CHAPTER 51: CHAPTER 51

The borrowed waiter’s uniform felt like a costume for a play he never auditioned for. The starched white shirt was too tight around his neck, and the black pants were too short. Ace stood in the cramped, hot staff bathroom deep inside The Sapphire Lounge, staring at his reflection. He didn’t see a tech entrepreneur looking back. Instead, he saw a scared kid who was about to do something very stupid.

"Can you hear me?" Evelyn’s voice was a faint whisper in his one way earpiece. "Testing. Ace, confirm."

He tapped the tiny device twice, which was their pre-arranged signal for "I hear you."

"Good," she replied. "Silva is in position at The Driftwood Bar, and I’m parked three blocks away. The police bands are quiet. Remember, the code word is checkmate. The second you hear it, you must drop everything and run for the service exit. Understood?"

He tapped twice again, his throat too dry to form any words.

A sudden, sharp knock on the bathroom door made him jump. "New guy! Stop primping! The customers are hungry. Grab your tray and get to the main floor, now!" It was the head waiter, a man named Gerard who seemed to have a permanently sour expression.

Ace took one last deep breath, straightened his shoulders, and stepped out of the bathroom. The hallway was a blur of frantic activity as waiters balanced silver platters and bartenders shook cocktails. The air was thick with the smell of expensive perfume, cigar smoke, and seared meat.

He followed the crowd into the main gaming room. The Sapphire Lounge lived up to its glamorous name. The room featured deep blue carpets and low lighting that gleamed off polished brass and crystal glasses. A soft, serious murmur hung in the air, the sound of large amounts of money changing hands. High rollers sat at green felt tables, their faces masks of concentration. This place didn’t have the loud, desperate energy of Ramos’s gambling den. This was a quieter, colder kind of danger.

His eyes immediately found the table he was looking for. It was in the center of the room and roped off from all the others. This was the high-stakes game. Five men sat around it. Ramos’s associate, a man named Sterling, was easy to spot because he had the cold, dead-eyed look of a shark. The other four players were a mix of older businessmen and one younger man who kept nervously adjusting his cufflinks. And then there was the host, Vincenzo, an older man with silver hair and a sharp, hawk-like gaze that slowly swept the room and missed nothing. Silva’s warning echoed in Ace’s mind: "He’s old school."

"Stop gawking, new blood," Gerard hissed as he shoved a heavy tray of champagne flutes into Ace’s hands. "Take this to table seven, now. And for heaven’s sake, don’t spill anything. That bottle costs more than you make in a month."

Ace moved into the room, his heart hammering against his ribs. This was it. He focused his mind. Neural Interface: Engage. A sharp pain helped him focus, and the world around him seemed to sharpen. Audio Enhancement: Engage. The room’s general murmur exploded into a cacophony of individual sounds.

He filtered out the noise, pushing the clinking glasses and idle chatter into the background. He tuned his enhanced hearing specifically to the central table.

"...raise you five thousand," Sterling said, his voice a flat monotone. He pushed a stack of chips forward without a flicker of emotion.

The younger man with the cufflinks swallowed hard. "I... call," he said, his voice betraying a slight tremor.

Ace moved around the table, offering glasses of champagne to the players. No one even glanced his way; he was as invisible as a piece of furniture. As he leaned over to place a glass near a young man, he concentrated. His enhanced hearing picked up the rapid, fluttery beat of the man’s heart and the faint, scratchy sound of his thumb rubbing against his index finger under the table. The man was clearly nervous and bluffing.

Ace moved away and focused next on an older businessman wearing a heavy gold ring. The man had just gotten a new hand of cards, and Ace heard him let out a soft, almost silent sigh of disappointment as he looked at them. He had a weak hand.

This was the secret to their scheme. Ace wasn’t cheating by marking cards or using hidden cameras. Instead, he was listening to the players’ unconscious biological reactions of the players—the things they couldn’t control.

He needed to get this information to his partner, Sterling. Their plan was simple: whenever Ace walked behind Sterling’s chair, he would whisper a single code word indicating the strength of the other players’ hands: Strong, Weak, or Bluff.

On his first pass, Ace heard the businessman with the gold ring sigh with disappointment again, a sure sign of a weak hand. As Ace walked behind Sterling, he leaned down as if to check a glass on his tray and whispered, "Weak on your right."

Sterling stayed still. He didn’t react with a nod or a glance. He simply folded his next hand, avoiding a certain loss against a player who moments later revealed a powerful pair of aces. Their plan was working.

For the next hour, Ace played his part perfectly. He fetched drinks, cleared empty glasses, and delivered his quiet whispers: "Bluff across from you," and "Strong two seats left." Sterling, who was already a skilled player, became unstoppable with this extra information. His stack of chips grew steadily, while the other players became more frustrated and tense.

Ace started to feel a grim sense of confidence. The System’s cold efficiency and his own fear were a powerful combination. He felt like a ghost, secretly feeding information from the very heart of the enemy’s territory.

And then, he suddenly felt the weight of someone’s stare.

He looked up and saw Vincenzo, the host of the game. The man was no longer scanning the room; he was watching only Ace. His sharp, hawk like eyes were narrowed and fixed on him as he moved around the table. Vincenzo didn’t look angry, just deeply and unsettlingly curious.

Ace’s blood ran cold. He realized he had been too confident and had made too many passes behind Sterling’s chair. He forced himself to move to the other side of the room to attend to a different table, but he could still feel Vincenzo’s eyes burning into his back.

"Evelyn," he whispered, cupping his hand over his mouth as he pretended to adjust a napkin. "The host, Vincenzo. He’s watching me."

There was a brief pause over his earpiece before Evelyn replied. "How closely is he watching?"

"It feels like I’m a bug he’s thinking about squashing," Ace whispered back.

"Okay. Okay, don’t panic," Evelyn said. "Change your pattern. Avoid Sterling for a while. Just focus on being a waiter."

But it was already too late. A large man in a suit—one of Vincenzo’s personal security guards—pushed himself away from the wall and began moving casually through the room. He wasn’t walking directly toward Ace, but he was circling like a predator cutting off its prey’s escape route.

Ace’s mind raced. He was trapped and he needed to create a distraction. A big one.

His eyes swept across the room as his neural interface processed everything at lightning speed. He scanned the exits, the other staff, and the patrons. Then he saw his opportunity. Near the bar, a tired and overworked waiter was struggling to balance a massive tray of dirty glasses. The tray was wobbling dangerously.

It was a huge risk, but it was the only chance he had.

As the security guard moved closer, Ace knew he had to act. He walked quickly toward the bar, carefully timing his steps. Just as he passed a waiter who was struggling with a heavy tray of glasses, Ace pretended to stumble. He deliberately knocked his elbow hard against the waiter’s arm.

The result was instant and disastrous. The waiter cried out as the tray tipped and slid from his grasp. It crashed to the floor, creating an explosion of shattering crystal and porcelain. The sound was deafening, like a hundred windows breaking at once.

Every person in the lounge turned their head toward the noise. Vincenzo’s sharp gaze was ripped away from Ace. The security guard stopped his advance and turned toward the commotion. Patrons yelled out in surprise and annoyance.

In the middle of the chaos, Ace did not hesitate. He dropped to his knees, not to help but to hide himself. He scrambled behind the relative cover of a high-backed booth.

"Sorry! So sorry!" the waiter babbled, his face red with horror as other staff rushed over to help him.

The distraction was perfect. The entire room’s attention was consumed by the mess.

Ace stayed low, his heart pounding so hard he felt it might burst from his chest. He heard Vincenzo’s voice, sharp with irritation, as he directed the cleanup. The critical moment had passed, and the immediate threat was over.

Ace risked a glance toward the high stakes table. Sterling was watching the cleanup with a bored expression. He caught Ace’s eye for a split second and gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod. The game was nearly over, and Sterling now had a big enough lead.

Ace stayed away from the table for the rest of the night. Twenty minutes later, Sterling cashed out his massive pile of chips. He had won, which meant the job was done.

Ace slipped out through the service entrance, and the cool night air felt like a pardon. He leaned against the dirty brick wall of the alley, breathing heavily as the crash from his adrenaline rush left him shaking.

He had done it. He had cheated a powerful crime lord in his own casino and gotten away with it. He had passed Ramos’s test.

The Neural Interface faded, the Audio Enhancement dialed down. The world returned to its normal volume, but it suddenly felt duller and less vivid.

He thought about the money and the freedom it was supposed to represent. Yet all he could feel was the cold memory of Vincenzo’s stare and the echoing sound of breaking glass. His victory felt hollow because he had survived by creating chaos and letting an innocent man take the blame.

He tapped his earpiece to communicate. "It’s done," he whispered, his voice hoarse. "I’m out."

Evelyn’s relieved sigh was the only reward he needed, but even that could not erase the stain of what he had just done. He realized that his path to a clean future was getting dirtier with every step he took.