Night's Honor (Elder Races #7)(56)

“What do you mean?” She stared at him, wide-eyed. “You can’t change our agreement like that.”

“I can do anything I want,” he told her. “And I will, including changing the terms of your stay. You’ve already said you intend to leave, which means we have no agreement.”

“What are you saying?” The bottom dropped out of her stomach. “You can’t keep me prisoner here.”

“Can’t I?” He looked entirely ruthless.

Her voice rose. “What happened to those fancy promises you made about not making me do something against my will?”

He shook his head. “But you don’t really want to go, do you?”

She glared at him and tried to force a denial out, but he had her with that one.

“You might as well start talking,” he told her. “If you don’t tell me what happened, I’ll go to Malphas and ask him.”

“Don’t!” Without thinking, she clutched at his lapel.

He took her by the shoulders and pulled her close, his hard, glittering eyes boring into hers. “Talk.”

“Who are you?” she said, staring. “Where has the soft-spoken, courteous man gone?”

“He’s right here in front of you, and he’s very angry. He just doesn’t know if he’s angry at you yet.” He gave her a thin-lipped smile. “Now, what is it going to be? Are you going to tell me what happened, or will Malphas?”

She knew who she was looking at. This was the man who chose to become a Vampyre in order to go to war for ten years. She said, calmly, “I can’t talk you into letting this go, can I?”

He shook his head slowly, his gaze never leaving her face.

“Fine. Fine.” She still held his lapel, and he still gripped her shoulders. They were much too close. She pushed against his chest, and this time he let her go. Swinging away, she rose to her feet and started to pace. “Remember how I said I was good with money? Malphas hired me to keep his books.”

While he still straddled the bench, he watched her with an unnerving attention. “Were you cooking them?”

“Oh no, there’s nothing on paper.” She waved a hand in the air, reached the edge of the ballroom and stalked back. “He looks like he’s completely in compliance with the gaming commission, and he pays taxes on all casino profits. That’s not the issue.”

He sat back and crossed his arms. “Then what is?”

She glanced over her shoulder at him. “What I saw and heard happened around the edges of casino life. People showed up for private appointments with Malphas, people who had racked up really large debts. I saw their expressions afterward, and I overheard things I wasn’t meant to hear.”

“Dear God, you eavesdropped?” said Xavier. His expression turned ironic. “I don’t know why I find myself shocked. You are far more talented at gathering information than I ever gave you credit for.”

She swung around to the end of the baby grand that was opposite from where he sat, wanting the illusion of something between her and his too-still figure. “Oh, I didn’t mean to, and nothing happened quite like what happened the night you and Melisande were talking. I just . . . I caught snippets of conversations here and there. I really tried not to notice what was happening or put two and two together. That was my first job out of college, and it paid damn well.” She laughed bitterly. “But I was flattered and excited that I could pay off my student loans so quickly, and I wanted it to be okay.”

“Tess,” Xavier said. “What the f*ck 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.