I Joined a Fake Death Game for My Son's Surgery, and the First Rule Killed a Man novel · Chapter 4 of 24
Chapter 4: My Old Villa
By breakfast, half the house believed Twenty-One.
"A guy on a couch with a check," Three said, flipping pancakes. "I mean, that's a guy on a couch with a check."
"His pupils were blown," Six said.
"Makeup's good now," Eighteen said quietly from the end of the counter.
She hadn't said a word to me since the vote, and she didn't look at me now.
The whale came down the stairs at nine in his silk robe and went straight to a cabinet by the Wall.
He opened it without looking.
Inside were bottles of scotch, and he poured himself two fingers.
"They kept my bar," he said. "I'll be damned."
"Your bar?" One asked.
"This was my villa." Twenty-Nine waved his glass at the room. "Twenty-nine oh one. Eleven years, every weekend. They knocked a wall through to the next one, but that's my bar."
Five set down the coffee pot very carefully.
I already knew, but now I couldn't pretend I didn't.
We were on the twenty-ninth floor of the Marquee, in the Sky Villas where the high rollers stayed.
The black panels bolted over the windows were hiding the ocean.
Somewhere under my feet were the dead slot floor, the dusty tables and the dark room where I used to sit.
I'd been inside these villas a thousand times without ever setting foot in one.
I knew them from the ceiling.
Six came and stood next to me at the counter.
He took my hand without asking and turned it over.
Eighteen's nails had left four red half-moons in my palm.
He wet a paper towel under the tap and cleaned them, slow and careful.
"Occupational habit," he said.
"You're very gentle for a guy built like a vending machine."
"I get that a lot."
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