The casino was in Monte Carlo, the table was baccarat, and the man was losing beautifully. Some men lose money the way other men bleed, quietly, hoping nobody notices. He lost it the way I prefer, in tall black stacks, with a smile, like a man paying admission to his own ruin. I watched him push another fifty thousand across the felt toward a banker he did not believe in, and I took the empty seat beside him the way weather takes a coastline.
"You are betting on the wrong thing," I told him, without looking at him.
"Am I," he said. "Enlighten me."
"You are betting on cards, darling. Cards do not care about you. Bet on me instead. I at least acknowledge the wager."
That earned me his full attention, which was the first thing he paid for that evening and the cheapest. I am Chanel. I know what a man like him is actually buying in a room like that, and it is not odds. It is the feeling of a beautiful woman watching him be powerful. So I let him be powerful. I let him place my bets with his chips, order my champagne with his tab, and drape his winnings, when the cards briefly pitied him, across my wrist like jewelry. And all evening, in the low voice I charge extra for in every sense, I told him the truth. That his money was the only interesting thing about his luck. That I could feel it leaving him. That men like him do not gamble to win. They gamble to be relieved of the weight of having, by someone elegant enough to make the theft feel like art.
He took a suite upstairs. Of course he did. Men with his disease always escalate to a room with a view.
In the suite, I set the terms the way I set every term in my world. He would sit. He would keep his hands where I could see them, on his own cock, through his trousers at first, because a goddess does not rush her collection. I counted his remaining chips on the glass table, one stack at a time, and read his net worth back to him like a poem I was slightly bored by. For every stack I named, he stroked. For every compliment he attempted, I raised the price of the next sentence. He paid the hotel concierge four figures to send up a bottle I barely touched, paid the pianist in the lobby to keep playing for an empty room, and when I finally permitted him to take his cock out and stroke in earnest, I made him narrate his bank balance aloud while he did it, the number dropping in his own voice as my heels stayed, pointedly, on.
He came apologizing to his accountant in three languages, untouched by anyone but his own hand and my appraisal, and then, darlings, he tipped me for the evening in a wire that arrived before room service did. They always tip. Ruin is only satisfying when it is expensive.
I left him asleep in a suite he could suddenly afford much less of, with my champagne unfinished and his chips arranged in a pattern he will understand when he wakes.
Now. Look at your own balance, darling, and be honest about what it is for. If the idea of a woman in heels reading your worth back to you while your hand obeys her arithmetic just tightened something low in you, then you are not shocked. You are recruited. Find me on PhoneBuckFuck, where my time begins at a dollar a minute and my approval, as established, costs considerably more. If you have not yet read about the man who paid four hundred dollars for one word, educate yourself first. Then call, with your cock in your hand and your banking app open. The house always wins, darling. I am the house.