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Chapter One

Camila

The lounge smelled like stale cigar smoke and spilled champagne. I balanced a tray of martinis as I moved through the crowd and slid past a table of drunk men in tailored suits with enough of a smile on my face to keep the tips coming.

But underneath the cocktail dress and the practiced smile, I was working.

A politician I recognized from a fundraiser several months ago went into the private elevator with two men I didn’t recognize at all. I noted his face along with the time on the clock behind the bar. A fighter with a split lip and one eye swollen half shut was walked through a service door by a man in a Golovin polo, moving like every step he took hurt. Two men at the high-limit table settled a debt with a black duffel bag passed under the table.

I remembered and stored all of it. That was the job I didn’t get paid for.

Between drink orders, I ducked behind the service bar and pulled the little gold notepad from my apron, worn enough that the cover had gone soft at the corners. I wrote fast, in a shorthand only I could read—initials, times, a description instead of a name I didn’t know yet. Politician, private elevator, 11:40. Fighter, service door, favoring right side. Duffel, table 12, no chips exchanged.

“You’re in calculation mode again, hm?”

I didn’t need to look up to know it was Bianca. She had a way of appearing at my elbow like she’d teleported there, glitter still clinging to her collarbone from the performance she’d just finished on stage.

“Just counting tips,” I said, sliding the notepad back into my apron with the same motion I used to smooth my skirt, so it looked like nothing at all. “Trying to figure out if they deserved the smile, after all.”

She let out a laugh that always seemed too loud and too warm for a room like this, bumping her shoulder into mine. Bianca was the only person in this building I let get close enough to bump shoulders with. She was my closest friend, both in and out of the casino. Everyone else got the version of me that was all tips and small talk. She got something closer to real, even if that also had its own careful edges.

“You work too hard,” she said. “You’re always somewhere else in your head. It’s a casino, Cami, not a crime scene.”

If only she knew how close she’d landed to the truth without meaning to.

“Tips are important,” I said instead. “Rent doesn’t pay itself.”

“Mm.” She didn’t push, though I could tell some part of her wanted to. Bianca noticed things—she was too smart not to—but she also knew that there were rooms in me she wasn’t invited into.

She looked toward the far end of the floor, unconsciously tilting her chin.

I followed her eyes just in time to catch the tail end of it—Sebastian Golovin, leaning against a pillar near the private corridor with his hands in his pockets, gaze fixed somewhere in Bianca’s direction before he turned and disappeared through the door behind him.

“Any news there?” I asked carefully.

“Nothing,” she said too fast, reaching up to fix an earring.

I let it go because I had bigger things pulling at my attention than the complicated history behind Bianca’s shrug. My eyes drifted up to the balcony that ran along the top floor like a private gallery built for watching everyone beneath it.

Nikolai Golovin stood there the way he always did. Not lounging, just standing, hands loose at his sides, watching the floor like he was gazing at the sky.

Chaos moved beneath him in every direction—dealers, dancers, drunk gamblers, and the quiet laundering of God knows how much money through slot machines and high-limit tables—yet none of it touched him. I’d never heard him raise his voice; he didn’t need to. Men twice his size went quiet when he crossed a room.

I made myself look away because staring too long at Nikolai Golovin was how women ended up disappeared or devoted, and I intended to be neither.

I picked up my tray and went back to work.

By the time my shift ended, my feet ached in a way that lived under my skin, but I still walked home instead of paying for a cab. Partly to save the money and partly because the walk let me shed the version of myself that smiled at strangers for tips, layer by layer, until I was just Camila again—tired, wired, already thinking about the article waiting half-finished on my laptop.

The security guard at the corner lot, an older man named Ellis who’d worked the Strip longer than I’d been alive, nodded at me the way he did every night. “Long shift?”

“Always is,” I said.

“You should let me walk you the last stretch. Neighborhood’s not what it used to be.”

“I’ve been making this walk alone for years, Ellis. I’ll make it again tonight, too.”

He laughed and waved me on. It was a small kindness that cost him nothing but meant more to me than he’d ever know. His regular offer was proof that not every man in this city measured you by what he could take.