Chapter 018: Wait—Brother-in-Law Knows Gambling Too?

Chapter 018: Wait—Brother-in-Law Knows Gambling Too?

Wu Chen stood and smoothed his jacket, one hand sliding into a pocket. Li Ruobing rose as well, straightened his collar, then looped her arm through his.

Li Ruotai took it all in. He no longer doubted, not for a second, that this man was exactly who his sister had chosen—no acting involved.

The group headed out, more than ten bodyguards trailing behind as they made for the stairwell.

In sheer size, Donghai Crown Entertainment Club might not be the largest club in East China, but in caliber, it was unrivaled.

Eleven floors in all. Not especially tall, but sprawling in footprint, which made every floor enormous.

The first floor held the biggest bar and KTV lounge in all of Donghai. Floors two through seven made up the sauna and bathhouse club. The eighth floor housed staff. The ninth and tenth were the casino and its attached luxury suites. The eleventh, the top floor, was the core area.

Crown Entertainment’s official business was sauna, bathing, and massage—though naturally not the aboveboard kind. Setting aside every other employee, the club alone employed a thousand attractive female technicians.

As for rooms available to guests, including the casino’s private suites, the count ran past twelve hundred.

By Wu Chen’s exacting standards, the average attractiveness of Crown’s technicians probably landed around a 7.5.

The overall quality was staggering.

Though, aside from a rare few natural beauties, nearly all of them had clearly gone under the knife.

In truth, the sauna and bathhouse business was only the surface. Crown Entertainment’s true main business ran on the ninth and tenth floors.

The casino.

It served regulars only, wrapped in the tightest secrecy, its clientele built strictly through friends bringing friends.

The group of more than ten crowded into the elevator. Only after a bodyguard swiped a card did anyone press the button for the ninth floor.

To the casino.

“Brother-in-law, how did you know it was Boss Shen from Fusheng Aluminum?” Li Ruotai finally asked.

“He arrived in Donghai yesterday. Even brought in a gambling expert from Macau—planning to wash away his old humiliation.”

Wu Chen glanced at him. “You had your people take three hundred million off him. That’s where this whole mess started. His father-in-law is close with the Wei family.”

The real reason Li Ruotai was about to fall wasn’t that Crown Entertainment had gotten too flashy, nor that he’d secretly filmed certain important men’s activities on the premises.

It wasn’t even the people he’d threatened.

It was the casino.

His business with Xie Hu, stripped down to its essentials, worked like this: Xie Hu, ever the smooth operator, used his connections to draw billionaires into Crown Entertainment to gamble. Li Ruotai would arrange for them to win first, then lose—until eventually they dropped some astronomical sum on the tables.

No sophisticated cheating required. Li Ruotai simply kept gambling experts on retainer, paid handsomely.

The billionaires who came to gamble were businessmen through and through—none of them true gamblers, all of them trusting to luck. Which meant they won when they were meant to win, and lost when they were meant to lose.

By now, no fewer than ten wealthy men had lost upward of a hundred million each at Crown Entertainment, with far more losing in the tens of millions.

Still, Li Ruotai knew when to stop. He never bled a billionaire completely dry—that kind of enmity wasn’t worth making.

But some men wouldn’t take the hint.

Their appetite for the tables ran too deep.

Shen Guangjun, owner of Fusheng Aluminum, was exactly that kind of man.

After losing two hundred million at Crown Entertainment, he’d refused to walk away, pushed on, and lost another hundred million—stopping only because his accounts had run dry. Li Ruotai didn’t extend credit.

Fusheng Aluminum carried a market value in the tens of billions, but market value and cash flow were two very different things.

Shen Guangjun had gambled away nearly all his company’s liquid cash at Crown Entertainment, leaving the books empty and creating real operational trouble for Fusheng Aluminum.

After the loss, he hadn’t dared make trouble for Li Ruotai—he couldn’t afford to cross the Li family—so he’d gone scrambling for cash elsewhere.

Somewhere in that scramble, he’d mentioned his gambling losses to a few people, and discovered he wasn’t the only one who’d lost that much at Crown.

Word of it reached the Wei family.

At first, the Wei family assumed Li Ruotai was simply fleecing a few people for cash. But a quick investigation revealed Crown Entertainment’s real problem ran far deeper.

Bleeding rich men dry was the small issue. Li Ruotai was too clever to provoke true top-tier magnates—the men he carved money from were wealthy and influential, but never at the very top.

Nouveau riche, essentially. Local money with more cash than sense.

He never touched the truly powerful.

The bigger problem the Wei family uncovered lay in the sauna and massage side of the business.

Li Ruotai had been secretly filming powerful men with the club’s technicians, holding the footage as leverage. Used well, that leverage could turn those men into protectors of Crown Entertainment—even assets for the Li family. Used poorly, it made enemies by the dozen.

The Wei family recognized the opening at once.

A chance to rally scattered forces, send Li Ruotai straight to prison, and maybe throw the entire Li family into chaos. So the Wei family moved quietly, reaching out to allies—including several powerful men Li Ruotai had once threatened.

Wu Chen had studied Li Ruobing and Li Ruotai down to the smallest detail.

Which was why he understood all of this.

And he understood, better than anyone, exactly what was unfolding in Donghai on this particular day, July 7th.

Since Shen Guangjun had arrived in Donghai the day before, expert in tow, Wu Chen knew he’d almost certainly return to Crown Entertainment within days, determined to win his money back.

Which was why, the moment Li Ruotai had taken that phone call earlier, Wu Chen had already guessed: Shen Guangjun had arrived with reinforcements.

Under ordinary circumstances, Shen Guangjun would never have dared bring a hired gambling expert into Crown Entertainment—that was tantamount to challenging the house.

He wouldn’t have dared cross Li Ruotai.

But now, clearly, Shen Guangjun no longer cared about retaliation. He understood the situation. He knew Li Ruotai’s days were numbered.

His calculation was probably simple: win back what he’d lost, and more, before Crown Entertainment came under investigation.

…

Ding.

The elevator doors opened.

The ninth-floor casino.

Lavishly furnished, tables everywhere—though few guests occupied them, given the early hour.

Crown Entertainment didn’t open in the morning. Business began at night.

The casino was the one exception. Regulars could ride the VIP elevator up any time, and some guests, already staying on-site, came down to play cards first thing.

Others, of course, had simply never left the tables since the night before.

Spotting Li Ruotai’s arrival, a stout middle-aged man in a black suit hurried over, sweating profusely, dabbing constantly at his face with a handkerchief.

“Boss, you’re here. They’re in the Nine-Five Supreme Room.”

Only after delivering that did he turn and nod to Li Ruobing, addressing her as Eldest Miss.

This was the casino manager, a trusted man of Li Ruotai’s named Bao Wei—an old hand of the Li family.

No sooner had Bao Wei greeted Li Ruobing than he startled, noticing for the first time that Eldest Miss had a man’s arm hooked through hers today.

He didn’t recognize Wu Chen and had no idea how to address him.

The group moved deeper inside.

Bao Wei jogged ahead a few paces to lead the way.

They soon reached the private room.

A bodyguard opened the door. Li Ruotai went in first, and a moment later his booming laugh rang out from inside.

“Hahaha, Boss Shen! Months since I’ve seen you, and you’re looking well today.”

Wu Chen and Li Ruobing entered to find Li Ruotai shaking hands with a balding middle-aged man—Shen Guangjun, unmistakably.

“Young Master Li looks as spirited as ever,” Shen Guangjun said. He shook Li Ruotai’s hand, but the smile never reached his eyes.

He would never have dared take that tone with Li Ruotai before.

Wu Chen glanced at the two of them, then moved on, his attention drawn to the gaming table.

Two men sat locked in play.

On the left, chips rose in a small mountain. The player was a refined, bespectacled middle-aged man—the expert Shen Guangjun had flown in from Macau.

On the right, only a few million in chips remained. That player was a middle-aged man with a hawkish nose, Crown Entertainment’s top gambling expert.

By the look of things, every expert Crown had was already cycling through the seat, even the best of them—and still losing.

The hook-nosed man studied his cards, sweat beading on his face.

The pressure was crushing him. They’d already lost far too much.

He looked at his hand, muttered, “Damn it,” under his breath, and slapped the cards face-down. Fold.

Wu Chen took in the scene with one glance and walked straight over. “Get up. I’ll take it from here.”

The hook-nosed man looked up, startled. He didn’t recognize Wu Chen, but he knew Li Ruobing, who’d followed him in, and rose to give up the seat—though he shot Li Ruotai an uneasy glance.

Li Ruotai, still trading hollow pleasantries with Shen Guangjun, caught the movement and froze.

What was this? Brother-in-law knew how to gamble too?

He shot his sister a questioning look.

Li Ruobing gave a small shake of her head. She genuinely had no idea whether Wu Chen could gamble. This felt like it could go badly.

“Oh? Switching players again? And bringing in someone so young this time?” Shen Guangjun spotted the change and grinned, raising his voice. “Young Master Li, isn’t this a bit too generous of you? You’ve already lost over two hundred million to me today, and now you’re practically shipping more my way. That’s not very sporting, is it? Hahahaha!”

The words came laced with barbs. On the surface, a joke—underneath, a jab at Li Ruotai for having no one left worth putting at the table.