It worked, the way it always worked—a softening around her mouth, involuntary, the kind that happened below the level of decision. She updated me on something about a dinner reservation, and I listened and made the right sounds as I finished restocking my tray.
When I walked back out onto the floor, I could feel her watching me go.
I didn’t look back. If I looked back, she would see my face, and my face, right now, was doing something I didn’t entirely have control over.
The casino felt different.
It was the same as it had always been—same lights, same music, same layered smell, same geometry of tables and bodies, and the perpetual, enveloping sound of money in motion. Nothing had changed. The Golovin Casino had absorbed a murder the way it absorbed everything, cleanly and completely, without a mark left on the surface.
But I moved through it differently.
Every security camera felt like an eye that was specifically, personally mine. Every shadow in a side corridor contracted something in my chest. The doors to the restricted sections, which I had passed a hundred times without thinking, now registered as objects. I found myself calculating distances—how far from any given point to an exit, how long a hallway was, how many people were between me and the main floor at any given moment.
I had read once that this was what trauma did to the body. Turned the ordinary into threat maps. Made every room a problem to be solved in advance.
I thought about that and found it unhelpful and moved on.
Thankfully, Viktor was nowhere in sight.
*****
The VIP floor was busier than usual for a weekday. I worked my section with the automatic precision that three yearshad built into my muscle memory, delivering drinks, fielding comments, deploying my smile with the same rationing I always used. I was fine. I was performing fine so thoroughly that being fine was nearly true.
My skin would not stop prickling.
It started at 11:15 pm, between the high-stakes roulette tables and the east bar. Not a sound, not a sight—nothing I could have pointed to. Just a slow, unmistakable pressure at the back of my neck, the particular awareness that something in the environment had changed. The way animals feel the change in weather before it arrives.
I knew, before I turned, what I would see.
Viktor stood at the VIP security desk across the floor.
I had sighted him several times the previous night. Our eyes had met once or twice from where he stood on the mezzanine. They had been brief gazes.
But tonight, he was actually watching me. He had a tablet in one hand, the way security managers always did, but the tablet’s screen was dark, and his eyes were on me. Arms crossed. Dressed in black from collar to boots, the way he always dressed, as if he had decided long ago that color was a distraction and excised it from his life. He was not leaning. He was not restless. He simply occupied space with the particular stillness of something load-bearing—the kind of stillness that is not passivity but compression.
He looked exactly as he had looked two nights ago. Standing over a body. Empty-eyed and controlled and lethal.
My stomach tightened. My pulse did something complicated. Fear and fury arrived together, which they always did for me, braided so closely I had stopped trying to separate them.
The correct thing to do was nothing. Look away. Finish my shift. Clock out at 3 am and go home, back to the privacy of my own apartment. The right thing was keeping Viktor Golovin in my peripheral vision, where he was manageable.
But I was already moving toward him, my hips swaying with determination.
My feet were carrying me across the floor, and my chin was up, and my tray was balanced in one hand, perfectly level, because I would not give him the satisfaction of watching me wobble.
He watched me come the whole way. He didn’t move. His expression didn’t shift. There was no surprise, no wariness, not the slightest realignment. He simply watched.
I stopped in front of him.
The height difference hit me. Now, it was not from a distance, where it was just information, but up close, where it was physical. He was, give or take, a foot taller than me. He was broad-shouldered, built in a way that suggested not vanity but function, the accumulation of years of something practical and violent.
He said nothing.
Well, I took his silence as a prompt.
“I know what I saw.” My voice came out the way I had trained it to come out under pressure: level, low, the wordsclipped clean. “I want you to know that I know. And that I’m not scared of you.”
The last sentence was a lie. The first two were not.
