The house always wins.
By the time I had made it into the back room that housed the security camera feed, Amelia was already being served her first drink.
Vodka cranberry, by the looks of it.
That was good. If she could keep up the innocent schtick, she just might make it out tonight. It would have been more suspicious if she was shooting whiskey straight.
Though she was nearly thirty, she didn’t look like it and could have easily passed for nineteen or twenty.
Apparently, minding your business keeps you young. Maybe that’s why John Valentine looked pretty good for a man of seventy-nine. He minded his business—he had me minding everyone else’s.
I grabbed the headphones on the security desk and held them up to my ear, not bothering to put them all the way on, and tapped into the feed at Valentine’s table.
“What’s your name, sweetheart?” Valentine asked with a smarmy grin as he fingered his cards.
Amelia chewed on her lip. “Um . . . Angela.”
Her mother’s name.It wasn’t far enough removed for my liking, but at least it wasn’t the name on her driver’s license.
“Angela,” he said, rolling around the name like a cat with a ball of yarn. Something amusing to entertain himself with. “Alright, Angela. The game is twenty-one.” Valentine grinned. “You start with two cards and add up the value. Jacks, queens, and kings are all ten, but an ace is eleven. You wanna get as close as you can to twenty-one without going over.” He picked up one of her chips and slid it forward. “Let’s start with a little bet to get your feet wet.”
The dealer laid two playing cards face down in front of her before dealing the rest of the table. Amelia picked them up andmade a show of adding them up by counting on her fingers, then took a long look at the up card—a nine.
John Valentine grinned. “Now, you can hit and take another card or stand and stay where you are.”
She hit him with doe eyes. “What if I want to bet more?”
The men at the table chuckled.
“I like you, Angela,” Valentine said, like a king amused with a new courtesan. “You can double down if you’re feeling lucky.”
She studied her two cards again—a ten and a seven. Seventeen was risky. It was high enough that most cards would make her go over, but low enough that most people would risk it to edge closer to twenty-one.
But Amelia Hawthorne already knew that. I watched the way her eyes darted over the dealer’s stack. He was working from six decks tonight, giving the house a greater advantage, not that it needed it.
I had to give it to her, she ran the odds and decided to hit.
The dealer slid her another card, and I watched through the feed as she added it to her hand.
A three.
The round played through. Some hit, some stood, some doubled down.
But Amelia won, raking in the chips.
To the rest of the table, a hand like that was beginner’s luck. To Amelia, it was strategy. To John Valentine, it was the beginning of playing the long game.
To me, it was a curse.
5
JUDAH
Saturday, May 17 | 9:03 p.m.
“What’s a pretty little thing like you doing all alone tonight?” John said as he thumbed the cards in his hand.
I kept an ear on their conversation while I rotated through the rest of the camera feeds. As long as Amelia was seated at the table . . . and didn’t lose . . . she was fine.
