Avery grins, a sadistic glint in his eyes as he watches the unease in Chloe’s expression and posture that has every one of my muscles growing strained with a restless tension. “Bet. Eight hundred.” He counts out the chips and slides them forward.
Chloe blinks, staring at her cards for a long moment before setting them face down. “Call.” She takes a drink.
The lady beside me shakes her head and folds.
I glance at the pot that’s nearly three grand, hoping that if Chloe loses, she doesn’t take it hard. The river comes as a seven of spades.
Chloe takes another drink, ignoring Avery as he attempts to make eye contact with her.
I clear my throat, ready to give him a similar warning that I gave to Cowboy, but Chloe looks at me and shakes her head once, smiling as she does.
“Bet. Twelve hundred,” Avery says.
Chloe licks her lips and finishes her drink with one pull. “All in.”
Avery chuckles. “Call.”
I drain my glass.
Chloe’s eyes flare, and regret slides through my gut. The money is nothing, but convincing her of that fact is going to take effort if she doesn’t win this hand.
Cowboy whistles. “This is gonna be good.”
Avery drops his cards to the table: pocket eights, giving him a full house. Cowboy shouts out a cheer, and then Chloe flips her cards over, revealing pocket aces, giving her four of a fucking kind. My chest swells with excitement and pride and something that sits too fucking close to my damn heart as I look at her, noting the gentle smile her lips are curved into as Joseph announces her the winner.
We play for six hours, and though Chloe loses a few hands, she wins far more.
“So glad you came,” Jericho says as we leave with our winnings. “Make sure you bring her again next time.”
I give a polite nod, leading Chloe to the lift.
“How are you feeling?” I ask her.
Her green eyes meet mine, bright with the adrenaline from winning. “I think I’m shaking,” she admits.
I laugh. “Now we have to go celebrate.”
A smile spreads across her face. “That was crazy.”
“You fucking wiped the floor.”
“I got lucky,” she says.
I scoff.
The lift doors part to a darkened parking lot. Two more security guys meet us, one of them following us to where we’re parked.
“There’s something slightly unsettling about needing someone to walk us to the car,” she says as we fasten our seat belts.
“It’s more to make Jericho look good rather than because there are any potential threats.”
“Is it weird that Mr. Avery was here?” she asks. “I mean, what are the odds?”
I glance at her seconds before the dimmers fall and the interior of the Tesla goes dark. “I knew he’d be here.”
She’s silent.
“I have some suspicions, and I knew he liked to play because his ex-wife is now married to the GM of the San Francisco site. He hates Avery and is happy to tell me all about it, so, I asked Jericho to invite him.”
“But you didn’t even talk to him.”
“I wanted to see how he played.”
“Because knowing he sucked at poker told you something?”
I chuckle. “Watching him buy back in four times did.”
“I’m not following.”
“He lost twenty grand tonight and drank his way through a bottle of gin. He’s either up to his eyeballs in debt or he’s embezzling money.”
17
Chloe
“Embezzling?” the word squeaks out of me.
“I can’t prove anything yet, but remember what I said about the numbers not adding up for the New Orleans hotel?” His gaze shifts to mine as he stops at a red light. “I thought maybe I was missing something, but then when we got to Austin, I assumed that the hotel was doing shitty because the GM is a clown. But then I learned that they’d paid to do a bunch of remodeling and nothing had been done or was even scheduled. When I asked Sid about it, he didn’t even know what I was talking about. So I contacted Vivian, our accountant at the San Francisco location because she’s worked for the hotels forever, and my dad’s always complained about her being paranoid and rigid—which means she’s good—and I talked to her about the examples and hired her to start looking over the other sites.
“Before we got here, she sent me a whole list of concerns. Half of them are likely erroneous and loose bookkeeping, but there are too many inconsistencies and not enough answers from Avery. He keeps telling Vivian that he’ll look into things and follow up, but he never does, or when he does, it’s some bullshit answer that doesn’t address the issue.”
“So, you wanted to see how aggressively he’d gamble?”
“It wasn’t guaranteed to tell me anything—it still doesn’t. He might live far below his means and piss all his money away gambling. However, if he’s doing this every week like the San Francisco GM claims, then something’s amiss.”
“What are you going to do?”
He glances at me. “Keep digging.”
All of this is so far over my head that I can’t quite wrap my mind around the implications of what this might mean as the lights of the city welcome us back to the Strip.
Tyler’s phone rings through the speakers, silencing the music as Cooper’s name is announced.
“Hey, Coop,” Ty says.
“Where are you guys? You aren’t still playing poker, are you?”
“We’re on our way back to the hotel now. Where are you guys?”
“Ready to go party. Vanessa’s words, not mine.”
Ty chuckles. “Where do you want to go?”
I consider Tyler telling me we’d spent more than the five thousand last night at the club, likely due to the VIP lounge we didn’t need.
“Vanessa says you guys can choose. She wants to do either a show or another club,” Cooper tells him.
Ty glances at me. “What do you want to do?”
I shake my head, unable to make a choice when each might be associated with a matching price tag.
“We’ll be there in ten, and
