These humans were mine.
A family he'd known from the beginning, and a bar he'd frequented for nearly as long over the decades. I had overseen every generation of that family, and it only took one drunk with a weakness for giving his money away for it all to come crashing down on him.
It looked like he had built his new house with my cards, and he was about to tear it all down.
However, the guilt was eating away at me. I had lost touch with the family around the time of Kamill's marriage to Jack , too absorbed in my father's slow and protracted decline and my inevitable ascension to the throne to care about the only humans I seemed able to tolerate. Even their presence had irritated me at the time, so I cut all ties and concentrated on my future role, doing my best to prepare and forge the alliances that would sustain me during my transition from heir to king.
Regret was a useless emotion, but I sighed as I stood up and walked to the window, watching the humans who couldn't see me, the ones who might get lucky from time to time, but who would ultimately lose. Because I wanted to win. I controlled every moment of them there. There were no clocks, so they wasted hours of daylight, not knowing when dusk turned to night or dawn turned to day. The seats were comfortable enough to relax before the game at another table drew their attention, and the high-stakes slots in another room played a celebratory tune no matter the amount of the win.
Here, these humans were mine.
Only now, what I understood Dean harper was also mine. I might as well have wrapped him up in a bow and given him to myself.
I rested my fist briefly on the glass. I had long since become immune to the stupidity of humans, to how they always searched in vain for the unattainable, but every now and then one would surprise me with their conviction that they would succeed despite the odds.
And in this particular case, I couldn't help but feel compassion for the long list of family members I saw toiling to build their small but worthy Baton Rouge empire, an empire that needed only one man's mistakes to be destroyed. In some strange and remote way, I felt them as my family, and I would be pleased to see Dean Harper pay for his damned stupidity.
Guilt for having neglected them for so long came over me again, but such sentimentality was ridiculous. Humans meant nothing to me, and my father's decline had had to be hidden for as long as possible. It had absorbed all my attention.
But I would make Jean pay now. It would help relieve some of my frustration, at the very least.
“Nic?” Arthur's tone suggested it wasn't the first time he'd uttered my name as a question.
“Yes?” I tossed the dry reply over my shoulder, barely looking back.
“I asked if you had seen the sub-clause I mentioned.” “My friend seemed to take a special interest in that, but anger that it only took one idiot in a long line of decent people to ruin a good thing still strained my muscles.”
The plantation house and the bar Dean Harper had staked out had been in Baton Rouge almost as long as I had, and I had always taken some comfort in knowing that both were still there unchanged. An immortal life was long and full of change, and I found comfort in a constant.
I smiled sadly. That probably made me the jerk.
I remembered the subclause. I turned away from people who were putting their lives on the line. They were putting it on the line for me.
“You're not interested? “ Arthur arched an eyebrow, but I shrugged.
“Not especially. What's an extra guarantee bet by a drunk?” I took a seat and flipped through the papers again. The amount outstanding on his account probably didn't even reflect what he'd spent on La Fresh Blood over the years.
When he stopped having money to invest in his addiction, he turned to credit. To his house. To his bar. To other valuable things.
“I'll collect this debt myself. “ I pushed the file away from me, disgusted by Boucher, making my movements jerky.
“You?” Arturo arched his damn eyebrows again, and rightly so.
My entire staff was aware of my thinly disguised intolerance for humans, but I needed to do something that wasn't required of a new king. I wanted to own a casino again; I needed some action.
But owning a casino didn't invalidate the fact that I was now king, and I had spoken, and Arthur had dared to question me, so I glared at him. And all the other bastards at the table, for good measure. They all looked down, suddenly busy with other files. Any other file.