Heist Royale (Thieves’ Gambit #2)

Chapter Twenty-Three

Twenty-Three

10:15pm, 304 of 2,000 victor chips accumulated.

Thirty minutes later, and I was still thinking about Devroe as furiously as I had been a minute after he walked away. At least his departure left me with a slot machine to work with. I racked up the thirty or so victor chips I needed, filling my quota for Taiyō’s schedule. That plus the chips he and Mom had won crunched us up to over a hundred fifty thousand in an hour. Honestly, I wouldn’t have minded hitting the slots all night, but according to the book Taiyō got this con from, about an hour and twenty minutes in was when the house started noticing the uncanny lucky pulls that got the original couple caught. I was supposed to dip long before that. Thankfully, my next assignment involved a touch of cardio, so maybe a long stroll around the casino was going to be good for my thought process.

With my leather bag on my arm, I took a glass from one of the servers and started teetering through the first floor. My steps wobbled just the subtlest bit, feigning tipsiness. Just enough to blend in, and to give myself an excuse when I walked a little too close to people or brushed past them. Mini con number seven—forged chips. Or rather, swapping real chips with my forged ones.

I dug into my bag, feeling for the hidden compartment inside. With the help of a contact Count had, we were able to get our hands on a last-minute collection of forged victor chips. Apparently, fake chips were a route a lot of people went when they were desperate to earn something back from Hart’s exclusive catalog. It never worked; the forgery attempts were always caught by the cashiers. And the people who tried to cash them in one too many times, well, there was more than one case of such people coincidentally swan-diving off the roof into the ocean below. We weren’t going to risk trying to cash them in ourselves, obviously. But just because the cashiers’ vetting machines were excellent at telling the reals from the forgeries, that didn’t mean that the average casinogoer was. Chances were, if I switched a few forgeries with real ones I found around here, no one would know until they were attempting to cash them in. Hopefully the people who were cashing them in one by one wouldn’t be facing too harsh of consequences…

I brushed past a group hurrahing around a roulette table, one where Taiyō was currently on an astounding winning streak, keeping an eye out for any iridescent black chips. The rare black chips weren’t the easiest to spot, but they were there. I’d say about one out of every ten players was using the special chips. Once I spotted one, it was almost too easy. With a little sleight of hand and an occasional apology for bumping into someone, I swiped chips here and there, sliding in my own replacements. The first thing everyone did if they noticed me stumbling a little too close was glance down at their stack of chips, but noting that they were all still apparently there, no one was that worried.

Passing through the first-floor card tables, I managed to swipe eight victor chips from a woman who’d been messaging someone on her phone, leaving her chips in a Tower of Pisa–like stack at the corner of a blackjack table. I may have inadvertently toppled her tower, but she didn’t care too much when I stacked them back for her.

I weighed the chips inside the purse swaying at my side. Electricity crackled at my fingertips. Ten thousand dollars. I’d just swiped ten thousand dollars in less than ten seconds. In total, there was at least a hundred thousand’s worth in my purse, and I still had fake chips to switch out. This was freaking genius. We were on track to rake up around a million from this mini con alone.

Looking over the rim of my glass, I eyed the higher-stakes card tables one floor up. Mylo pumped a fist in the air, apparently getting another “lucky” hand, and behind him security was circling like vultures. He’d leveled up from curiosity to person of interest. Just as planned. All he had to do was keep it up for a few more hours, but if I could read Mylo at all, he was having the time of his life up there. Could I blame him? We were all on fire. It was like this pulsing, addictive thing lighting us all up.

We were really doing this. It felt impossible a couple of days ago, but we were doing it. Piece by piece, we were working our way up to twenty million. One hour, one minute at a time.

I kept going, feeling drunk on something that wasn’t alcohol. One thousand in chips here, two thousand there, four thousand next. The whistles and bells and jackpots and clattering chips around me fueled my zeal. More, I needed more and more. So I kept going, and I’d go on and on until this hour was up and I had the fifty black chips Taiyō wanted me to get during this mini job.

“?’Scuse me,” I slurred, pushing into my next target. A young man in a well-tailored, honest-to-god moonlight-silver waistcoat was lazily flipping a particularly shimmery black chip with one hand and taking a dab of a vape pen with his other. He had a careless ease about him.

An easy grab.

My elbow hit his, knocking the chip off course. It skidded a foot or so over the carpet. Simultaneously, I dropped one of my own, letting it air-hockey across the floor to land right next to his. In an apologetic scramble, I swiped up both, then pressed the fake one into his hand. “So sorry.” I pointed to my heeled boots. “Still breaking them in.” I turned to keep walking, but a hand clasped onto my shoulder.

“Excuse me,” he said, his voice not particularly loud, but with an unquestionable authority to it. “That one’s mine.”

I turned around, feeling more focused than I had just a few seconds ago.

The boy blew out, and a wave of cherry-flavored mist hit me. Was he European? Middle Eastern? Asian? Maybe all of those. His wavy brown hair, cut right above his pressed collar, was a little too textured to just be white. I really needed to break my habit of using hair as a way to judge someone’s ethnicity.

He gave me a well-practiced sideways smile, nodded once to my hand that was currently clutching the chip that, well, had once been his. His palm was open, as if he just expected me to drop it in. Maybe I should have.

I pulled my hand to my chest. “Why does it matter?”

“Because…” He held up the other chip between two middle fingers. “This one’s a fake. I should know. This is my casino.”