Night two at the Devil’s Mercy had, thus far, passed much the same as the first: Avery losing at poker and Jameson winning down below—never too much, never at any one table for too long. Winning, after all, wasn’t the point. Getting the lay of the land was. Seeing.
This was what Jameson saw in that underground palace of a gaming hall: mirrors that weren’t just mirrors, moldings shaped to mask peepholes, triangular jeweled necklaces worn by the dealers that he deeply suspected contained listening devices or cameras or both. Jameson remembered the way that Rohan had thrown his voice in the atrium—a trick of the walls— and thought about Zella’s response when asked about the Proprietor. He’s everywhere.
And all Jameson had to do was impress him—or if not impress, intrigue. A Hawthorne knew how to bide his time, so that was what Jameson did, playing at one table, then another, noting everything, including the fact that there were at least twice as many people here tonight as there had been the
night before.
Word of the Hawthorne heiress’s overconfidence at the poker tables was spreading.
Jameson stayed down below as Avery put on her show up in the alcoves, making his way through the old-fashioned games one by one. Hazard was easy enough to pick up but didn’t require any real skill. Piquet was more interesting, allowing one player to face off directly against another. Points were awarded across multiple rounds. The deal alternated between the two players, with the strategic advantage to the non-dealer. The exact
mechanisms of scoring were complicated.
Jameson was good at complicated. “Quatorze.”
The man across from him scowled. “Good.”
In the language of the game that meant the man couldn’t best Jameson’s set. “That gives me thirty,” Jameson noted, leaning back in his chair. The man opposite him was, he had gathered, a power player in the financial sector—one who’d generously warned Jameson that he’d been a mainstay at the Mercy for longer than Jameson had been alive. “Thirty points on combinations alone,” Jameson reiterated, and then he put the poor sod out of his misery. “Repique.”
In other words: another sixty bonus points—and the game. A velvet pouch was flung his way.
“Much appreciated.” Jameson smirked, then looked back over his shoulder at the decorative mirror that stood far enough away from the tables to pose no danger of cheating.
Do you see me?
Do you see what I can do?
He stood and made his way to yet another table, ready to plunk his entire winnings down on a single hand if it meant drawing the attention of the Proprietor.
Don’t wager anything you can’t afford to lose. Rohan’s warning came back to him. Fortunately, Jameson Hawthorne had a tendency to see warnings as a challenge, an invitation.
A single hand of vingt-et-un later, he’d doubled his winnings.
Will you notice if I start counting cards? With multiple decks in play, it wasn’t a matter of remembering every card so much as assigning simple values to ranges of cards and keeping a running tally of those values, proportioned over the number of decks remaining.
What will you do, Jameson could hear the old man asking him, with what you see?
Rohan slid in for the dealer. Jameson didn’t so much as blink, but the other men at the vingt-et-un table reacted visibly to the Factotum’s presence. This was Rohan the charmer, handsome and wicked, his posture not threatening in the least, yet the other players radiated poorly masked unease.
“December fourth, nineteen eighty-nine.” Rohan offered up a roguish
smile as he began expertly dealing out the cards. “That was a Monday. Boxing Day, eighteen fifty-nine—also a Monday.” With a single face-up card in front of each player, Rohan dealt a card to himself, facedown. “I’ve always had a mind for dates.” He dealt five more face-up cards—one to each of them, including himself. “And numbers.” Rohan looked to the man to Jameson’s left and arched a brow. “January eleventh, March sixth, June first, all of this year. Shall I rattle off the days of the week?”
The man to Jameson’s left said nothing, and Rohan shifted his gaze past Jameson to a second man. “Would you like to hear them, Ainsley?”
“I’d like to play,” the man blustered.
“Play?” Rohan said, leaning forward slightly. “Is that what you call your recent activities?”
The question seemed to suck the oxygen out of the room.
“You know the rules.” Rohan’s smile relaxed, his eyes crinkling slightly at the corners. “Everyone here knows the rules. Since the two of you have been in this together, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll play this hand I’ve dealt, you and you and me. If I win…” Rohan’s smile fell away, like sand blown smooth by the wind. “Well, you know what happens if I win.” Rohan nodded to the men’s face-up cards. “If either of you win, I’ll let you fight it out in the ring.”
One thing that Jameson had learned early on about observing the world was to pay attention to blank spaces: pauses in sentences, what wasn’t said, places where crowds should have been gathered but weren’t. A blank face. An opening.
No one in this secret, underground lair of luxury and wagers was looking at the vingt-et-un table now.
“What if we both win?” the man to his left said. Jameson was fairly certain the guy was a politician—and even more certain he was sweating.
“The offer’s the same.” Rohan flashed another easy smile, but there was something unsettling about it. The Factotum was wearing another red suit this evening, with black underneath, an ensemble fit for the club’s namesake. “Where angels fear to tread, have your fun instead,” he murmured, his eyes flashing. “But remember…”
The house always wins.
Rohan shifted his gaze to the man on the right and waited. The man took another card. His friend did not.
Rohan dealt himself a card. He flipped the facedown one over. “Dealer wins.”
The men said nothing, their faces ashen. The moment Rohan stepped away, the dealer slid back in, the jewel around her neck reminding Jameson that he was being watched.
They all were.
The dealer gathered the losing cards, then nodded to Jameson. “You still in?” she asked.
Out of the corner of his eyes, Jameson saw a man with thick red hair and features that looked carved from stone—and then he saw the space around the man. Other people got out of his way.
Jameson tracked the man’s progression, then turned back to the dealer, in her old-fashioned ballgown. “Actually,” he said, “I’m feeling like a game of whist.”
“You’ll need a partner.”
Jameson turned to see Zella standing behind him. “Are you volunteering?” he asked her.
“That depends,” the duchess replied. “How often do you lose, Jameson Hawthorne?”
Jameson was used to being the one who assessed other people, looking for the right play. It was interesting to him to see this woman do the same. How often do I lose? “As often as it takes,” he told her, “to win the games that matter most.”
Jameson could practically feel the duchess reading him the way he read people. “You have a specific opponent in mind,” she noted. “For your game of whist.”
Jameson didn’t deny it. “Who is he? The red-haired man?”
In answer, Zella began to walk toward the whist table where the man in question now sat. He appeared right after Rohan dealt with those men. The timing seemed a bit too coincidental, as did the way people looked at—and avoided looking at—this man who dripped power.
The Proprietor?
“The answer to the question you’re really asking?” Zella murmured beside him. “It’s no.”
She’d zeroed in on the question beneath the question with remarkable ease. “Who are you?” Jameson asked the woman beside him.
“I’m just a woman who married a duke.” Zella gave a slight shrug, as elegant as the teardrop sapphire that hung around her neck. “A nonroyal duke, for what that’s worth. Handsome. Young.”
You love him, your duke. Jameson wasn’t sure where that instinct came from, but he didn’t second-guess it, and he didn’t press for details about her marriage. “Just marrying a duke wouldn’t get you membership here.”
Zella smiled. “You could say I have a gift for turning glass ceilings into glass castles.”
Glass castles? Jameson probed the phrase for meaning. Beautiful, but still constraining. They’d nearly made their way to the whist table.
With long, graceful strides, Zella came to stand behind the duo slotted to play against the red-haired man. “Would one of you gentlemen mind—”
Both men stood before the duchess even finished the request. Jameson wondered if they were that motivated to give Zella what she wanted—or if they simply didn’t want to play against the man who’d claimed a seat at their table.
Whoever he was.
Zella took one of the vacated chairs and gestured toward the other. “Mr.
Hawthorne?”
Jameson sat.
“Zella,” the man said with an arch of his brow.
“Branford.” Zella met Jameson’s gaze again. “Shall we begin?”
