“Dear God, you eavesdropped?” said Xavier. His expression turned ironic. “I don’t know why I find myself shocked. You are far more talented at gathering information than I ever gave you credit for.”
She swung around to the end of the baby grand that was opposite from where he sat, wanting the illusion of something between her and his too-still figure. “Oh, I didn’t mean to, and nothing happened quite like what happened the night you and Melisande were talking. I just . . . I caught snippets of conversations here and there. I really tried not to notice what was happening or put two and two together. That was my first job out of college, and it paid damn well.” She laughed bitterly. “But I was flattered and excited that I could pay off my student loans so quickly, and I wanted it to be okay.”
“Tess,” Xavier said. “What the fuck was he doing?”
That brought her up short. Normally he was so courteous, the expletive seemed doubly shocking.
“He lured people into placing bigger and bigger bets, and they got more and more into debt. Then he would meet with them, and when they left, they looked sick to death, yet their debt would be forgiven.” She looked down at her blurred image in the polished dark wood of the piano. “On the surface, you might think that was no big deal. Casinos write off tens of millions of bad debt every year. But none of the people I saw looked like they had been given a reprieve. I heard one of them say he was going to be sick, and another one told his wife it was never going to be over.”
He leaned his crossed arms on the piano. His gaze never left her. “Was he cheating?”
“Maybe?” She shook her head. “I don’t know for sure. I’m not a gambler, and anyway, I didn’t watch the games. I just watched the money and the people.”
“All right,” he said. The soft-spoken man was back, only he had shotgun eyes that bore right at her, and he was the gun. “Do you have any idea what he was doing to them? Why was it never going to be over?”
Staring at him was too distracting. She looked down at her blurred self in the piano again. “I think he was extorting or coercing them somehow, only with their debts erased, I don’t know how.”
“Forget about trying to figure out how. I just want to hear what you think.”
“What I think . . . ?” Her voice died away. Nobody had asked her that before. She hadn’t had anybody to confide in, and the whole situation had come to feel so unstable and dangerous, she hadn’t dared verbalize her impressions, even to herself. She frowned as she considered, and he didn’t rush her. He simply watched and waited.
“I think . . . he liked the game too much. All of it. He was lit up and entirely focused when he was playing, like he needed it.”
“You’re talking about the gambling itself?” Xavier asked.
“Yes.” She ran the tip of one forefinger around the pale oval of her face in the reflection.
“So he acted like an addict might?”
She lifted her head up, and this time when she spoke, her voice was surer. “Yes. Maybe he’s a gambling addict, and the whole process matters to him. But it always ended in someone getting trapped.”
“Because the house always wins,” he said.
“Exactly.” She focused on him again and gave him an embarrassed, self-deprecating grimace. “Until the one time I got involved.”
THIRTEEN
Xavier was usually a patient, even-tempered man, but at the moment so many unruly emotions surged inside of him, he had to struggle to restrain himself.
She had messed with a pariah Djinn who played power games and was possibly a gambling addict?
He bit out, “What did you do?”
Her gaze wandered away. “I might have interfered with one of his marks.”
Holy Mother of God. He rubbed his eyes and forced himself to speak with some measure of control. “Interfered how?”
She tilted her head toward one of her shoulders and watched her finger as she drew circles on the piano’s polished surface again.
She said, “I might have called his parents to tell them what kind of debt their son was accruing, and with whom. He was only twenty-one, you see—old enough to drink and gamble and get into trouble, but he wasn’t even out of college yet.”
He rubbed the back of his neck as he watched her. “What happened?”
“Eathan’s father shut him down before it could go too far. He flew out to Vegas, paid off Eathan’s gambling debt and dragged him home again.”
“Is that when you left Las Vegas and ended up at the Vampyre’s Ball?”
She nodded.
He couldn’t look away from her dejected figure. She looked as beautiful in the dark blue dress as he knew she would. The cut of the gown highlighted the slender lines of her neck and shoulders, and the graceful wings of her collarbones.
“There’s something I’m missing,” he said, almost to himself. “This isn’t just a story about a boy who made mistakes. What’s the significance of all of this?”