Dragon's Luck: Dragon Shifter Paranormal Romance (Shifter Agents Book 3)

by Lauren Esker

Yeah, and he's standing in a sunbeam right now. Try again, genius.

  At ten minutes to one, four redcaps entered the room, including the gray-haired man from earlier. Every one of them was armed.

  "Everyone here is part of the Hathor group?" Gray Hair asked. "Please show your tokens."

  Hands extended around the room. The redcaps strolled about, checking tokens. They didn't seem to be in any hurry. Lucky hid his nervousness behind a smooth, polite smile.

  "This way, please."

  They were ushered onto the elevators in several smaller groups. There aren't actually that many of us, Lucky thought, but then the elevator doors opened on Deck A and they merged with more passengers from the other decks.

  He glimpsed what looked like an indoor mall, as well as the entrance to the atrium, before they were all herded through a discreet door to the left of the elevators.

  The hallway beyond the door was wide and dimly lit, giving off a sense of calculated Old World elegance. Lucky's feet sank into a dark red plush carpet. There were no windows; the walls were paneled in dark wood, and all the light came from a few lamps with Tiffany shades. One of these stood on a small table beside a book stand with an enormous antique dictionary spread out on it. Lucky brushed a finger over the pages as they passed.

  There were four doors along the corridor, two on each side. Each one bore a life-sized human figure, head turned to the side in profile. No, not humans. Gods. Egyptian gods. The painted figures were executed in tomb-painting style, but the colors were fresh and bright. They seemed jarringly out of place in a hallway that could otherwise have been lifted from an English lord's manor.

  The second door on the right was open, and people were already filing in. Lucky lagged back, looking at the other doors. Isis, Hathor, and Bastet were the gods who had been named at the morning briefing—all goddesses really, he thought, looking at their feminine contours. Hathor with her horned headdress waited for him on the open door. Of the other two, one had a cat's head, and the other wore a tall, stepped crown.

  And then there was the fourth door, on the far left. This one bore the likeness of the only male god in the assemblage. It had a jackal's head.

  Lucky was no expert on Egyptology, but he recognized that one. The jackal-headed god was Anubis, judge of the dead.

  No games in the Anubis Room? he wondered, glancing over his shoulder as he went through the Hathor door. For some reason it made him shiver. He felt as if the jackal-headed figure was watching him out of the corner of its painted eye.

  Inside the Hathor Room, to his relief, everything felt a little more familiar. As with the hallway, the Hathor Room was decorated more like the drawing room of a private gentleman's club than like a Vegas game room: dark wood, deep carpet, upright Queen Anne chairs at the tables. But it was a recognizable gambling den, from the card tables to the bar in the corner.

  Each table had a redcap dealer and places for ten players. There were four tables, spaced widely apart in a room that could easily have accommodated a half-dozen more with space to spare.

  Forty competitors here, Lucky thought. If it's the same in the other rooms, that's a hundred and twenty to start.

  It was actually fewer people than he'd been expecting. And if each table only allowed one winner, today's game would whittle it down to twelve.

  Gray Hair closed the door after everyone had filed in. "If you'll check your token, you'll find that it's printed in one of four colors, and includes a number. The color will determine your table, and the number your seat."

  Lucky's token had the number 6, and was printed in red ink. Each table, he saw, had a geometric pattern of interlocking squares inlaid on its wooden surface in a different color: red, black, green, and blue. The chairs bore small, discreet number plaques on the backs. He took seat six at the red table.

  Marius ended up at one of the other tables. Thank God.

  Their dealer was a young Southeast Asian woman with braided hair wound in a tight coil at the nape of her neck. Like their escorts, she was armed; he caught the contour of a shoulder holster under her jacket. She watched in silence as they took their seats. Other redcaps circulated, placing identical piles of chips in front of each player. Lucky scanned them quickly to count them, but didn't try to relate them to a monetary amount. Best to think of them in the abstract, not as actual money. It wasn't like he was playing for money anyway.

  "The game is no-limit, twenty-and-forty-thousand Texas Hold 'Em," the dealer informed the table.

  With one gloved hand, she placed a black disc in front of the player to her left. This disc would circulate during the game, indicating where betting would start each time. On the Fair Lady, the players themselves had been dealing, so betting had rotated along with the deck of cards. Here, with a table dealer, that disc—called the dealer button—would serve the same function, giving everyone a fair chance to start.

  Texas Hold 'Em was the most common tournament poker game. No limit meant no cap on the betting; it could go as high as the players wanted to push it. Twenty thousand was the minimum to start, and forty thousand to stay in. From there, betting would go in twenty-thousand-dollar increments, rising to forty thousand on the final two rounds of each hand. Even to Lucky, who was used to playing high-stakes games, the amount of money that would be in circulation at the table was staggering.

  It's just chips. Don't think of it as money. You probably wouldn't get to keep most of it anyway.

  He glanced quickly around at his competition. On Roxy's gambling boat, he'd played against a mix of wannabes and bottom-tier underground pros. Now the chaff had been sorted out, and only the serious players remained.

  The kind of people who were drawn to an underground game like this one were a different crowd than the ones who played on televised poker tournaments at the Vegas casinos. Those were a clean-cut bunch, and many of them were young, twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings. Most of the players here were older, and most of them had a scruffy, hard-bitten look about them. They were primarily men, but not exclusively. There was only one woman at Lucky's table, about Roxy's age and with a similar flint-hard look to her.

  Still, Lucky was used to people like this, even if these were a more dangerous caliber of player than he was used to facing. All of his gambling experience was in underground games. He'd always avoided any game that had even a whiff of being televised or putting him on the radar of the online gambling sites that listed player bios and rankings.

  Roxy had wanted him to scope out the other players, but there was no point. He knew they'd be good. But what he couldn't tell either Roxy or Jen was that the other players' level of skill didn't matter. Oh, he could still lose by playing stupidly. As long as he didn't make any amateur mistakes, though, all he had to do was put his thumb on the scales of luck at the right time.

  So let's not make any dumb mistakes, then.

  Once he managed to relax and settle into the game, he found he was enjoying it. Redcaps circulated, offering drinks. Lucky decided to avoid alcohol for the time being, and ordered a virgin Bloody Mary instead. Chips moved back and forth across the table. Players went bust one by one, whittling the number of people at Lucky's table down to six. The chairs to his right and left were now empty.

  At the other tables, the game moved faster or slower, depending on the relative skill and playing styles of the players involved. One of the tables still had all ten of its starting players. Marius's table, on the other hand, was already down to just three; the play had turned fast and vicious. Watching out of the corner of his eye, Lucky could see that the competition was mainly between Marius and a big, nasty-looking bruiser with a scar on his cheek that looked like it had been inflicted with a bottle in a bar fight. Despite his thuggish looks, he was very good. So was Marius. The other players had simply gotten caught up in the crossfire between those two.

  By now Lucky had pinpointed the main person to beat at his own table: a lean and sharp-faced blond man in his fifties, referred to as Yegerev by some of the other players.
He had a Russian accent and a deeply conservative playing style, folding at the slightest hint of a better hand elsewhere on the table, and hanging onto his chips jealously.

  In reaction, Lucky had decided to frame himself as someone who placed flamboyant bets, bluffing on bad hands and then tweaking the shuffles to give himself a win on the next one. Players who hardly ever placed bets were hard to beat, but were also susceptible to someone who was so erratic they were literally impossible to predict—any player had to eventually go in on a hand, or they'd wash out of the game in small increments, one starting bet at a time.

  Lucky had, through actual unaugmented chance, ended up with a pretty good hand and was trying to decided what to do with it, when a sudden yell and a crash from the next table drew the eyes of everyone in the card room.

  "You fucking cheater!" Bottle Scar snarled, standing up from the table so quickly that he knocked his chair over.

  Marius remained seated, his hands folded in front of him and face impassive. "I did not. You made a poor play, and lost."

  "Nobody gets hands that good three times in a row, you fucking cheat."

  Huh, Lucky thought; was it possible his gentle nudging of the luck at his own table, in his favor, was spilling over and distorting the web of probability for the entire room? He had no idea how it all worked; all he knew was how to make it work.

  Several of the nearby redcaps were converging on Marius's table. Every player had turned away from their respective games—many of them, Lucky included, with one hand resting protectively on top of their facedown cards to prevent anyone from messing with them—to watch the action.

  "I was watching," the dealer said. She stepped away from the table, one hand sliding under her jacket to the bulge of her weapon. "He didn't do anything. It was a fair win."

  Bottle Scar lunged across the table and seized Marius by the front of his shirt. Lucky couldn't see exactly what Marius did next, his view blocked by the broad back of the bottle-scarred thug, but whatever it was, Marius effortlessly broke the meaty grip, sidestepping gracefully away as he did so.

  That's a guy I really hope we don't have to fight.

  The redcaps were drawing their weapons, Bottle Scar stepped forward with his fists up, Marius had moved into a fluid martial-arts stance—and then everyone just ... quit.

  Marius and Bottle Scar froze in place like children playing freeze-tag. The redcaps holstered their guns. Everyone else turned back to their games. And Lucky felt a cold chill wash through him, something that came not from inside him, but from outside. The skin prickled on the back of his neck. For a moment he thought he was going to be sick.

  He hadn't felt that sensation in a long time ... and yet it hadn't been nearly long enough.

  He looked up at the door to the Hathor Room, where Angel Lucado had just stepped into the room.

  They'd both been teenagers the last time Lucky had seen his cousin. Angel was a few years older, a virtual lifetime at that age, and Lucky had never quite stopped thinking of Angel as bigger and stronger. This seemed to have carried over into adulthood. The family resemblance was still visible; even from here, Lucky could glimpse echoes, in his cousin's harder and broader face, of the features he saw in the mirror. But Angel had grown up and out. Where Lucky was slender, Angel had a more heavy-boned and powerful physique.

  He was probably a fucking enormous dragon now, too.

  Angel was wearing a charcoal-colored suit with no tie, and a gray trilby that made him look like a 1930s gangster. His eyes flicked up, under the brim of the hat, and met Lucky's for an instant. A glimmer of blue-white light seemed to gleam for an instant in those shadowed depths.

  Lucky realized that his hands had started shaking on the edge of the table. From the beginning, he'd hoped—But hoping and knowing were two different things.

  Angel strolled inside, moving with predatory grace through a roomful of people who did not seem to know he was there. Maybe they didn't. He'd been powerful before, but from the look of things, fifteen years had made him terrifying.

  Lucky pushed luck, but Angel pushed people.

  The game at Lucky's table had resumed. When the betting came around to him, Lucky shook his head and folded, even though he had a good hand. He couldn't concentrate on anything but the drama unfolding at the table next to his.

  Marius and Bottle Scar both relaxed out of their paralysis as Angel approached. Marius sank into his chair, while Bottle Scar collapsed into the chair vacated by the dealer, limp-legged like a puppet with its strings cut.

  "You," Angel said quietly, and Bottle Scar's head turned toward him, dragged around by invisible strings. "What made you think he was cheating?"

  "His hand was too good," Bottle Scar said in a dazed voice. "He got pocket kings three hands in a row. I went all in on the last one because I thought he was bluffing."

  Angel turned to look at Marius. "Did you cheat?"

  Marius's eyes were unfocused; he shook his head. "No."

  "There you go, then." Angel clapped Bottle Scar on the shoulder; his hand rested a second too long for friendliness, his thumb touching the man's throat. "Return to your cabin and feel free to enjoy the hospitality of the Memphis for the remainder of your stay."

  Bottle Scar rose to leave, vacant-eyed. Angel turned away, already dismissing the man from his attention, and shook Marius's hand. The handshake lingered; Lucky could tell something had been in Angel's hand and was now in Marius's. "Congratulations on your win."

  "Thank you," Marius said. He hadn't blinked yet. When Angel let go of his hand, he looked down at it, then shoved his hand into his pocket. He started for the door, stopped, blinked, shook his head, and then went on with a slight, puzzled frown.

  Angel glanced at the dealer at Lucky's table. She still didn't seem aware of him, but she set aside the deck of cards. "Ten-minute break," she announced.

  The players rose and stretched. Some of them left to find restrooms. Angel came to stand beside Lucky's chair.

  "For the record," he said softly, "I don't actually care if they cheat or not. What's important is cheating well enough not to get caught. If they can do that, more power to them. Sound familiar?" He winked. "Let's have a drink, cousin."

  Feeling numb, Lucky got up and followed him to the bar. It was as if fifteen years had never passed, as if they'd only seen each other yesterday. Angel tapped the bar top, and the bartender turned up two glasses and brought a bottle of well-aged Scotch from beneath the bar.

  "I'm not drinking today," Lucky said.

  "Yeah you are." Angel picked up the glasses and the bartender immediately moved away. No one else was nearby, everyone having quietly and casually found things to do elsewhere.

  Reluctantly, Lucky took the glass and clinked it against the one his cousin offered. "So tell me, cousin, should I call you Angel, or Lux?"

  Angel's half-smile was a sickle blade. "Oh, little cousin. I could confirm or deny, but where's the fun in that? I'd miss seeing the look on your face when you find out how wrong you've been, about so many things."

  "The reason why no one ever remembers meeting Lux is because you make them forget. No one in this room except me is going to remember you were here, are they?"

  Angel shrugged and sipped his drink. "If you've got it, might as well flaunt it. You could be so much more than you are, Ambrose."

  "You know I hate that name."

  "I'm certainly not going to call you Lucky. It sounds like a dog's name." The blade-sharp smile returned. "So tell me about that pretty little piece who's sharing your stateroom. Wife? Girlfriend?"

  Sick realization screwed Lucky's stomach into a knot. Of course Angel knew about Jen. The idea of Angel anywhere near her filled him with horror and loathing. "Neither. She's someone I picked up at the last level of the tournament. It's a temporary partnership, that's all."

  "You, working with a partner? Hard to imagine."

  "How do you know?" Lucky demanded. "You haven't seen me since I was fifteen. You don't know me anymore, Angel."
<
br />   "No? But I knew you'd be here. You couldn't stay away. And look." Angel made an expansive gesture, encompassing the room with its nearly silent tables of intense gamblers. "Here you are. You can't tell me you don't miss working together."

  "I was fifteen! And besides, this is bullshit, the same bullshit you've always pulled. You were the one who walked away, not me. You were the one who took—" He broke off, balking.

  "Little Lucia?"

  Hearing her name on Angel's lips swamped him with a rush of impotent fury. "You son of a bitch. Is she here? On the Memphis?" He couldn't bring himself to ask the question he really wanted to know the answer to: Is she alive?

  "Find her yourself. All you have to do is win the tournament. We both know you can do it."

  "If you really want me to deal with you again, I don't think playing head games with me is the way to go about it."

  "It's working so far." Angel waggled his fingers in a small wave, and turned away. "Enjoy the rest of today's competition. And say hi to your pretty little partner. I'll be sure and say hi to Lucia on your behalf, too."

  "I can make a real mess for you, you know," Lucky snapped at his back. "I'm just about the only person who could. I can scream out the truth right here."

  "Really?" Angel turned back. "And make me kill them all? That'd be a shame."

  Kill them all. Even allowing for attrition in the gamblers' ranks, there were still around twenty-five or thirty people in the room, including the dealers and waitstaff. Most of them were probably terrible people, mobsters and killers and professional cheats.

  But still. Thirty lives. And Angel would do it, Lucky thought.

  "You haven't changed at all, have you? You're still a petty tyrant playing games with other people's lives. But I've changed, Angel. I'm not yours anymore."

  "Really?" Angel asked archly. "To me, it looks like you're dancing to my tune just like you always did."

  "I'm going to find her. I'm going to make it to the end, and I'm going to free my sister from you."

  "Well, you can certainly try." Angel jerked his head to indicate Lucky's table. "I believe play is about to start again. You'd best get back."