Page 51 of Forsaking All Others

He’d dragged me into the study and fucked me over the edge of his palatial desk and then never spoken another word about it again.

Dario pressed a perfunctory kiss to my cheek and nodded at Luigi and Stefan, my bodyguards for the night, before stalking off toward the back of the room.

“I think I’ll play the floor for a bit before I head to the back,” I told Luigi and Stefan, my favorite guards and close friends of mine.

I stroked a hand down Cerberus’s silken head and adjusted his leather collar. Sometimes, when I took the dog with me, he had to wear a service vest, but his presence at my side was such a staple in the casino, he was unencumbered by it now. I didn’t even use a leash with him most of the time, his sleek body moving gracefully in tandem with my stride.

Stefan slanted a glance at Dario’s retreating form, but nodded, following my lead as I slipped onto a stool at a blackjack table with a dealer I recognized. I played a few hands there, enough to realize that the young, balding man on the last stool to my right was too twitchy, playing with a gold signet ring that almost blinded me each time it caught the low light.

At the next table I played at, a man and woman sitting a few stools apart seemed to be signaling each other with minute glances and frequent touches to their face. I recognized the gesture from a guest speaker at the University of Chicago that we had from the CIA who said one of the signals of deception was touching the face too much.

One of the pit bosses, Angelica Dearborn, found me at the table after that, where I was playing medium-stakes poker with a handful of others.

“Is everything okay, Mrs. Ferretti?” she asked, when I caught her eye.

“Speak to Luigi. The last three tables I was at had suspicious activity. The man in the red vest at the first, a man in a black suit with a goatee and a woman in sequined pink dress at the third, and the dealer at this table in cahoots with the man to my left who is pretending to be drunk when his pulse is beating steadily at his neck. Tag them and watch their movements, I think it’s part of a bigger operation Dario would be curious to know about.”

Angelica’s mouth thinned, but she nodded, turning away and already speaking into the microphone attached to her lapel.

“Dario will pull you from the floor.” Luigi told me what I already knew. “As soon as she tells him what you said.”

“Only if he can find me on the floor,” I suggested with a pretty smile before I slid off my stool.

My shadows followed me without another word of reproach as I wound through the tables to the left of the room, where a door labeled Private was guarded by security. He took one look at me and tipped his chin before scanning his badge and opening the door for me.

I glided down the corridor to the room at the back of the hall that was manned by yet another goon and waited while he knocked on the door.

Tony, the backroom manager who organized all the high-roller games, most of which were not exactly legal or attended by law-abiding citizens, beamed when he saw me standing there.

“Ah, the lady of the house graces us with her presence tonight,” he charmed, swooping forward to kiss me on both cheeks. “To what do we owe this honor?”

I shrugged delicately, looking up at him through my lashes. “You know sometimes I have this profound urge to see how much of my husband’s fortune I can gamble away.”

Tony laughed, and behind me Luigi coughed to hide his own amusement.

“I have rarely seen you lose a dime,” Tony pointed out, but he was already moving aside to lead me into the private room, reaching out to Cerberus, who growled at the threat of being touched, before he snapped his hand away. “And I have a feeling tonight will be no different.”

The truth was, I had overheard Dario speaking to his right-hand man Cesare in the office late last night about a problem with the club finances. Even though North River Casino was wildly successful, there had been a few weeks of the house losing a disproportionate amount compared to the norm, and Dario suspected someone on the inside was scheming against the Family.

It wasn’t the first time I heard of the issue. The day before I had taken a meeting at my offices in the Loop with a very lucrative client who offered to pay me handsomely to find out who the fuck was stealing money from the Outfit.

Of course, Lando Ferretti had no idea he was speaking with his daughter-in-law.

Sybil, or the Oracle, as most people in the know called me, was an eastern European with a hard-to-place accent and brilliant red hair beneath the full-face alabaster mask she wore.

So I had gently manipulated Dario into inviting me along tonight, knowing he was probably spending the rest of the evening interrogating the staff, but I had always preferred a subtler method of questioning.

One that involved frequent eyelash batting and the careful stroking of male egos.

And it was just my luck that the two men I most suspected of acting against our interests were attending their usual Friday-evening poker game that night.

Mario Giordano barely lifted his gaze to greet me when Tony pulled out a spare chair for me at the circular table, but Joey Erizzo flashed me his megawatt grin.

The others, Michael and Bobby Fiori and Serena Nenci, all gave me their own greetings, unsurprised to have me sit in on their game.

I knew Mario’s mistress was trying to blackmail him into paying over $2 million if he didn’t want her to share the tapes she had made of him trussed up in rope taking her strap-on with generous enthusiasm. His mistress, Eliza, was distant friends with Katya because they worked at the same glitzy uptown club.

Joey was a better bet. He’d been steadily working his way through the ranks of the Ferretti operation, first as a lowly runner when he was just a teen, and now as one of the highest money-making capos in the Outfit. He was ambitious, the kind of hunger in his gut for money and glory that made him inherently dangerous.