After the bright lights of Las Vegas, Houston was grim and dreary. A slow patter of rain fell, snarling traffic in the city. Emma’s first stop was to pick up Bentley from Liz, and it seemed to take hours to get there. She didn’t feel like talking and left her best friend staring after her worriedly as she scurried away with her precious little dog hugged to her chest.

Her next stop was her bed, where she slept for fourteen hours straight. Only then did she feel somewhat human again, capable of making adult decisions. And even though it was the last place on earth she wanted to go, she drove to Players, where she had a lot of cleaning up to do before Damien got back at the end of his tournament. She wanted there to be no traces of her left anywhere in the building, nothing that might tempt him to try to get in contact with her even though he knew her phone number and address. Hell, maybe she should change both of them. Move out of the city or something. If he was determined, there would be no stopping him. Then again, he might have no inclination of ever seeing her again.

Her little office. Emma flipped on her desk lamp, fighting tears again as she looked around. She’d been so happy there. It had been a good job, where she could lock herself away with nothing but her numbers, or walk out and shoot the breeze with the bartenders or waitresses when she needed a break. Lots of laughs and good memories. The first thing she did was sit down and type up a resignation letter addressed to Damien, the text blurring on the screen as she typed. Short, sparse, to the point.

I hereby tender my resignation effective immediately. Thank you. Emma Haskell.

After printing it out, she crept up the stairs to the second floor, finding Stacia at her desk looking rather haggard. When she glanced up, her eyes got huge. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I got back this morning,” she said, knowing the other girl could see her shadowed, red-rimmed eyes. She held out her letter. “Can you put this on his desk, please?”

Stacia, of course, glanced at its contents when she took it. Emma had known she would. “Jesus Christ! What happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Somebody better fucking do some talking. All fucking night clearing everything out for both of y’all to say ‘Oh, nothing’ when I ask for some kind of fucking explanation. Answer the fucking phone to hear him say that fucking word and I was like, ‘O-M-F-G, Damien, you are SHITTING ME’—Do you even know how much work that took, Emma? Does he? We all want bonuses. Lots and lots of bonuses.”

“Stacia, what in the hell are you talking about?”

“He shut the whole shit down! What do you think I’m talking about?”

Ozymandias, she remembered, and something about the word rang a bell this time. College. English lit. It hadn’t made much sense when he’d said it into the phone, but it must have some deeper meaning for him. While she stood trying to puzzle it out, Stacia got up and came around her desk. “Come here. Look at this.”

Emma followed, her heart thudding dully. Behind the window where Stacia always sat to hand out chips, there was nothing but empty shelves. She unlocked the door to the huge room, ushering Emma inside—it was vast and empty and echoing. All the tables were gone. Alcohol behind the bar . . . gone. There were even a few pieces of furniture with old dust cloths thrown over them shoved in some of the shadowy corners, as if they’d been sitting there for years.

Damien’s empire, gone. Emma lifted a hand to her mouth, her eye drawn to the place where the three of them, she and Damien and Benjamin, had stood when he’d first made his offer. All that, and she had nothing to show for any of it, except for a broken heart.

“Will he . . . bring it back?”

Stacia shrugged. She wore a black sleeveless T-shirt and ripped jeans, her hair styled haphazardly through a white bandanna. She indeed looked as if she’d worked all through the night. “That was something I hoped you would answer. I don’t know. I kind of doubt it. The cops showed up here this morning, but they didn’t say much, just wanted to look around. We’d worked all night and barely gotten it all out in time. Did some weaselly little piece of shit squeal?”

My weaselly little piece-of-shit brother. You didn’t waste any time, Ben, you jackass.

“I think that’s what happened,” she said glumly. “Anyway, could you get that letter to him? Whenever he gets back. I would appreciate it.”

“I’ll put it on his desk, but I wish you’d reconsider. Is there anything I can do, Emma? Don’t ask me to help you pack up, though. Jake and all the security guys and I, we’ve had our fucking fill of moving.”

“I wasn’t going to. Thanks for everything, Stacia.” She leaned forward and gave the other girl a hug. For someone she hadn’t liked very much in the beginning, Stacia was a good person to have on her side. Damien had been right about her. “I’ll stick around a few days and get everything in order for the next person.”

“We’ll probably give it to the temp, if she wants it,” Stacia said, closing the door on the poker-less poker room and locking up. “She’s a pretty good fit.”

As long as Damien didn’t offer to buy her for a month, she would probably be all right.

That was all Emma could take for the day. Leaving Stacia, she headed back down to her office, but before she shut down her computer, she ran a Google search on Ozymandias . . . and everything became clear.

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things

The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains: round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

“He isn’t bringing it back,” she muttered to herself, switching off the computer and sitting back in her chair. The poem spoke of a once-great empire in ruins. Nothing would rebuild that statue made of stone, or put that face with its expression of cold command back on its broad shoulders. It was all in the dust now, wrecked, gone.