour of dock water in morning light, the colour of the Syndicate’s ink.
Lachlan watched me approach. His face did nothing. But I knew him well enough now to read the tension beneath the stillness – the faint adjustment of his weight in the chair, the opening of his posture, the controlled non-reaction of a man who was watching his plan deviate from specification and was deciding, in real time, whether the deviation was catastrophic or beautiful.
McInnis watched me too. His bright eyes tracked my path from the stairs to the table with the calculating attention of a predator who has been told his prey is approaching voluntarily and cannot quite believe it.
I sat down.
The chair was cold. The felt was smooth under my fingertips. The casino held its breath.
“What is this?” McInnis said. His voice was thin and sharp. He looked at Lachlan. “This isn’t part of the terms.”
Lachlan said nothing. He looked at me. His glasses caught the chandelier and I saw my own reflection in them – small, dark, precise.
I picked up the deck.
The cards were heavy. Casino-weight, the kind that snap when you shuffle them and sit flat on the felt without curling. I held them in my right hand and I felt their weight and their edges and their specificity, and I thought about everything the last forty days had taught me – the Ledger, the debt, the studio, the fire, the locket, the library, the study, the night before, the three men who had arranged themselves around me like the walls of a house I had chosen to live in.
“If I’m the prize,” I said, “I deal.”
The room was silent. The words sat in the air like a coin spinning on its edge – not settled, not fallen, occupying the space between outcomes with the perfect balance of a thing that could go either way.
McInnis looked at Lachlan. Lachlan didn’t move. The non-movement was permission.
“This is irregular,” McInnis said.
“The Gilded Table’s house rules permit any named party to the stake to take the chair,” I said. I’d read the rules. I’d found them in the drawer of Lachlan’s study desk three weeks ago, hand-written in gold ink on card stock, filed behind the Ledger’s index. I’d memorised them the way I’d memorised everything in this house – carefully, completely, in case the knowing became useful. “Section four, clause eleven. A named interest may participate by right. I’m the named interest. I’m participating.”
McInnis looked at me. The bright eyes narrowed. The tremor in his left hand intensified.
“You know how to play?” he said.
“I know how to deal.”
The hand was simple. One round. Five cards each. No draw, no exchange, no bluff – a naked comparison of what you held against what I held. The Wager’s format had been designed by Lachlan for exactly this kind of theatre – a single moment of revelation rather than the extended complexity of a poker game, because the outcome was not the point. The outcome had been determined before either player sat down.
I dealt. The cards left my hands with the precise,fluid motion that came from thirty years of manual dexterity – pointe shoes, ribbons, barre work, the practised intelligence of fingers that had been trained to perform under observation without trembling. I dealt five to McInnis. Five to myself. The cards whispered against the felt.
The signal was embedded in how I played the last card.
