Page 21 of The Devil's Dilemma

He couldn’t move, his arms bound behind the chair, and I slowly slid my hands into his pockets.

They were full of chips and some higher denomination plaques. He’d not had a chance to cash these in and was leaving the casino when I apprehended him.

I took them to my desk and laid them out. Most were high-value chips, totalling thirty thousand pounds. Twelve five-thousand-pound plaques gave him another sixty. Still not a huge amount, but at our casino, we carried plaques worth £25,000. He had ten of these.

“How did you win all this?” I walked back to him.

Every casino’s goal was to take money from the customers. No matter how hard they tried, the odds of someone winning big were small. If we hadn’t spotted them, they’d have walked out with over half a million pounds. I couldn’t let that happen.

But I was more concerned about who was stealing from me.

“Who put you up to this?”

“I’m telling you nothing. We just wanted to win some money.” I spun on my heel and faced the one called Joel.

“You think you can come in here and steal my money?” My temperature rose, a sure sign of my annoyance, but I needed to keep calm if I wanted more information.

“Not stealing if we won it fair and square.” Joel’s list of criminal records was the longest, but his transgressions were still only petty shit. Something didn’t fit.

“Well, Joel.” He paled. “Ordinarily, I would agree with you. People come here and win all the time. Sometimes big money, but I have this feeling that your intention”—I pointed to the three of them—“was to steal from me, and I have to ask why.”

“I’m not telling you shit.” I was on the right track, all right.

“Austin here. I watched him for a while, and no one wins that consistently. Not at blackjack nor at roulette. The odds are always stacked in the dealer’s favour. No doubt the other footage we have of him will show him winning consistently on other tables too.”

What was it about him? Something was masking him from me, not exactly hiding but muddying the waters. I couldn’t get a read on him.

“He’s just lucky,” the other guy, Freddie, said.

“No. Lucky is winning on a scratch card. Lucky is putting your hand in your pocket and finding a twenty-pound note. Lucky is finding that priceless heirloom in your attic.”

I stood before Austin and closed my eyes, inhaling deeply. Definitely something. I opened them again and scanned his face, looking for any clue that would tell me what he was. He appeared human.

“You are an enigma,” I whispered, more to myself than to him.

“And you are in my face.” He jerked forward, but I jumped back out of his reach.

“Now, now, Austin. Play nicely.”

I’d had enough for the moment and settled back behind my desk. Conrad took up his usual spot on the sofa, and we sat in silence, letting them stew.

“You can’t keep us here,” Joel said.

He was probably right. Legally, they shouldn’t be tied up in my basement, but who was going to bother with a couple of criminals?

“Yeah, you have to let us go,” Freddie said.

I didn’t have to do jack shit. I was the devil and could do what the fuck I wanted. Who was going to stop me?

I didn’t have one ounce of compassion for them and could just as easily snap their necks as look at them.

But where was the fun in that? And I’d not had any fun in a long time.

“People will come looking for us.” Joel was definitely the chatty one.

Austin said nothing and stared ahead, but it was his anxiety I sensed the most. But where the other two feared for their own lives, Austin’s distress was different, more concern than anything. What had he said about a grandpa?

That had to be it.

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