Watteau’s initial assumption was that the wheel had been tampered with, but that simply wasn’t possible. There were casinos that had tried attaching magnets to their wheels before, but they always got found out. Attempts to tilt the wheel similarly ended in failure.
The thing was, roulette was a game where the audience’s full attention was on the wheel. If a ball’s arc looked even the slightest bit unnatural, some keen-eyed observer was sure to notice. It was an incredibly difficult game to rig. People had no choice but to leave their fate in the hands of Lady Luck—that was why people called roulette the “Queen of the Casino.”
“Even so, my brother can always land the balls on the exact numbers he wants to. There’s no trick to it, just raw technique. There are some dealers who control roughly what area their balls land in, but you could search the world over without finding anyone who can hit specific numbers the way my brother can. And the owners are none the wiser.”
Dealers spun the wheel without looking at the board. It was a way to limit the house’s ability to cheat.
However, what if there was some godlike dealer who could land the ball exactly where he wanted without looking at either it or the pockets?
Why, that dealer and their fingers would break the game on a fundamental level.
“For the final step, all you have to do is pretend to give in to your desperation and bet everything you have on a single spin.”
Watteau thought back to the young man’s advice and steeled his nerves.
There was no way the fortune teller could betray him. After all, the man was locked up in Watteau’s cellar. There was a guard stationed there, too. Watteau held the man’s life in his hands.
“I-I’m all in! GOD, GRANT ME STRENGTH!”
He took every last one of his chips and bet them all.
The onlookers burst into laughter.
“It’s sad, is what it is.” “The guy’s lost it.” “I feel for him, y’know?”
Their reactions were understandable.
Watteau had just made a straight bet. His odds of winning were one in thirty-seven. It was nothing short of suicide. If that ball didn’t go in, half of his fortune would up and vanish.
If he won, though, he would earn a staggering amount of the Lucidor family’s money.
Heh, idiots. They fell for my acting, hook, line, and sinker.
Watteau recalled the fortune teller’s smile.
He clenched his fists and watched as the roulette wheel gradually slowed.
This is the gamble of my life, and I’m the one who’s going to win it—
Watteau had bet on thirty-one. That was the number they’d agreed on ahead of time.
However, in a cruel turn of events, the ball slid into the number one pocket.
“Huh?”
His whole body went ice-cold. Terror clutched directly at his heart, and his train of thought froze. The crowd bombarded him with uncaring laughter, but he didn’t process a word they were saying.
He looked at the dealer, figuring that this had to be some kind of mistake.
There was a faint smile playing on the dealer’s lips—the smile of a reaper, come to herald his end.
“GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!”
As he wailed, Watteau descended into madness. “He’s a cheat!” he said on repeat, like a broken record, but not a single person paid him any heed.
Rather, Marquis Watteau’s disgraceful performance became the talk of the town, and the man was reduced to a laughingstock.
On the upper floor of the Lucidor family casino, there were four men laughing and clapping.
One of them, a man in the middle of the room named Isaac, drank deep from his wineglass.
Isaac was a slender thirty-four-year-old and the second son of the current head of the Lucidor family. He was the man who ran their illegal casino, the Vigean. His main line of work was offering entertainment to thrill-seeking aristocrats, but he was also in charge of making problematic aristocrats “disappear” from time to time.
One of his dealers had just finished a major job, and Isaac heaped the man with praise. “Hot damn, that was slick. Marquis Watteau’s done for. It’ll be dead easy for my old man to buy up the rights to that pepper farm now.”
“Nah, that was nothing. The guy was a chump.”
The dealer smugly crossed his legs as he enjoyed some wine, much like Isaac. Rather than join in the others’ cheerful conversation, he drank down his wine like it was water.
He was an aloof young man whose smile revealed nothing of what lay beneath. He was supposedly in his late twenties. His blond hair was as beautiful as woven silk, and it was parted in the middle, leaving his forehead bare and his charming face on full display. The corners of his mouth snapped upward when he smiled, giving him the merry grin of a teenage boy.
From just his appearance, not a single person would have taken him for a grim reaper of a master gamer who’d brought countless aristocrats low.
The blond man shamelessly grabbed a hunk of cheese sitting in front of Isaac and shoved it in his mouth. “But more to the point, Mr. Isaac. I’d like my compensation now.”
“I suppose we did agree on five targets, didn’t we? Get this man what he wants.”
Isaac and the dealer had struck a deal.
For the dealer’s part, he was helping Isaac take down his rivals in the aristocracy. The dealer’s talents were like witchcraft. He would pretend to run into their targets at random, lure them into the casino, sucker them into doomed bets, and destroy them.
In exchange for leading five aristocrats to ruin, what the dealer had asked for was information.
Isaac’s underling took a document out of the safe and offered it to him.
“That there’s a list of everyone in the underworld who secretly helped back that anti-establishment revolution two years back. Not even Genesis Army intelligence has that intel yet.”
“Ooh.” The young man looked over the list, visibly impressed. “That’s what I like to hear.”
It was only their deep ties to society’s dark underbelly that allowed the Lucidors to get ahold of that information. There had been a failed revolution two years ago, and though the state police had suppressed it, the number of Mafia members who’d been helping support the revolutionaries behind the scenes meant that they’d had to call in the army to do so.
“I gotta ask, what’s the plan there?” Isaac said with an amused chuckle. “If you hand that list over to the Genesis Army, all those guys are done for. That’s some juicy blackmail material if I ever saw it, but—”
Suddenly, Isaac noticed something.
The blond youth’s emerald eyes were burning with the fierce brutality of a predator stalking his prey.