“I’m not the house.” I grunted. “Even if you walk away tonight. The house will still win.” I tucked a lock of sandy hair behind her ear. “The house always wins, so don’t come back.”
For a moment, we did nothing but stare at each other. She was so goddamn beautiful. Too beautiful for a shithole like this. She needed to go back to her Ivy digs and never cross the state line again.
She needed to stay in her cocoon of goodness that nurtured beautiful things and allowed them to grow.
I didn’t come from the land of beautiful things. She knew it just as well as I did, which was why I slipped out first, hoping she would heed the warning.
A moment later, Amelia dashed out with her phone in hand, not even sparing me a second glance as she put on the performance of a century.
I lingered in the ether between beauty and pain, the eternal gatekeeper that allowed her to live in blissful ignorance of the true darkness that lingered around her.
8
AMELIA
Wednesday, May 21 | 12:28 a.m.
Ihated driving through New Jersey. Everyone sucked.
Maybe I was just in a mood.
But if I was just in a mood, then it wouldn’t have passed as soon as I crossed into New York. Now, I was just tired.
Driving four to five hours every other day and staying in a cheap hotel every other night was wearing on me.
Just a few more nights.
I had no idea what I would’ve done if I had classes to teach this summer. Joel would have been up a creek without a paddle even more than he already was.
The Connecticut state line was both a reprieve and a sick tease. I was so close to home, yet so far away. Driving through Connecticut took forever.
I curled and flexed my fingers around the steering wheel as I tried to stay awake for the last hour of the drive. By now, I was usually wiped, but the adrenaline hadn’t subsided after runningout of the Four Horsemen with my phone and thirty thousand dollars in my bag.
I’d needed to play longer tonight. I was on a winning streak, but something about the tone of Jude’s voice when he cornered me in a supply closet struck fear into my bones.
Maybe it’s because he sounded afraid too.
He wasn’t just telling me to stop playing because he was annoyed I was there. He told me not to touch my drink.
He even said that if I stayed, I wasn’t to touch the drink.
Had someone tried to drug me?
I was around college kids enough to know that it happened way more often than people wanted to admit.
I’d gotten too comfortable. On Monday, I had tried to play at a different casino, but there were too many distractions. It was too loud. Too many lights and sounds from slot machines. Too much going on to focus. It was why I had gone back to the Four Horsemen. I needed to win, and that was where my luck was. At this point, I would wholeheartedly believe in every superstition in existence if it meant I’d get the money.
I groaned and squeezed the steering wheel. Once I got a few solid hours of sleep, I’d make a new game plan.
After a few nights of playing, I had won a little over forty thousand dollars. Unfortunately, I only had three days left to get the other sixty thousand. Really, it was just two days. I needed time to get the money to Joel so he could give it to the scary boogeyman waiting in the shadows.
Two days. Thirty thousand each.
Technically, I needed more, since I’d be taxed out the wazoo on the winnings, but that was a problem foraftergetting Joel off a hit list.
If the previous three days were the precedent, I could do this. I could win six figures—so long as I could stay at the table.
Games of blackjack at the Four Horsemen were a sure bet, but the casino itself felt like a risk. I really needed to find a new spot to play at—maybe hop between a few casinos. But each casino was different. I couldn’t waste time learning the individual security measures Joel had talked about. Big casinos with dozens of blackjack tables made it harder to watch and follow the counts. And if the dealers or security caught on that I was trying to find a hot table to jump into, I’d get kicked out.
