Pale Carnations -ch. 4 Update 4- -mutt Jeff- ... 〈FHD — UHD〉

End of Scene.

“She’s asking about the fourth round,” I said. “The private exhibition. The one not on the club’s books.”

He flipped the top card from the deck. The Ace of Spades.

He laughed—a wet, phlegmy sound—and leaned back. The chair groaned under his weight. “Fourth round ain’t about pain, pup. It’s about want . You strip a girl down to her last nerve, and then you offer her a glass of water. That’s the game. The audience doesn’t pay to see her cry. They pay to see her choose to crawl.” Pale Carnations -Ch. 4 Update 4- -Mutt Jeff- ...

I reached out, slow, and drew from the middle. The Queen of Hearts. Her painted smile was the same as the girl’s in the photograph. The same hollow fold.

“Go on,” he said. “Let’s see if you’ve got your father’s luck.”

He turned his back to me then, a clear dismissal, and began shuffling once more. End of Scene

“Your little blonde,” Jeff continued, tapping the photograph with a yellowed nail, “she crawled. Fastest I’ve ever seen. Didn’t even make her beg. She just… folded. Like a paper hat in the rain.” His eyes flicked up to mine, and for a moment, the showman’s mask slipped. Beneath it was something hollow. Hungry. “That’s the part they never put in the contracts. The folding.”

“Club wants a lot of things.” Jeff stood, slow, his joints popping like distant gunfire. He loomed, not tall, but wide—a bulldog in a stained vest. “But you tell them this: Mutt Jeff delivers what he’s paid for. And what he ain’t paid for stays in the back room. Under the floorboards.”

He held out the deck of cards to me. “Pick one.” The one not on the club’s books

The door closed behind me, and the hallway smelled of bleach and roses. Somewhere deeper in the club, a piano struck up a lazy, familiar tune. And beneath it, just barely, I could hear the sound of someone crying—not loud, not desperate. Just the quiet, practiced sob of someone who’d already folded.

I left the card on the table.

He tilted his head, and a grin cracked his face like dry earth. “You here to threaten me, or to ask me how I train ‘em for that round?”

I didn’t move.

The air in the back room of The Carnation tasted of old cedar, whiskey sweat, and the faint, coppery tang of last month’s takedown. I found Jeff there, not in the kennels where the new stock was kept, but hunched over a scarred card table, the brim of his flat cap casting a shadow over eyes that had seen too many losing hands.