“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?”

She squared her shoulders and looked at him with equal parts dread and sadness. “His father was Senator Ryan Jackson. Malphas really, really wanted to trap Eathan.”

He was on his feet, around the piano and by her side before he knew it. As she turned to face him, he gripped her by the shoulders again. He couldn’t seem to stop himself from touching her. “Senator Jackson sits on several key subcommittees in Washington. If Malphas had gotten control of Eathan, he could have used that as leverage to force Jackson into doing whatever he wanted.”

“I know.” She twisted her fingers together.

He scowled, his mind racing over everything she had told him. “I’m still not seeing something. All this happened weeks ago. Why did you decide today that you were going to leave?”

The corners of her mouth turned down, and her dark gaze took on a wet, overbright shine. “Because this morning I read in the Boston Herald that Eathan died in a boating accident while he was in Florida during Presidents’ Day weekend. None of his friends died, just him. The paper said it was a freak squall, but I know it wasn’t. It was Malphas, and he hasn’t forgiven or forgotten anything. If he was willing to do that to Eathan, he’ll be more than willing to do something similar to me, whether I’m one of your attendants or not.”

The pain in her eyes was too much to resist. He did what he’d been looking forward to doing all evening and pulled her into his arms, only this time he didn’t hold her at the proper prescribed distance for waltzing but clenched her tight. “I’m so sorry.”

She didn’t flinch or pull away. Instead, her arms crept around his waist, and she leaned against him. “If I hadn’t done anything, if I’d just kept my mouth shut, Eathan would probably still be alive.”

He felt in her tense body how she struggled not to cry, and he stroked her hair. “You can’t think like that. If you hadn’t stopped Malphas from trapping the boy and controlling the father, who knows what kind of harm could have come from that. The fact that he chose to retaliate is not your fault.”

“It feels like it is,” she whispered. A sob broke out of her. “It feels like I killed him, and while I think I could kill somebody in self-defense or if I really had to, he didn’t deserve to die like that and I didn’t mean to do it.”