Page 14 of Femme Fatale
“Deal.”
She grinned, and in a single, fluid motion, opened the club’s ledger, inked a fancy “G” next to the current date, and then, from her purse, produced a custom embosser. It was heavy, old school, with her tattoo design on the die. She stamped the bottom of the page, hard enough to leave a mark that would last forever.
“My books are always balanced,” she said, “even when they’re crooked.”
I nodded, picked up the napkin, and tucked it into my jacket.
Three days left, and my accounts were finally in the black.
***
The thing about server rooms is that they’re never really dark. Even in the guts of Aces Wild, three floors below the strip, past the maze of boiler pipes and empty liquor cases, there was always the flicker of blue, green, and orange from the racks. The air was colder than the casino floor, but heavy with the stink of overheating circuit boards.
Nines ran the place like a crypt, and she dressed for it in an oversized hoodie, black leggings, and combat boots with neon pink laces. Her face was heart-shaped, eyes huge and unblinking behind prescription lenses that caught every byte of light. Her hands moved in a blur over the keyboard, typing like she had six fingers per hand. She hunched in a folding chair, surrounded by towers of monitors and battery backups that hummed like a hive of mechanical bees.
She never turned around. “You walk heavy, boss,” she said, voice echoing off the servers.
I pulled up a crate and sat. “That's supposed to be an insult?”
She shrugged, barely audible under the whirr of cooling fans. “Just means you’re not here to bullshit.”
I watched the monitors. One showed the casino floor in grainy grayscale; another scrolled lines of raw code, while a third ran side by side security feeds from three different properties. She had a fourth screen that showed nothing but network traffic, the numbers pulsing in a way I couldn’t pretend to understand.
“You’re in,” I said.
Nines finally glanced over, eyes magnified behind the glasses. “I’ve always been in.”
“No, I mean you’re in the club. Secretary. You run intelligence, digital, all of it.”
She pursed her lips, almost smiling. “You need a secretary because you suck at email?”
I grinned. “Because I don’t trust anyone else to keep Zeke out of my system.”
“Zeke’s an amateur,” she said, never missing a keystroke. “You’re more worried about the Turkish mob, or maybe Metro. Or maybe the Feds.”
“Why not all three?” I said.
She liked that answer. “You know I used to work for Caesar’s? Until they found out I was running a side hustle selling slot algorithms to the Chinese?”
“I heard,” I said. “You banked a quarter mil before they caught on.”
“Three hundred, but who’s counting?” Now she grinned for real, flashing a chipped incisor.
I watched the code scroll, hypnotic and endless. “What’s your price, Nines?”
She stopped typing, turned in the chair, and fixed me with those alien eyes. “Full autonomy. You don’t question my software, and you don’t ask how I get things done.”
“I can do that,” I said. “Within reason.”
“And I want new gear. Not the shit they left in here after Buck died.”
“I’ll order it today.”
She went back to her screens, satisfied. “You want to see something fun?”
“Hit me.”
She tapped a key, and every monitor in the room, at least two dozen, lit up with the Royal Harlots logo, stitched in pulsing red and gold. Even the security feed showed it in the upper right corner, like it was always supposed to be there.
