Sasha’s Gamble

An accountant, wife, and mother, Rebecca “Beki” Tempest led an uneventful life of middle-class leisure, happy to live in a way in which nothing exciting or traumatic ever occurred, until one boring party turned everything upside down. Plagued by a series of bizarre misfortunes, with her son lay dying and her husband straying, Beki was driven to the edge of suicide, until a perpetually drunk man appears and, like a snake oil salesman, offers a seemingly impossible salvation. Left without a choice, she follows him into a world of hedonistic immortals who saw her life – as well as every other mortal’s – as nothing but another form of entertainment. In a world drowning in alcohol, gambling, and pleasure, filled with dice games, card games, and mind games, Beki soon finds herself in the middle of a massive tournament, where she is given a chance to win back her life as well as her beloved son’s. But before claiming that prize, she must play against the most feared and admired elites of this strange world, all the while trying to figure out who was a friend and who was merely using her and everyone else as a pawn in their own games. Shockingly, everyone seems to know her face, and call her by a different name, though it is a name she does not recognize. The line between friend and foe was thin. The insomniac lawman with the changing face, the old hermit and his living doll, and the beautiful teashop owner with a collection of beautiful “children” all eyed her with eerie familiarity. And the rulers of the realm, the High Rollers, seem to have already marked her as an enemy, particularly the Queen of Spin, a twelve-year-old girl named Sasha.It is in this world that Beki, a normal, ordinary human, will find the unpleasant truths about herself and learn the ultimate truth behind immortality – it sucks.