Chapter Twenty

Twenty

For the third time, Mylo tried to peek over Taiyō’s shoulder at the notes he was taking—which he’d explicitly told Mylo not to do—and for the third time, Taiyō caught him.

He pinned Mylo to the floor with ease.

“That’s three,” Taiyō said.

“Does that mean I struck out?” Mylo asked, his face still pressed to the carpet. If anyone could flirt while their face was on the carpet, it was certainly Mylo.

I watched this exchange from the upper floor of the loft Count had booked for us. Our plane from Tokyo had taken us straight to Nice. Tomorrow we’d head into Monte Carlo. According to Count, although she hadn’t been able to prove it yet, she suspected that Quinton Hart had some sort of connection at Monte Carlo’s immigration office. It looked like someone working at Hart’s had cross-referenced the faces of Count’s old goons with the mismatched passports they used when landing in France. Lesson learned? If we were going in using aliases, which was the smart way to do things, we needed to enter the country with new passports for our aliases too. Count arranged to have all of that done by tomorrow morning.

The more I learned about this mysterious Quinton Hart, the more precarious I suspected trying to rob him was going to be. Here’s hoping Taiyō was going to pull out the real big brain stuff for this one.

“I think he’s enjoying this,” Noelia said. I folded my arms over the loft balcony. Behind me, my toe grazed the bag from my shopping excursion. In the middle of another Gambit wasn’t the optimal time for shopping, but now that Taiyō was aboard, there was something I needed to get. It also gave me a way to ditch Mom. When I said I was dipping out for an hour to shop, per usual she wanted to go too. I was in and out of the boardwalk mall within fifteen minutes. Two hours later, she was still out.

“Which one of them?” I answered, noting how Taiyō didn’t appear to be trying that hard to shoo Mylo away.

Noelia’s phone buzzed. She glanced at it, grimaced, then tucked it away.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Just Nicky completing his daily quota of calling me Witch Bitch.”

“Ah.” I traced the edge of the balcony. “What’s that like? Having a sibling?”

“I despise him, and he despises me. But I also wouldn’t want to be in this family if he wasn’t in it too.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Do you wish you had one?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Could just be another person to compare myself to.”

“Hmm,” Noelia said. “I didn’t know if I should bring this up, but you really lost yourself at the lab for a second there.”

“Hypothermia does that to a girl.”

“Before that. When you were about to pincushion a scientist with my sedative gun.”

“It’s what my mom would’ve done.”

“What does that have to do with you?”

The sound of feet on the stairs put an end to any would-be hard truths we were about to share. Noelia gave me a look that made me think she’d want to talk about this later. We’d see about that.

Taiyō trotted the last handful of steps into the loft, and Mylo wasn’t that far behind.

“He’s finally ready to grace us with his brilliant plan,” Mylo said, hopping up to sit on the balcony before Taiyō snapped and pointed to a sectional instead. “Is he telling us to sit down and listen?” Mylo whispered.

“Just do what he wants.” Mylo and I took one side of the couch while Noelia perched petulantly on the sofa’s arm. It was going to take more than a few hours for her to get over the kidnapping-her-brother thing.

“ Twenty-One ,” Taiyō announced. “Who’s seen the movie?”

Not ringing any bells.

“Oh!” Mylo raised his hand like we were in an actual classroom. “I knew you were going to go that route.”

“ Twenty-One ?” Noelia repeated.

“It’s this flick from the early 2000s,” Mylo said. “A bunch of college kids counting cards, clearing out some of the biggest casinos in the country with the help of their math professor.” He cut a knowing grin at Taiyō. “So that’s the plan, eh? Good old-fashioned card counting.”

“No, don’t be ridiculous.”

Mylo’s smile dropped.

“The film is based on real events,” Taiyō continued. “Which brought card counting into the public consciousness. Card counting attempts increased notably after the scandal, if you want to call it that, was revealed. An ingenious concept for its time, but casinos will be extra vigilant about looking for that these days. Keep it dog-eared in your memory, though.

“Now, what about the 2006 Harrah’s chip forgery case?”

Mylo opened his mouth, but closed it a second later.

“Slot machine rigging?”

Silence.

“What about the pool-hustling gang out of Montana?”

Noelia yawned.

“Were these all twenty-year-old movies only Mylo would have watched?” I asked.

“Not at all,” Taiyō said. “But they were all smaller heists that took place at casinos.”

“Fascinating,” Noelia said. “But not really seeing the relevance here.”

I straightened, locking eyes with Taiyō. “So this Twenty-One thing was a big heist that the casinos fell for before and a lot of people knew about it, and the others are smaller heists that no one has really heard of.”

I thought I knew where he was going.

Taiyō smirked, pushing up his glasses.

Yes, yes, I did.

“I suspect Ross is the only one up to speed, so I’ll be blunt. We’re going to do them all.”

Mylo belly laughed. “This is a joke, right? Why would we do all of those? Didn’t the Twenty-One heist rake in a hell of a lot of money on its own? And didn’t you just ream me, like, thirty seconds ago when I asked if we were going to do the Twenty-One heist?”

“I’m seconding Mylo’s thoughts,” Noelia added. I think she might have agreed to anything that was anti-Taiyō at the moment. Quite the grudge she could hold when she wanted to.

“The Twenty-One con is a decoy,” I explained. “It’s so notable the casino probably knows how to peg it. It’s perfect as a distraction. Some of us are going to fake the Twenty-One con, while the others are efficiently and subtly pulling off these smaller cons, racking our way up to twenty mil one mini heist at a time.” I tilted my chin up. “Am I right?”

“Lacking some specifics, but yes. That’s the plan,” Taiyō said. I’d say he was looking awfully proud of himself, but real deal, he deserved to be. Concocting a plan that utilized not only one major heist but probably at least a dozen. It could be…well…extraordinary.

“You asked him to plan one job, and my man comes back to you with a heist buffet. You really like to flex, don’t you, Taiyō?” Mylo cocked a brow at him, and maybe I was hallucinating, but I thought Taiyō was blushing under the praise.

“It sounds clever in theory,” Noelia said. “But can we execute? This is a heavy workload, and there’s only four of us.”

“Did they make you skip primary school back at Boschert HQ?” Mom stepped into the loft with a distinct lack of shopping bags dangling from her hands. If she hadn’t bought anything, what had she been doing all this time?

Mom pointed at each of us, counting. “One, two, three, four—” And last she pointed at herself. “Look at that, five.”

Noelia soured. Biting her tongue, I’m sure.

“There’s no use in counting you if you’re just going to be running coms ,” I said, resisting the urge to do air quotes.

“I’ll be on the floor.”

I narrowed my eyes on her. “Even if you know who is—”

“I said I’ll be there,” she insisted. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“Good. Five is stronger than four,” Taiyō said. He checked his smartwatch, a tiny gesture that seemed to make Mylo almost melt next to me. “We have twenty hours until the assignment commences. That’s how much time to learn all the tricks necessary to pull this off flawlessly, and for two of us to learn how to cheat expertly at Hart’s Bluff.”

“Hart’s Bluff? Are you talking about the card table decoy? I thought we were using twenty-one as the distraction game.” Noelia looked so exasperated she could collapse. Or punch someone.

“I was only using twenty-one as an example. The students who ran that con were advanced mathematics undergraduates. Are you saying you think any of us already have that level of probability and statistics skill to be able to make snap judgments in under a second?”

“Yes,” Mylo answered for all of us, before Noelia jumped in.

“Not all of us frequent casinos like movie theaters.” Noelia cocked a brow at me.

“Don’t look at me—they didn’t cover that in my homeschool curriculum,” I said, not acknowledging Mom.

Noelia dropped her head into her hands.

“Hart’s Bluff will be easier to learn, and easier to con. In an obvious way, of course.” Taiyō knelt, finding a palm-sized leather-bound notebook in his pocket and a pen. Because of course he just carried a notebook around with him.

“What else do you have in there?” Mylo asked. I stepped on his toe.

Taiyō started scribbling lines as he spoke. “It’s Hart’s Casino’s signature card game. Crafted in-house.”

What was up with this casino and its overwhelming exclusivity? Maybe that was part of the appeal. Not just prizes, but games you could only get there. “The game isn’t listed on the website, so I’m guessing it’s a game you can only play with victor chips. I had some contacts slip the rules to me.”

“Which contacts?” Who else out there in our industry had been losing their life savings—or more—at Hart’s lately?

“More importantly, how much did you have to pay to get your own rundown of the rules to this secret card game?” Mylo asked.

“I reached out to a number of people, and none of them requested any payment.” His gaze flicked up to Mom. “None of them asked for anything after I mentioned I was working with Rhiannon Quest. It would appear there’s a certain number of people who wouldn’t mind throwing away a sliver of information for free to stay off your mother’s bad side.”

I glanced at Mom. The barest hint of a grin sat on her lips. How long had she had this reputation for being such a gangster? My whole life, and I just didn’t know it.

I guess when word gets around about you betraying best friends, manipulating your daughter into death games, and letting your own sister get kidnapped in exchange for half a billion dollars, people decide they don’t want to screw with you.

“The game is simple,” Taiyō went on. “Part luck, part memorization.”

“Like Uno!” Mylo said.

“No. Well…kind of. The dealer divvies up five cards for each player and keeps five for themself. They show their five cards to the players to memorize. From there, it becomes like a game of find the lady. The dealer shuffles those five cards facedown, usually in a confusing way, before selecting one. If the player is lucky, they’ll have kept an eye on all the cards and will know what card the dealer has facedown. The player’s goal is to pick a card from their hand that will beat the card the dealer has facedown.”

“So, you just have to remember what cards the dealer has and play a higher card. That’s basic,” Mylo said.

“Not quite,” Taiyō said. “In Hart’s Bluff the color of the suit determines what cards ‘beat’ others. If the dealer plays a black card, you only win by playing a higher card. If it’s red, you have to play a lower value. And then there are jokers. If the dealer plays one of those, the only way for the player to win is to call it a zero and play nothing.”

Noelia scoffed. “What a ridiculously simple card game.”

“Probably why it’s popular.” Mylo rubbed his chin. “So if you’re gonna cheat, with someone spying on what card the dealer’s playing and signaling the player, then they’d have to signal not just the card’s number but what color the suit is.”

“Still, it should be pretty easy to actually con this game,” Noelia said.

“Too easy,” Mom said.

“Luckily for us, that’s the point,” Taiyō said. I reached for the notebook to see what he’d written, but he snatched it back and ripped the paper out instead. “No one opens my notebook but me.”

“Oooh, mysterious.” Mylo took the paper eagerly, and I peered at the lines of text myself. It looked like he’d written the rules of the game down. The surprisingly jagged and lopsided handwriting made me do a double take.

“I write more tidily in Japanese,” Taiyō promised.

“I hope not. People with messy handwriting are statistically the most brilliant,” Mylo said, still scanning the paper.

Taiyō flushed.

“Whatever. Let’s figure this out.” Noelia stood. “One decoy con and, like, fifty others. Sounds like we’ve got a night of cramming.”