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When I Became the House’s Chip

When I Became the House’s Chip

Short Story · Romance
By:  GraceCompleted
Language: English
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10Chapters
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Synopsis

After Death

Tragic Love

Plot Twists

Unattainable Love

Devotion

Lovesick Fool

Pregnancy

Seduction

Regret

In the underground casino, my ex-fiancé Don Dante Castellano threw the card in my face. His arm was around Sabrina—his first love—and his eyes were ice as they shoved me toward the table. "Your father owed mine a life. The thing in your belly isn't mine." He pressed the card flat against my cheek. "The daughter pays the father's debt. Tonight you're the living chip on that table." The paternity test was fake. The child was his. I knew. He didn't believe me. That night, with a gun pointed at my head, I took off all my clothes in front of everyone. Two years passed. Two years later, in Vegas, he saw me again. I was in a red silk dress with a gold chain around my neck, the other end of the chain held by a yellow-toothed gambler. "This bitch is cheap. Bark for me, and all these chips are yours." I picked up the chips, practiced. "Woof. Woof." Sabrina pressed her face into his chest, covering her nose. "Dante. This is disgusting. Let's go." He didn't go. The veins rose along his temple. He was staring at the bruises on my knees. Then he kicked the gambler across the room. He bent down and took hold of my chin. Hard. "Sienna. Money, and you'll do anything at all?" He was close enough that I could smell him. Soap. Two years, and still the same soap. I closed my eyes, opened them, pulled my mouth into a smile for him. "That's right, boss. Pay up and I'll cooperate with whatever position you want. Care to buy a round?"

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10 Chapters
Chapter 1
I tilted my face up and pulled out the practiced, obliging smile.He froze where he stood.His eyes were locked on the bruise across my knee.I'd earned it the night before, kneeling three hours on crushed gravel for a gambler with particular tastes.Dante's chest rose and fell, hard.He bit down on his back teeth and kept staring at the bruise.Once, years ago, I'd tripped at his front step and scraped the skin off my knee. He'd crouched in front of me, cupped my ankle in his hand, and blown very seriously on the red patch. I'd looked down and seen the top of his head. He told me if he blew on it, it wouldn't hurt. I don't know whether it worked. What I know is that his palm under my ankle was warm.I lifted my eyes and found him in the crowd.Same hands. Resting on Sabrina's shoulder now. Not moving.Around us, the wolves started laughing."She's cheap, Mr. Castellano, but she listens! That's the thing about her!""Yeah—throw her a few chips and she'll crawl like a dog. That's a dea
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Chapter 2
Dante's eyes locked on the clean black chip in my hand.His chest rose and fell. His breathing was heavy."Cash?" he said. A cold laugh.He reached out and caught a fistful of my hair.Pain shot across my scalp. My head was forced back. I was looking straight into his eyes.The scar at the corner of his eye was still there. Four stitches. He'd taken the bottle for me when we were both seventeen.My gaze landed there for less than a second and moved away."Half a million to keep your side piece? Sienna. When did your appetite get this filthy?"It wasn't a question.What he'd seen in that stairwell two years ago and the report he'd held in his hand afterward—together, they'd already closed the case.He dragged me by the hair through the casino, up to the private floor on the top level.Sabrina lifted the hem of her dress and followed, a cold smile on her mouth.The top floor was one wide hall. At its center stood a transparent, blast-proof tank, filled with water kept at freezing.At the
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Chapter 3
The cashier's cage on the ground floor of the casino.Marco had cleared the other staff out in advance. He stood behind the counter himself and took me in, dripping.He watched me pull the blood-smeared chips out of my soaked clothes. Something moved in his eyes. He didn't ask.He counted fast and clean."Three million, exactly."He hit the keys and cut me an unnamed Swiss bank card.He reached under the counter for a dry towel and pushed it to me. Then he leaned toward the bulletproof glass and dropped his voice."Sabrina's men are waiting for you at the front and the side corridors."He nodded at the passage to his left."Take the staff fire exit. No cameras."He slid the card through the tray."Don't let this show. Go save her."I took the card.I pressed it flat against my chest and bowed to him."I won't forget this."I didn't stay.Dante could come down any minute.If he saw me at a man's counter, saw that man count chips for me, hand me a towel, lean in to whisper—I knew exactl
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Chapter 4
Dante looked down at me.He held the diamond between his fingers, and his thumb moved slowly back and forth across one of its edges. Once. Again. He didn't stop."Caught in the act."He kicked a small chip of diamond out of his way."A million-dollar necklace. What are you going to pay with?"I lifted my head. My eyes went past his shoulder to the clock on the wall.Forty minutes until the hospital pulled her off the tube.I let go of his trouser leg.I turned and dropped onto my knees on the concrete.I touched my forehead to the floor. Again. Again.The sound was a dull thud.The blood on my forehead left smears on the concrete."Dante, this is all on me! All of it!"I was shouting. My throat was full of iron."I'm begging you. Let me go to the hospital first. Let me put down that three million.""My daughter's waiting for the money. She's two years old."I reached for the toe of his shoe."As soon as she's out of surgery I'll come back. I'll owe you my life. Cut me, kill me, whateve
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Chapter 5
He stood frozen. Then he lunged for the phone on the floor.He read the notice.The lock screen was a small girl in an oxygen mask.The eyes and brow were stamped straight from his own face.His breathing stopped."No… that's not… no…"He shook his head and turned and roared at the bodyguards waiting down the corridor."Get a car! To the hospital! Fly in the best medical team in the country, right now—move!"I didn't look at him.I didn't look at Sabrina, whose face had gone the color of paper.I dragged my broken fingers along the floor and started down the stairs.Marco was at the far side of the fire door.He shrugged out of his long black coat and wrapped it around me.He said nothing. He picked me up in his arms and carried me fast toward the garage.Dante was at the other end of the corridor.He saw it.A man. Carrying me. Walking fast.In the way his mind worked, there was only one explanation for that.---County General. Basement level two.The corridor outside the morgue.Dan
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Chapter 6
The ICU floor, top of the hospital.The doctors had forced a sedative into me.I was lying in the bed with my eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling.Dante was on his knees outside the window of my room.His face was painted in blood.He pressed his face against the glass, muttering."I was wrong, Sienna. I know I was wrong…""I shouldn't have stopped the treatment… it's fine, we have the money, we'll use cloning, Emily will come back, she'll come back…"At the other end of the corridor, Marco had changed out of the casino uniform.He was in a long black coat, walking toward them.In his hand, a yellowed manila envelope with a red classified seal on the flap.He stopped in front of Dante."Mr. Castellano. Stop the performance."His voice was even."For two years I've been keeping an eye on the hospital for her. When they pulled Emily's tube, she was so oxygen-starved she couldn't fight. They cut her off from her medication and she suffocated on that bed."Dante came up off the floor an
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Chapter 7
Three days later.A cemetery on the west edge of Las Vegas.A storm had opened up over the desert. Wind was driving the rain sideways.I was in black.Marco stood beside me, holding a large black umbrella over us.It was a funeral with no mourners.Only a priest, reading the service into the wind and the rain.Out beyond the cemetery gate, on the asphalt—Dante, mud to the bone.He lifted his head, and the first thing he saw was Marco holding the umbrella over me.The same man. At the hospital. Here. Always next to her.He looked for a long time.Then he lowered his head and kept crawling.He had no umbrella. He let the rain strip his face.From the gate.Three steps, and his forehead to the ground.Every time, his head hit the concrete hard.Blood and rain ran down his face.He came up on his knees, one length at a time, until he reached Emily's new stone.From inside his jacket he took out a notarized document."Sienna…"His voice was cracked open."This is the transfer of every asse
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Chapter 8
West Las Vegas.An abandoned auto-scrapping yard.Sabrina had tried to run. A suitcase of gold bars, a private jet to South America.Dante's men took her off the tarmac and drove her straight here.In the open dirt at the center of the yard.A white Porsche.Two of his men forced her into the driver's seat. A welder's torch fused the doors shut.A crane lifted the Porsche and set it under the jaws of a hydraulic car crusher.Dante was at the control deck on the second level.The wound in his chest was loosely bandaged. It was still bleeding through.In his other hand: my three-million bank card. He'd pulled it off Sabrina when they grabbed her.Inside the Porsche, she was pounding on the bulletproof glass. Her face was torn up.The car's speakers came on.Dante's voice came through them."Sabrina. You like playing with other people's lives.""Today it's your turn."He pushed the first lever.A heavy rumble.The steel plate came down onto the roof of the Porsche.The roof screamed and c
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Chapter 9
Steel groaned as it twisted.The hydraulic press let out a long hiss of brakes.One second before the Porsche would have gone flat, it stopped.The cabin had closed up around her.Her arms, her legs, her spine—pinned between folded steel.Crack. Crack.Bones snapping inside the small space.A scream tore out of her.Dante had held back just enough. He'd missed every vital.She lost control of her body. Warm fluid and blood soaked through the seat.Boom.The gate of the scrapyard blew in.Searchlights swept up to the control deck and found him.Dozens of rifle lasers came to rest on his chest and forehead.A SWAT captain raised a bullhorn."Castellano! Hands up! You're surrounded!""Stand down! Surrender, now!"Medics ran in toward the wreck.They brought in cutters and started prying Sabrina out of the metal, blood all over her.He didn't resist.He reached over and killed the power to the control deck.He stood up.In his hand, the bank card—broken in half—and a crayon drawing Emily h
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Chapter 10
A month later.Los Angeles. A small walk-up apartment.I was packing to go home.The porcelain urn with Emily's ashes sat in the middle of the table.Knock knock knock.At the door.The Castellano Group's legal team, in full suits, filling the hallway outside.Their senior counsel took off his glasses and delivered it."Ms. Moretti. Mr. Castellano, last night at the federal penitentiary in Las Vegas—attempted to drive a sharpened toothbrush handle into his own carotid."The lawyer paused. His voice was unsteady."A guard found him in time. They kept him alive. But his mind's gone. He's in the psychiatric lockdown wing now. When he's lucid, he spends the day weeping and beating his head into the wall. Day and night he hallucinates you and Emily. He screams, he sobs. He can't even manage to die. It's worse than death."My hand, folding a shirt, paused for less than half a second."Oh."I kept packing."Death really was too cheap for him. This sounds about right."The lawyer produced a no
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