Chapter 207: Old Maid

I took my seat across from Byron with the kind of casual confidence usually displayed by people who either knew exactly what they were doing or were so catastrophically ignorant they didn’t realize they should be terrified—and I’ll let you guess which category I fell into, though I suspect the answer might disappoint those hoping for self-awareness.

The chair welcomed my weight with the discreet murmur of finely worked wood, cushioned just enough to be comfortable without inviting drowsiness—clearly designed for extended gambling sessions where physical discomfort would be an unacceptable distraction from the main objective of parting people from their money.

Jazmin materialized beside me, settling into my lap with the grace of a housecat reclaiming her throne after a long day of napping and judging lesser creatures—fluid, proprietary, and utterly unconcerned with whether the furniture had opinions on the matter.

She draped her arms around my neck with possessive familiarity, fingers tracing idle patterns along my jaw—comforting in theory, yet catastrophically distracting in practice.

Her weight was warm and reassuringly real, anchoring me firmly to the present while simultaneously making it exceedingly difficult to remember why I’d come here in the first place.

And her scent—that masterful, insidious perfume of night-blooming jasmine undercut by the muskier, more honest base note of spent passion—still rose from her skin despite the water’s attempted cleansing, a phantom fingerprint on the air that spoke directly to the most primitive parts of my hindbrain.

For a brief, treacherous moment, the table, the stars overhead, and the ancient man across from me all registered as optional details—background elements I was clearly meant to ignore, if only for my own detriment.

Byron leaned forward, his hands coming together like two ancient tortoises meeting in solemn conference, each motion measured as though time itself were a resource he’d learned not to waste.

The lamplight settled into the deep grooves of his face and stayed there, lingering in the creases as if uncertain how to proceed, making him look older still.

“I am old,” he began, as if this were a revelation rather than an aggressively visible fact, his voice resonant enough to make you lean in despite yourself—an auditory trick I suspected he’d perfected sometime around his third century, “profoundly, thoroughly old. I have lived through more seasons than most people have days, seen empires rise and crumble, watched the world change in ways both beautiful and terrible. And in all that time, I’ve come to learn one fundamental truth—that age brings with it not wisdom, necessarily, but resources. Opportunities. The capacity to help those who need it most.”

He paused for dramatic effect—an impressively well-executed silence, I’ll give him that—even if it took a concerted effort on my part not to strangle him for wasting my time.

“The poor souls who end up in this casino,” he continued, his tone taking on what I’m sure he thought was genuine sympathy, “they arrive desperate, broken, clutching at straws because legitimate opportunities have abandoned them. Society has failed them. The system has chewed them up and spat them out. So I offer them something different—a chance to multiply what little they have, to turn pocket change into real wealth, to escape the circumstances that brought them here through skill and fortune combined.”

Internally, I rolled my eyes with such enthusiasm I briefly worried they might complete a full rotation and file for independence.

What absolute, unmitigated bullshit. The kind of self-justification favored by people who prey on the vulnerable while insisting—earnestly—that they’re actually doing the world a favor. A philanthropy of razor blades, sold as opportunity.

But I kept all of that to myself. Moral philosophy is notoriously ineffective when deployed against predators. They’ve already workshopped their excuses, polished them, framed them, and hung them somewhere tasteful. Anything I said would only mark me as naive, sanctimonious, or—worst of all—boring. And boring people don’t last long at tables like this.

Instead, I got right down to the point with the directness of someone who didn’t have time for elaborate pretense.

“What’s the wager?” I asked simply.

Byron’s expression shifted a fraction—a nod of approval at my bluntness, or perhaps a flicker of amusement at my impatience. “One chip,” he replied.

I lifted an eyebrow, the gesture deliberately theatrical. “And the value of said chip would be…?”

“Five crowns.”

I didn’t bother hiding the smirk that followed. Five crowns. Essentially nothing compared to the stakes I’d been hoping to access. “And what happens if I win this incredibly modest wager?”

Byron’s smile widened, revealing an unsettling surplus of teeth for a man his age to possess naturally. “You earn double. Ten crowns total.”

I already knew exactly how this would play out—the trajectory was so obvious it might as well have been written in glowing letters across the ceiling.

Start small, build confidence. Then slowly escalate the stakes while subtly cheating to ensure the house always won in aggregate. Classic gambling manipulation, executed thousands of times across thousands of casinos by thousands of operators who all thought they were being clever.

“I agree to your terms,” I said brightly, pouring enthusiasm into my voice—because nothing says thrilling opportunity quite like wagering five whole crowns against the man who’d almost certainly invented half the cheating techniques currently in circulation.

Byron looked pleased. Not politely pleased—sated. The expression of someone who’d just secured another participant, another tidy little opportunity to separate someone from their money while preserving the charming illusion that this was all fair, consensual fun.

He nodded once, satisfied, then allowed his expression to soften into something faintly regretful, as though what came next pained him personally.

“My hands, I’m afraid, aren’t what they used to be,” he said, lifting them for inspection as though presenting exhibits in a long-running case against time itself. “Arthritis, you understand. Age claiming its due in painful installments. I’m not very well inclined to play anything fancy. Something simple.”

He reached into a drawer built into the table—a hidden compartment I hadn’t clocked until he decided I was ready for the reveal—and produced a deck of cards looking as though they’d personally witnessed the rise and fall of several financial empires.

The edges were frayed, individual cards beginning to delaminate like tired scholars slipping out of tenure. The backs were washed nearly blank, whatever design they’d once borne reduced to a ghost of color and geometry, and yet the deck carried a certain authority—the unmistakable presence of something that had been handled countless times in rooms where money, pride, and self-respect were routinely misplaced and rarely recovered.

“How about Old Maid?” Byron proposed, his tone light, almost cheerful.

It was the voice of a man who’d spent decades perfecting the art of sounding harmless, which was impressive in the way any long-running fraud becomes impressive—less for its ingenuity than for the sheer endurance required to keep lying to strangers with a straight face.

My smile widened, just a fraction, because Old Maid was perfect. Elegant in its simplicity, vicious in its implications. A game that advertised itself as pure luck while quietly rewarding memory, attention, and the ability to track patterns over time.

The kind of game where an overconfident mark would assume they couldn’t possibly lose because it was just a children’s game, right?

In my head, I performed a brisk review of the mechanics, because my internal monologue had once again appointed itself instructor and was clearly under the impression that this moment required a lecture.

Old Maid operates on straightforward principles—deal all cards from a standard deck with one card removed to create an odd number, players draw from each other’s hands attempting to make pairs which they discard, the person left holding the unmatchable card, the joker, at the end loses. On paper, it’s childishly elegant. In practice, it lives and dies on memory, observation, and psychological manipulation to track which cards had been played and which hands contained the Old Maid based on specific reactions.

I nodded, already committed, then added with practiced casualness, “Mind if I do a quick inspection of the cards? Just to familiarize myself with them, make sure everything’s standard. Professional curiosity, you understand.”

“Of course,” Byron replied smoothly, sliding the deck across the felt surface toward me with one gnarled hand.

I examined the cards one by one, front and back, with meticulous attention. I was hunting for marked cards—fine scratches, intentional wear, subtle inconsistencies in color or pattern—anything that would allow Byron to recognize cards from their backs and quietly shepherd the Old Maid wherever he pleased.

However, I came up completely short. The card backs were so uniformly faded that distinguishing one from another would have required a microscope, a minor miracle, or an exceptionally cooperative god.

Either Byron was legitimately playing fair with unmarked cards, or his cheating methodology was sophisticated enough that I couldn’t detect it through visual inspection alone.

With a satisfied sigh, I slid the cards back across the table and met Byron’s gaze with a smile carefully calibrated to suggest “eager innocence” rather than “calculating predator briefly cosplaying as eager innocence.” It was a delicate balance—one I’d found most people weren’t especially good at noticing until it was far too late.

“Let’s begin,” I prompted cheerfully.

Byron started the game with surprising haste, his brittle fingers shuffling the deck with a deftness that sat awkwardly beside his earlier lamentations about arthritis and frailty. The contradiction was… notable.

I filed it away for later, under claims that will age poorly, as he dealt the cards between us with practiced efficiency.

The first round unfolded with the graceful strategy of a blindfolded badger in a pottery shop—which is to say, my play was a masterpiece of intentional clumsiness.

I was sculpting a persona, and the clay was my own apparent incompetence. The figure I was shaping? A delightful fool, one who believed card games were powered by luck, cheerful intentions, and perhaps a friendly alignment of the stars.

As our turns progressed, I made sure Byron had a front-row view of every supposed tell. Each twitch, each hesitant pause, each carefully measured flicker of nerves as I drew from his hand or presented my own.

I fumbled the cards, my fingers trembling just enough to sell the act without being so obvious it looked performative, occasionally dropping one entirely and scrambling to recover it with soft apologies.

My smile stretched too wide, too desperate, an open invitation to be underestimated. It was the smile of someone clearly out of their depth but delighted to be there anyway, basking in the novelty of being allowed at the table, unaware they were already being quietly factored into someone else’s odds.

I played the fool with a level of dedication that would have earned polite applause in any respectable theater, and then, right on cue, lost when the final draw left me holding the Joker.

The Old Maid rested in my left hand, cold and mocking, while Byron laid down his last pair with a soft chuckle, a sound like dry leaves rustling in forgotten winds.

His fingers—thin, dry, and far steadier than they had any right to be—gathered the remaining cards with surprising care.

“Beginner’s nerves,” he said kindly, “Perfectly natural. The first game is always the hardest because you’re still learning the rhythm, still figuring out how to read your opponent. You’ll do better next time, I’m certain.”

I nodded and let my shoulders slump in a passable imitation of defeat, then flicked my lone chip toward him. It spun across the felt with a bit more energy than strictly necessary before coming to rest near his folded hands.

Byron leaned closer, his ancient face drifting fully into the lamplight, every wrinkle and age spot rendered in unflattering clarity.

“Shall we play again?” he proposed. “Perhaps raise the stakes slightly—two chips this time, ten crowns total, and I’ll match you and raise to twenty-five if you’re feeling confident. Give you a chance to win back what you lost and then some.”

He added his chips with a soft metallic clink that carried through the incense-heavy air, mingling with the distant moans from the couches and the whisper of silk shifting overhead.

Byron dealt the cards again with those same quick movements, eyes widening just enough to sell the innocence.

I took the cards, clutching them close to my chest like they were precious secrets I needed to protect from prying eyes, and arranged them in my hand with fumbling fingers.

Then… I smiled.

Not the wide, brittle grin I’d been wearing a moment earlier—the sort you put on when you want people to think you’re nervous, harmless, or both. This was something else entirely. Smaller. Smoother. It slid into place like silk soaked in venom, soft at first glance but quietly threatening if you stared too long.

It was the smile you see in the dark just before something terrible happens. Not too wide, but just enough. Not to win, but to begin the madness.

May the heavens preserve this man, because I was about to send him straight to hell.

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