Chapter 122

"When did you learn how to do that?" Sherry asked, studying Jack with curious eyes. She was pretty sure he hadn't known anything about hypnosis back when they were both at the military academy.

"Well..."

Jack paused, just for a moment.

The truth was, what he'd done wasn't exactly hypnosis — not in the traditional sense.

If anything, it was closer to something like folk magic. The kind passed down through generations in places most people never set foot in.

And the reason he'd learned it at all had everything to do with a tribal chief's daughter.

But that wasn't a story he could tell Sherry.

Not now. Not when, as far as that tribe was concerned, he was essentially a runaway groom.

"I picked it up by chance," he said simply.

Sherry's brow furrowed slightly. Her gut told her he was holding something back.

She didn't push it, though.

"Alright, it's getting late." She gave a small nod. "Get some rest."

With that, she turned and headed to her own room.

Jack watched her go, a quiet smile touching his lips.

Then he went to his.

The room was small — cramped, even. But it didn't bother him.

He called Sophia first, just to make sure she was safe. Then he called Joseph to confirm everything was holding steady back in Viridis State.

Only after that did he finally stretch out on the bed.

So far, so good.

Sherry still didn't know who he really was.

His commendation had been kept quiet — known only to a handful of top brass on both the military and political sides, and his own inner circle. The kind of thing that didn't make the news.

It wasn't that he was deliberately hiding it from her.

It was just...

He felt guilty when it came to Sherry. The last thing he wanted was to pull rank on her — to use a title to close the distance between them.

And from what he could tell, she still cared. Despite everything, she was willing to stand by him, to help him through this.

He could feel it.

She still had feelings for him.

But the wound he'd left behind was deep. Deep enough that she hadn't been able to let it go.

He'd walked away without a word. No explanation. No goodbye. Just gone.

She had waited. Waited until the hope inside her burned down to nothing, until her heart had shattered completely — and then, through sheer stubborn will, she had pieced herself back together.

So even now, even as she stood beside him and faced all of this with him, that crack between them had never truly healed.

She'd just learned to hide the scar.

I owe her that much. Jack exhaled slowly into the dark, the sound too quiet to hear.

It wasn't that he didn't want to come clean about who he was.

He was afraid. Afraid that the moment he said the title out loud — the moment he laid out the rank and the record — Sherry would take a step back. That she'd start looking at him the way a soldier looks at a commanding officer.

He couldn't stand the thought of that distance.

He'd rather stay beside her as just a man. An ordinary man. And when her wounds had finally had time to heal — then he'd tell her.

Maybe by then, it would be easier for her to hear.

---

Night settled over Imperial City like a sweep of dark velvet, soft and absolute.

Downtown.

High up in one of the city's glass towers.

A woman stood at the window of a luxury suite, perfectly still.

She was in her mid-fifties, though time had been unusually kind to her — barely a line on her face, no trace of the years worn into her expression. Instead, she carried something rarer: a kind of elegance that had been refined by age rather than diminished by it. The sort that made it hard to look away.

She wore a silk gown cut to fit her precisely, and her hair was loosely pinned up with an ornate clip, a few soft strands falling against the curve of her neck.

There was a composure in her eyes — a stillness — as though the noise and glitter of the city below had never once touched the quiet place she lived inside.

This was Sophia's mother.

Karina.

She held a glass of red wine, the deep garnet liquid catching the low light with a rich, almost hypnotic gleam.

She wasn't drinking. Not yet. She tilted the glass slowly, letting the aroma breathe, letting it drift into the air around her.

Her gaze moved across the skyline, distant and unreadable, as though she were seeing something no one else could.

Then, cutting through the silence — a knock at the door.

In a room this quiet, it landed like a stone dropped into still water.

Karina didn't turn. She didn't so much as shift her grip on the glass. She kept her eyes on the glittering sprawl of the city beyond the glass, as though the knock had been nothing more than the wind against the window.

Two seconds passed.

"Come in."

Her voice was low and smooth, carrying the effortless authority of someone long accustomed to being obeyed — firm without being cold, commanding without needing to be loud.

The lock clicked softly. A middle-aged man in a black suit and white gloves stepped inside, easing the door shut behind him with practiced silence, as though he'd spent a lifetime learning how not to disturb a room.

He crossed to where Karina stood, stopping a few feet away, and dipped his head in a slight bow.

If Jack had been there, he would have recognized him immediately.

Kirk. The casino floor manager.

"What is it?"

Karina raised the glass and took a slow, measured sip before turning to face him.

"Boss." Kirk kept his eyes down, his voice low. A sheen of sweat had already broken out across his forehead. "There's been an incident at the casino."

"What kind of incident?"

"Tonight, a man came in." Kirk drew a careful breath. "He walked in with ten million dollars. By the time he left, he'd won over three billion." He paused. "And he said he's coming back. He said he's going to take the whole casino."

Kirk laid out the full account, detail by detail.

"What?"

Karina turned sharply. The composed stillness in her eyes cracked open — just for a moment — and something fierce flared behind it.

"Three billion dollars?" Her voice climbed, the shock breaking through before she could pull it back. The wine glass came down hard against the crystal side table with a sharp, clean crack. A few drops of dark red wine scattered across the white tablecloth like drops of blood.

She fixed Kirk with a look that could cut glass. "What exactly do I pay you for? How did you let someone walk out with that much money?"

The casino wasn't really about profit — they both knew that. It existed to move money, not make it.

But three billion dollars.

Most people wouldn't see that kind of money across an entire lifetime.

And Kirk had handed it over in a single night.

That was not something she could overlook.

Kirk's shoulders trembled. He looked like his knees might give out. "Boss, I swear, we did everything we could. The way he played — it wasn't normal. Our cameras couldn't catch him cheating. And he seemed to know how the cards were going to fall before they landed."

"To keep him from winning more, I called a temporary halt — told him we needed to run an internal audit. But he's coming back in five days."

"I came to you directly. I need to know what you want me to do."

"He predicted the cards."

Karina repeated the words quietly, her tone flat and cold. Something dangerous moved behind her eyes.

She didn't believe in clairvoyance. She never had.

If this man had won that much, he had a method. A system. Kirk just hadn't found it yet.

"Have you checked your own people?" she asked.

The way she saw it, the most likely explanation was an inside job — someone on the floor feeding information to an outside player, working the house from within.