The first thing that hit me was how bright the space was—not pleasantly bright like the morning sun or the warm glow of candlelight, but aggressively, almost violently bright, the kind of illumination that felt like it was personally offended by the concept of shadows and had declared war on darkness with the zealotry of a convert.
I had to shield my eyes with one hand just to catch a glimpse of the room without my retinas burning to a crisp, squinting through my fingers like a vampire experiencing its first sunrise.
Sprawled out before us was a massive chamber with three floors open down the middle, creating a vertiginous sense of space that made you acutely aware of how small you were in comparison to the architecture's ambitions.
The walls were constructed from sandstone—the same material as the exterior—set with pillars that rose like ancient trees carved from stone, their surfaces decorated with more nonsensical hieroglyphics.
Giant statues loomed in all four corners, each one depicting some figure from Egyptian mythology—a falcon-headed god here, what might have been a sphinx there, something with too many arms in the third corner that I chose not to examine too closely because my brain had enough nightmare fuel for one evening.
Gemstones of various colors were set into the walls like stars in a very expensive, very stationary sky—sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and stones I couldn't identify that glowed with their own internal light, creating patterns that hurt to look at directly but were too beautiful to ignore.
Directly in front of us, depressed into the floor like someone had scooped out a massive section of the casino and decided that was where the fun should happen, was a pit of sand littered with gaming tables, roulette machines, card stations, dice games, and every other form of monetary self-destruction humanity had invented over the millennia.
Everything was lined with gold—the table edges, the roulette wheels, the chip holders, even the chairs—creating a space that screamed "we have more money than taste and we're making that everyone else's problem."
The pit was filled to the brim with people both rich and poor, nobles in flowing robes mingling and dealing with the slum folk in rags, or lack thereof.
The entire space was lit by some unseen source of light that made the sand shine a golden yellow and caused the embedded jewels to glint like captured starlight, creating an almost dreamlike quality that would've been beautiful if it weren't so obviously designed to distract you from the fact that you were being systematically robbed.
Soft music floated through the air from everywhere and nowhere at once—no visible musicians, no apparent source, just sound that seemed to generate spontaneously from the architecture itself.
It was pleasant, melodic, designed to relax you, lower your inhibitions, and make you think "yes, betting my life savings on whether a ball lands on red or black is most certainly a sound financial decision."
The edges of the room, the perimeter made of sandstone sitting below the second floor's balcony, existed in much darker territory lit only by torches mounted along the walls at regular intervals.
The contrast was stark—golden brilliance in the center pit versus shadowy gloom at the margins—and I watched the poorer people crowd around the edges like moths afraid to get too close to the flame, trying to assess those in the central pit with expressions that mixed longing, calculation, and desperate hope.
"Well," Willow said, her voice carrying that particular quality of someone trying to sound unimpressed and failing miserably. "this is either the most magnificent thing I've ever seen or the most grotesque display of wealth I've witnessed thus far, and I genuinely can't decide which interpretation wins."
"Both," Julius replied, his eyes tracking across the space with the analytical gaze of someone mentally cataloging architectural details. "They're not mutually exclusive states. Something can be beautiful and morally repugnant at the same time—in fact, I'd argue that's the defining characteristic of most things nobility creates."
"I like the shiny bits," Nara offered helpfully, her bunny ears perked up and tracking toward the gemstones with single-minded focus.
Grisha just grunted, which I'd come to recognize as her baseline response to most stimuli that didn't involve violence or sex.
I decided then to head straight into the central pit—no sense lingering on the edges like the desperate poor folk when we had chips to spend and a nobleman to bankrupt—but I didn't even make it three steps down the stairs before I spotted a figure emerging from the golden chaos.
She rose from the pit like a goddess ascending from her domain, standing at its edge with her body backlit by that sourceless golden glow, and my brain, faced with the task of processing this image responsibly, promptly abandoned its duties and resorted to screaming internally.
Her figure radiated heat and honey—not metaphorically, I swear I could actually feel the warmth rolling off her skin, the air around her scented with sun-warmed amber and something floral I couldn't identify but wanted desperately to drown in.
She had bronze skin, a bit darker than Iskanda's, the kind of rich color that looked like it had been kissed by desert suns for generations and decided to keep the tan as a permanent feature.
And her body—gods above, saints preserve me, every deity that had ever been worshipped by desperate mortals—short-circuited my internal systems entirely. My heart lodged itself somewhere between my lungs and my throat, fluttering like a trapped bird while my brain took one look, declared this well above its pay grade, and quietly stepped out for fresh air.
Wide hips flared from a narrow waist with curves so perfect they looked geometrically calculated, the kind of proportions that made artists weep and mathematicians question whether beauty could be expressed as an equation.
Her thighs were thick and powerful, muscles defined beneath satin-smooth skin. They tapered down into legs that seemed to stretch forever—teasing miles of toned calf and sturdy ankle before finally kissing the floor.
Her breasts were a generous, gravity-mocking bounty—full, heavy teardrops that sat impossibly high on her chest The weight of them shifted with every breath, soft flesh spilling just enough over the ribcage to make my tongue ache to trace the undersides, to bury my face between them until I drowned in that warm, sweat-slick cleavage.
Her stomach was a taut, sinful expanse. Soft enough to sink teeth into, yet etched with the faint ridges of muscle that flexed when she moved, a living tease that promised how they'd quiver and contract while she fucked herself senseless on whatever, or whoever, was unlucky enough to be beneath her.
Her "clothes"—if you could call them that—were a brazen insult to decency. Two wicked slivers of purple silk clung desperately to her dark nipples as if afraid to let go.
The fabric was so thin it molded to every pebbled ridge and swollen bud, translucent enough that the dusky color of her areolas bled through, teasing the exact shape of those heavy, jutting tits as they rose and fell with each breath—bouncing just enough to make the silk ripple, threatening to peel away completely and leave those thick, aching peaks naked and begging for teeth.
The breast strips were attached to an ornate golden collar piece—a broad, flat necklace of hammered gold that curved across her collarbones and shoulders in traditional Egyptian style, decorated with inlaid lapis lazuli and carnelian arranged in geometric patterns.
The silk strips emerged from the collar's lower edge, wrapping around her breasts before crisscrossing her bare back in an intricate lattice that left the long, muscled channel of her spine naked and glistening with sweat.
Above the golden collar sat a thin band of silver, smaller and simpler, marking her status as a Drudgewhore.
A matching scrap of purple draped low and shameless across her cunt, stretching taut over the plump, swollen outer lips. So much so that the silk sank into the cleft, outlining her puffy folds and the fat pearl of her clit straining beneath.
This patch connected to a golden waist piece that sat low on her hips—another broad band of hammered metal decorated with hieroglyphics.
To top it off, heavy gold bracers encircled her wrists and ankles—ornate, beautiful, weighty enough that they clinked faintly when she moved, yet carved with such lethal elegance they could probably serve as improvised weapons if the situation demanded.
Her most striking feature, however—the detail that finally broke through my aesthetic appreciation coma and registered as "oh this is actually important information"—were her massive ears.
Jackal ears, pointed and alert, twitching slightly at every sound like radar dishes tuned to secrets. They rose from her head with proud verticality, their inner surfaces lined with short fur that looked impossibly soft, tracking sounds with micro-movements that betrayed incredible sensitivity.
Beneath those magnificent ears, her hair fell in deep purple curtains that framed her face and shoulders, two strips draped forward and decorated with inlays of gold that caught the light with each subtle movement of her head.
Behind her swayed a massive tail—thick and luxuriously fluffy, the same purple as her hair, easily as wide as her thigh at its base before tapering to a plume that brushed against her calves.
Her eyes were striking as well, shining a molten swirl of violet and gold, as if some depraved alchemist had fused amethyst veins with liquid sunlight and poured the result straight into her irises. They were sharp, unblinking, and far too clever, fixed on me with an intensity that made me acutely aware I was being assessed by someone who saw far more than I wanted them to.
She was beastfolk. Obviously. The ears made that abundantly clear. And by the looks of everything else—the confidence, the bearing, the way she moved through the space like she owned it—she was high on the food chain, the kind of predator that didn't need to advertise danger because everything about her screamed it anyway.
She stepped up to our party without speaking, her bare feet making no sound on the sandstone steps despite her size, and began circling around me specifically with movements that were simultaneously predatory and playful, punctuated by slight giggles that made me shiver to the core.
Brutus raised an eyebrow, his expression shifting into something between curiosity and wariness. Julius, by contrast, looked delighted—wickedly so—his gaze following her movements with the focused interest of someone watching a fascinating performance and already outlining a footnote-heavy analysis in his head.
Willow, meanwhile, looked openly offended by the comparison, her hands coming up to assess her own chest with the air of someone double-checking measurements and finding the results personally insulting.
Nara's attention had already wandered elsewhere, crimson eyes fixed on something shiny glinting in the pit below, apparently unmoved by the supernatural sex appeal currently circling our group, while Grisha stared at the women with a scowl that could've curdled milk.
And Felix—saints above, Felix—couldn't control himself at all. His face flushed a bright crimson that made him look like he'd been dipped in paint, fingers trembling slightly as he gazed at the figure, his breathing coming faster and shallower with each circuit she completed around me.
The other crew members were either drooling at the mouth or clutching at their groins as if desperately trying to hold themselves back from doing something profoundly stupid, their professional composure evaporating under the assault of concentrated sensuality.
I eyed her cautiously while my brain caught up to what my hormones had already figured out—this was a trap, obviously, some sort of honeypot operation designed to gather desperate hopefuls and separate them from their money through the strategic deployment of overwhelming attractiveness.
Whether it was random chance or specifically set up by Oberen after he'd learned we were coming, I couldn't tell from available evidence. But the fact that I was visibly holding our pouch of chips probably marked me as the central target, the person worth deploying the heavy artillery of seduction against.
The Jackal woman stopped in front of me, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating from her skin in waves now, then gestured with a tilt of her head toward the second floor.
No words. Just the gesture. An invitation.
I stared down at our pouch, mentally cataloging what we had—seventy-five crowns in chips currently available, plus the registered ruby and people that totaled thirty-four thousand but couldn't be spent directly.
Even combined, we didn't have nearly enough to catch Oberen's attention, let alone force him into a high-stakes gamble.
And so it hit me.
I knew then that if I followed this woman, I could potentially take down whatever honeypot operation was running in the casino, extracting both information and money from whoever was operating it, which would be monumental to our efforts. More chips meant more flexibility, more options, more chances to accomplish what we'd come here to do.
I understood with sudden clarity that this was the fastest path to victory—not the safest path, definitely not the smartest path, but the one most likely to generate the kind of dramatic windfall we needed to compete at Oberen's level.
I turned back to my crew, meeting each pair of eyes in turn. "Stay close and observe the dynamics down here. See which games have the best odds, which dealers look corrupt, which tables the nobles prefer. Get a feel for how this place operates." I paused. "I'm going to go investigate whatever's happening on the second floor."
"Are you insane?" Brutus said, his voice pitched low enough that only the two of us could hear. "That's obviously a trap. She's clearly bait designed to—"
"Separate me from my party and rob me of my money, yes, I'm aware," I interrupted with a whisper. "But consider this. I'm extremely good at turning traps into opportunities, and if there's one thing I excel at, it's making terrible decisions work out through sheer audacity and spite."
Brutus sighed with the weight of someone who'd accepted that arguing was pointless but wanted the record to show they'd tried. His face, though, was struck with something that looked to be approval mixed with faith in whatever insane plan he assumed I had cooking.
The Jackal woman slipped away with fluid grace, moving toward a staircase carved from sandstone that spiraled up toward the second floor, and I found myself stalking after her like a puppy following treats, heading toward whatever fresh hell awaited me in the upper levels of Oberen's Den.