Unknownfate
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Chapter 79
🕑 Added 2025-03-29 03:43:38 +0000 UTCThe monitors glowed dimly in the dark-paneled room. A dozen camera feeds showed every inch of the casino floor, from the high-stakes lounge to the front lobby and every bar in between.
Victor Alvarez, the Floor Director, stood with arms folded behind his back, watching the main screen with narrowed eyes.
“There she is again,” murmured Serena, his assistant manager, as the suited blonde sat gracefully at the blackjack table—same posture, same expression as last night.
The newest problem guest, someone winning too much, never losing, yet only doing small bets. Making it difficult to just throw her out.
“And the girl?” Victor asked.
“Already down two grand,” Serena replied, flipping through tabs on her tablet. “She’s been at three different tables in the last twenty minutes.”
Victor didn’t sigh. He just nodded.
“Same as yesterday. The older keeps playing blackjack. She keeps the game small. Keeps the win believable.”
“But every time?” muttered one of the pit bosses behind them. “You know how many hands that is? No flinches, no hesitation. She doesn’t count cards, she doesn’t even seem to think. She just wins.”
“And never asks for comps, never gets flashy, never pushes her luck,” Serena said. “But her account has three penthouse charges. Room service for five-figures. Bottled gold tequila. Someone ordered an entire roast pig last night at two a.m.”
Victor gave a short laugh. “The kid.”
“Most likely,” Serena agreed, tapping on a receipt with a flourish. “Seventeen sodas. Five desserts. One three-hundred-dollar ‘steak challenge’ that she ate alone. And that was for breakfast.”
The room chuckled. Even Victor’s lips twitched. “The adult isn’t much better, they ordered enough food to feed twenty people, and nothing was wasted, so either they somehow hide a dozen people in the penthouse, or they ate it all.”
“So what do you want to do?” the pit boss asked, turning back to the monitor. “She’s bleeding us. Not fast, but consistently. Dealers are getting nervous. That’s ten clean hands she’s taken in as many minutes.”
Victor watched the mystery woman lean back in her chair. Calm. Unshaken. She took a sip of something from a crystal glass and gave a single nod to the dealer.
Another win.
“She’s not cheating,” he said slowly. “We’ve watched. No marked cards. No signaling. No sleight of hand. She just… plays.”
“And wins.”
“And the kid keeps losing.”
Serena nodded. “She plays much more normally. We have seen some abnormal behavior; at times, she gets unbelievably winning streaks. But she is reckless, she likes poker, and goes all in whenever she gets a king, it's lowering our losses for sure, but it's still a problem.”
Serena frowned as she flicked back through the guest records. “Still nothing on names. They used cash at first, and have been paying with chips ever since. The kid is being called Mo-chan, but no way those two are Japanese.”
Victor leaned in closer to the monitor, eyes narrowing as the blonde, flawless, unreadable, tapped the table once for another hand.
“She’s using chips. High-value ones. No credit lines, no markers, no player card. Technically, she’s not even gambling under a name we can log.”
Serena gave a soft hum. “Which means no ID requirement. We ask for ID when someone opens a line of credit, or if they want comps, or try to cash out beyond the federal threshold. But they haven’t done any of that yet.”
“She walked in. She paid cash. She uses chips. Then spends the winnings on food, drinks, and their suite,” Victor murmured. “Legally, they’re ghosts.”
“They are polite, but keep to themselves, while they respond to others, they don’t start any conversations. And they tip nicely, in chips, and big ones, they seem to disdain smaller value ones.”
The pit boss folded his arms. “So what’s the play?”
Victor turned from the screens to face the room.
“We don’t press. We don’t ask for ID. They’ve broken no rules, and if we start harassing guests for looking ‘too perfect,’ we’ll be out of business soon enough, but keep an eye on them. No one wins that much. She is doing something, figure it out, and then we can throw them out, or if they really start winning big.”
He paused, then added, “That said, what’s the current number?”
Serena tapped twice on her tablet, then flicked her finger across the screen to open the Gilded Serpent’s internal ledger.
“As of this morning, they’re up exactly sixty-six thousand,” she said. “All of it spread out in clean one-thousand-dollar wins. Blackjack only. No progressive tables, no jumps in stake.”
Victor raised a brow. “Only sixty-six?”
“That’s for today.” Serena clarified. Yesterday, they did… three hundred and eleven thousand. The girl lost… fourteen thousand, and they spent sixty-two thousand on staying here.”
Victor’s arms unfolded slowly. “Three hundred and eleven thousand?” he repeated.
Serena nodded. “Clean. Mostly blackjack. Never more than one chip at a time. The little one did end up with some winnings at the end, but she is down big time overall.”
One of the pit bosses let out a low whistle. “Still, this is not luck. It’s divine intervention.”
Victor didn’t smile. “Or something worse.”
Victor nodded at the screen. “If they were both winning like that, I’d shut them down. But as it stands... We haven’t lost enough to throw her out, and given she clearly is too lucky, I don’t want to mess with her.”
“But inform those people,” Victor added, his voice dropping lower, darker, “as you said, that luck isn’t normal. She could be enhanced.”
That hung in the air.
Serena tapped her nails against the tablet, slow and nervous. “You really think she’s one of them?”
Victor didn’t answer right away.
Instead, he turned back toward the row of monitors. The blonde woman in the tailored suit hadn’t changed position in over a minute. Her posture remained perfectly straight, her hand still resting against her chips with royal indifference. Unbothered. Untouchable.
He finally spoke. “I’ve been in this industry a long time. I’ve seen people cheat. Count cards. Hide transmitters. I’ve seen mirrors in watches and micro-cameras in cufflinks. But what scares me the most…”
He leaned forward, pointing to the screen.
“…are the ones who don’t need to cheat.”
A long silence followed.
“Last year in Monte Carlo,” Victor continued, “a telepath cleaned out a poker floor, he had people sitting at every table. The moment someone confronted him, the pit boss started bleeding out of his ears. Two others ended up hospitalized.”
Serena winced. “I remember. The cover-up cost them ten times the losses.”
Victor nodded. “And in Macau, a pyrokinetic got caught using heat-sensing vision to read marked decks. When they tried to detain her, she lit three tables on fire and walked out through the smoke.”
“So you think…” the pit boss began, hesitant, “this one might be—?”
“I don’t think anything,” Victor interrupted sharply. “But I know we don’t push our luck, unless you want to test it against hers?”
No one said anything. Clearly, they didn’t want to risk it. “So, alert those people, and unless something changes, don’t do anything.”
-----
With the same calm smile on my lips, I asked the dealer for another hand, another game, and as he had come to expect by now, another win.
The dealer’s expression never wavered—though his hands, I noticed, had begun to sweat. Only slightly. But I saw the glisten when he adjusted the deck.
I had only been here for a day, and already I was sure I had gone through every dealer they had. But it hardly mattered, I wasn’t cheating, I was just getting lucky.
I only used Card King B+ to make me tie if I was on a bad hand, never cheating to win, just… not wanting to break my streak of not losing.
The others at the table were new today. The people yesterday had been nice enough. And since we didn’t play against one another, they didn’t get scared off by me. However, they did underestimate the dealer and suffered a few losses.
The man to my left—bearded, mid-forties, Hawaiian shirt—was on his third whiskey and third loss. Yet he still grinned at me between plays.
“You’re my lucky charm, y’know that?” he said, nodding at me as he placed another bet. “You don’t talk, you don’t twitch, you don’t even blink. It’s unnerving. But damn if I don’t win more when you’re here.”
“I’m glad I can help,” I replied smoothly, sliding another black chip forward.
The woman across from me—mid-twenties, sharp eyeliner, a tattoo of a spade on her collarbone—smirked. “You know, I’ve been watching you for an hour. You haven’t lost once.”
“I’m very careful,” I said.
“Bull,” she laughed. “You’ve got some kind of superpower, don’t you?”
I smiled politely. “Just luck is all, I might have been a hero who saved the world in a past life.”
The table chuckled.
Another hand. Another twenty-one.
The dealer was sweating again.
Then came the thump-thump-thump of boots.
I didn’t look up.
“Faaaaather,” Mordred whined, sliding into view like a lazy comet. She leaned dramatically on the back of my chair. “I swear, I almost had them that time. Just needed a little more funding.”
I wordlessly slid her a small stack, about half of today's earnings, but I had just started, and I would make much, much more.
She snatched them up with a cheeky grin on her face. “I’m gonna beat them this time for sure, I can’t believe I lost with a king, that’s bullshit, kings always win!” She said running off again.
The Hawaiian shirt man leaned closer. “So... you’re her dad?”
“Yes.”
“She calls you Father?”
“Yes.”
“She’s—uh. Wow. Okay. Didn’t see that coming.”
I didn’t respond.
The woman with the spade tattoo gave me a sly smile. “I like her energy. Total disaster. You, though? You’re terrifying. If I ever get married, I want someone like you standing next to me to make the priest nervous.”
I quirked a brow. “Noted.”
Another hand. Another win.
The dealer looked like he wanted to crawl under the table.
At this rate, they might swap him out by lunch.
Behind me, Mordred shouted, “ALL IN!” loud enough to be heard across the entire casino.
I sighed.
“She seems fun,” the man in the Hawaiian shirt said.
“She is,” I said flatly. “That’s the problem.”
Still, I didn’t pay Mordred much mind; she was doing fine, and money hardly mattered. And as long as she didn’t start breaking stuff, or worse yet, kill people, I just stayed there playing.
I ignored the man’s attempt at flirting, as well as the woman’s. The guy became so drunk that he had to be escorted out. Replacing him were many more people, after all, the fact that I kept winning spread, and people wanted to see.
“Hit,” said the new man to my right—mid-thirties, dark suit, face like a hawk. His tone was clipped, aggressive.
He got a three. Twenty total. He grunted and stayed.
I slid another chip forward. The dealer gave me a queen and an ace.
Blackjack. Again.
The hawk-faced man cursed under his breath.
“You’re rigged,” he muttered. “You’ve gotta be. No one wins this clean.”
“Then perhaps you should be grateful I’m not betting against you,” I replied smoothly, accepting the payout with a graceful flick of the wrist.
The woman with the spade tattoo from earlier had moved to watch from behind now, arms crossed and eyes sharp. “I’m starting to think you’re a goddess, with luck like that, you must be,” she said.
“And pretty enough to be one as well.” Someone else added in.
Laughter bubbled from the group. Even the dealer cracked a weak smile—though he looked like he was trying to remember if he updated his résumé this month.
She came again. Mordred this time didn’t walk, she bounded. Sprinting with the force of someone who had once led armies and now couldn’t beat a pair of tens.
She skidded to a stop, panting slightly. “I swear to God, this table had it out for me. I had a king and a queen, and then BAM! Full house on the flop. What kind of game is that?”
I passed her a few more chips without a word.
“You’re the best, Father,” she said, grinning and about to bounce off again.
“Once you're done playing around, come back and we can have something to eat; it's high time we take a break.”
Mordred paused mid-bound, rocking back on her heels with a dramatic gasp.
“Wait—food?” she said, eyes going wide. “Real food? Not just peanuts from the poker table?”
“Yes, Mordred. Food,” I replied dryly. “With a fork and everything.”
She pumped her fist into the air. “Victory! Finally! All that losing worked up an appetite, y’know.”
“You always have an appetite,” I muttered as I rose from the blackjack table, collecting my chips with practiced grace. “Let’s try not to break anything on the way.”
Mordred threw me a mock salute and started marching ahead, arms swinging exaggeratedly. “Onward, to meat!”
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